Light Speed – How Science Fiction Failed Us.

May 18, 2010 - By Phineas Delgado

Last week, we dreamt together about the wonders of Time Travel, coming to the eventual question, “If you could go back, or forward, would you?” Of course, in our reality, Time Travel isn’t the forgone conclusion that Science Fiction seems to make it, which got me thinking about another popular “given” in much of our Sci-Fi: Faster-than-Light (or FTL) Travel.

Some of our most loved favorites in Sci-Fi require FTL Travel to even exist. Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, V, Dune, just to touch the tip of the proverbial iceberg, all use various methods to break the “light barrier” (or “time barrier” in Star Trek). Whether it’s Warp Speed, navigating hyperspace, or just folding space/time, the end result is the same. And for anyone who looks to the night sky looking for visitors from space, FTL Travel is not only a possibility, it’s a reality. One we just haven’t figured out yet. Of course, 150 years ago, the same could have been said of powered flight, the light bulb and American Idol (which makes me wish we were back talking about Time Travel… so I could go back to a time before reality TV… but I digress).

Of the theories presented in popular Science Fiction, the idea of folding space seems to hold the most weight with the current scientific community. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity says that the energy required to move an object (E) is equal to its mass (m) times the speed of light (c) squared (E=mc²). For the rest of us, that means even if something weighed one unit of mass, it would require many millions of units of energy to move it for just one second. Add to this the dilation of time at high speed, the travelers themselves would not experience the passage of time the same way the rest of us would. For them a journey of a few weeks or months would seemingly take years or decades from the rest of the universe’s perspective. Since much of the point of traveling faster than light would be to shorten the amount of time travelling such distances would take, if they still SEEM to take that long, what’s the point? Sure the crew gets there, but it would take generations for anyone on Earth to know they succeeded, or to reap the benefits.

To get around this difficulty, most Sci-Fi either just assumes the theory is incomplete or wrong, or just finds another way around it. The movie Event Horizon used the idea of a controlled gravitational singularity (or black hole to us monkeys) to bend space and travel vast distances nearly instantly. The idea being that the gravity well created by the singularity would cause space to fold around it, making travel to another point light years away take only a minute or two. The added benefit being that only a minute or two would pass for EVERYONE, not just the travellers (as opposed to just going really really fast, which we talked about earlier).

Of course, there are a couple of cons against this type of travel. Once space is folded, you still have to “tear space” to get from on part of the fold to the other. The down side to this is that we don’t know what exists in the space outside our space/time reality (other theories on this in a moment). In that movie, that space was Hell. Not figuratively, but the REAL Hell. The kind of Hell that makes you rip out your own eyeballs and reach down a crewmate’s gullet and rip out their spleen. Sorry if I’m spoiling the movie, but honestly, did you really want to see Sam Neill with his eyelids sewn shut? I didn’t think so. So the “Gravity Drive” is not really a viable option in the end.

In Dune, contrastingly, folding space wasn’t quite so dramatic, but it did require centuries of mutation and genetic manipulation in order to learn how to do it successfully. And by “mutation” I mean that you turn into a giant fetus with female genitalia where your mouth should be (Seriously, I have the movie on DVD. I challenge anyone to describe the Third Stage Guild Navigator any better than that). Hell. Mutation. Hell. Mutation. I have to admit, I’m not too keen on either option. There’s got to be something better.

Leave it to the utopic vision of Star Trek to give us “Warp Speed”, a way to make traveling extreme distances a viable plot device while bypassing the usual negative effects. Of course, Gene Roddenberry was a TV producer, not a scientist, so he never really explained why it worked, but he did give us clues. I mean any geek worth his weight in 20-sided dice knows that the warp effect is caused by the controlled mixing of matter and antimatter, focused through the fictional four-dimensional dilithium crystals. That reaction, in turn, created the “warp field” which makes faster-than-light travel possible. As I understand the pseudo-physics involved, the warp field represents a bubble of normal space with warped space/time around it. The space behind the ship is expanded while the space in front of the ship is compressed. This allows the ship to travel faster than light without the time dilation required by special relativity. Warp drives, or devices using similar theory, account for FTL Travel across many popular franchises, including The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Red Dwarf, and Starcraft.

The final major theory, which is similar to the folded space theory in many respects, actually involves traveling outside of space/time as we know it. In these cases, it is theorized that there is a stable space outside of space/time called “hypserspace” (in Star Trek it’s called “subspace”… I never realized that’s what subspace was, but yeah… same thing). All I know about traveling through Hyperspace is that it’s nothing like dusting crops and that it is possible to fly accidentally fly through objects like stars, or bounce too close to supernovae which would end the trip quickly (if not dazzlingly). Apparently objects that have mass in real space also exist in hyperspace, making navigation necessary (as opposed to just traveling between points in a straight line). Also, because time doesn’t exist in Hyperspace the same way it does in real space, it’s possible that the travel, while certainly not instantaneous to the traveller, could take much smaller increments of time than we are led to believe (Lucas smartly did not ever give a point of reference for time outside the traveller’s perspective).

As I look over all these options, and I ask myself how science fiction has failed us in this regard, I can only answer, “It hasn’t…yet.” FTL Travel is one of the many aspects of Science Fiction that we haven’t been able to steal. There are a lot of reasons for this, many of them geopolitical, like our reluctance to give up fossil fuels, and our desire to spend more money on providing private jets for congressmen rather than establishing a permanent foothold on the moon. Besides, looking at some of the possible side effects, perhaps we should go slowly. I mean do we really want to open a gateway to Hell? Well… another one. I’m pretty sure we have at least one open already. I mean, after all, American Idol had to come from somewhere, right?