We’re starting a series of “smarter travel conversations” today. Our inaugural posting features Esther Dyson, an investor, writer and inveterate traveller (and Dopplr friend and investor) who is currently training for the ultimate trip (about which more below). This is the first of several postings in a longer conversation with Esther.

Dopplr: What’s a rough estimate of how many miles/kilometers you’ve traveled in the past 1, 5 and 10 years? What percentage of the time are you away from your New York City home?

Esther Dyson: I really have no idea of the answer to the first question; I’m hoping Dopplr will tell me this December. As for percentage, I’d estimate I spend about 75 to 80 percent of my nights away from home. Of that, probably a third is outside the US. Again, Dopplr will tell the truth in a few months.

This coming year, things will be different: I’ll be spending most of the first three months in Moscow. It will be a new experience to spend so much time in one place!

Dopplr: You’re training to be a cosmonaut, which sounds like the ultimate travel experience. How did this come about?

Esther Dyson: It came about in a number of ways/on a number of levels. First of all, as a kid, I just assumed I’d go to the moon, without having to do much in particular to make it happen. I just took it for granted that by the time I was, say, 40, it would be a common thing. My father was involved with the space program, and we had some moon rocks at home, so I thought it was all no big deal.

Then I got a little distracted, for about 40 years, but a few years ago I started paying attention to space again. A lot of people I knew were doing the same: Elon Musk, Space-X; Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, and so on. I ended up starting a conference called Flight School for entrepreneurs in both space and private aviation.

Meanwhile, in about 2005, I was in South Africa with a small group advising President Thabo Mbeki and his government about South African IT policy. (That’s a separate long story!) One of the group was Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Thawte (sold to Verisign), who had recently come back from a trip to the space station as the tk third “space tourist.”

One evening, we all sat around a campfire as the sun set, and 50-odd African schoolchildren were bussed in. Altogether, there were about 100 of us. Once it was dark, a screen was set up and Mark showed us his home videos from space. It was amazing! He gave a fascinating talk about his adventures, complete with clips of him floating around, catching bubbles in his mouth, and so on. The kids loved it, and I’m sure some of them decided then and there to study math and science.

Over time, that led me to invest in the company that organized Mark’s trip into space, Space Adventures. Later on, I went on a tour they organized to watch the launch of the fifth space tourist, Charles Simonyi, from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. (Simonyi wrote Microsoft Word, and now has another start-up Intentional Software, and also a foundation, as well as a website, CharlesinSpace.org.)

At that point, I started casually discussing the notion of becoming a backup cosmonaut with the Space Adventures team. Yes, I would love to actually go, but the trip to space is $35 to $40 million, whereas the backup training is only $3 million.

Whatever… I had vague thoughts that I would do this sometime in 2011 – the year that Sergey Brin is tentatively slated to go. Space Adventures was pushing for spring of 2009, but I was pretty busy.

Then another thing happened: My sister Emily had a double mastectomy. (She’s doing very well now and in fact just won a 5k race, or I wouldn’t tell you this story:) A couple of weeks later I was faced with one of those conflicts: a board meeting here, a conference there, another opportunity somewhere else. “Aaagh,” I thought, “if only I had to have a double mastectomy. I could cancel all these things and no one would complain!”

…and then I realized, good grief! I have to reorder my priorities. So in some odd way, this sabbatical in Russia is my alternative to a double mastectomy – a positive one, to be sure, but the same kind of reset-button experience. And of course, it’s also the answer to another question I think of a lot because of my work on human genetics (through 23andMe and the Personal Genome Project): Suppose you had a high chance of developing Alzheimer’s in a few years, what would you do? Why I’d go train to be a cosmonaut, of course….! and why wait to find out I may get Alzheimer’s?

(This is the first of several parts of a conversation with Esther Dyson. Photo from Esther’s Flickr Photostream, some rights reserved.)