"Newer" forms of FTL travel?

[intrinsical]

Hi guys,

I realized Most of the space-based scifi television series I am familiar with were made in the 1980s and 1990s, and most of them used nearly a century-old Einstein's theory of relativity to explain FTL travel. Surely, with the advancement of science over the past 100 years, there must be better tricks for FTL travel?

Suppose you are appointed to create the next great space-based scifi television series and budget isn't a problem. What sort of science would you use to explain FTL travel in your universe? Quantum teleportation? Some kind of string theory trick?

Just for reference, both Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation achieved FTL by creating a warp field that compresses space ahead of the ship. Babylon 5, Deep Space 9 and Stargate uses the Einstein-Rosenberg bridge (aka wormholes) to create a traversable tunnel.

The newer television series tend to avoid the science. Firefly avoided the need for FTL by setting "The 'Verse" in a large trinary? system with at least a dozen terraformed planets and many more moons. While distances within this system are large, it is not large enough to require FTL travel; even an old junk ship like Serenity can make it with just sub-light speed. Battlestar Galactica simply avoids the science by never explaining or even hinting how the ships perform their FTL jumps.

 

[Barbreader]

Einstein's Theory of Relativity says there is no Faster than Light travel. If Enterprise were operating within the Theory of Relativity, it might experience the trip to Alpha Centuri as taking less than 4 years, but the folks on earth and on planets around Alpha Centuri would experience their trip as taking more than 12 years. The idea of warp comes more out of Quantum Theory which supposes the existence of alternative universes close to our own in which space is compressed.

Worm holes, likewise, in real science would spagettify anything that entered them, crushing even the individual atoms. You couldn't build a Stargate.

So, pretty much all faster-than-light travel has a lot more fantasy than science in the fiction.

 

[sojourner]

Here's the resource I use for different FTL methods:
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/A/advanced_propulsion_concepts.html

 

[skep155]

I wouldn't use FTL, if i were writing a sci-fi series/novel i have always been interested in using sub light interstellar travel as a plot point. It would create some very interesting scenarios in any future Human interstellar Empire, the farther out colonies would be technologically backward whilst the closer colonies would be wealthy and fairly modern. An over crowded solar system might offer its prisoners the chance to be deported on a sleeper ship to the outer colonies rather than serve their prison sentence etc...

 

[Lindley]

An over crowded solar system might offer its prisoners the chance to be deported on a sleeper ship to the outer colonies rather than serve their prison sentence etc...

While it does include FLT, The Reality Dysfunction does tackle this concept a bit. The "Involuntary transportees" are sent to stage-1 colonies basically as indentured labor to help tame new planets.

 

[skep155]

An over crowded solar system might offer its prisoners the chance to be deported on a sleeper ship to the outer colonies rather than serve their prison sentence etc...

While it does include FLT, The Reality Dysfunction does tackle this concept a bit. The "Involuntary transportees" are sent to stage-1 colonies basically as indentured labor to help tame new planets.

Sounds sort of like what i imagined apart from the FTL. I generally imagine the future to be like the 18th century except in space i.e long travel times to the colonies, rebellious populations who are culturally disconnected from their origins, rebellions, slave labour, nasty diseases and pirates.

 

[Lindley]

Which also sounds a bit like Firefly when you put it that way.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Something like this.

 

[Peter the Younger]

Worm holes, likewise, in real science would spagettify anything that entered them, crushing even the individual atoms. You couldn't build a Stargate.

So, pretty much all faster-than-light travel has a lot more fantasy than science in the fiction.

So, you have a working theory of quantum gravity that is consistent with general relativity? Man, Kip Thorne would love to know about that, you should call him.

Of course if you don', you should probably avoid making statements about what a wormhole does or does not do, seeing as it isn't settled science. Just sayin'.

The most a careful physicist can say about rapid interstellar travel (FTL is a misnomer, really) is that we don't know one way or the other. It seems unlikely, but we just don't know.

As to the OP, We're currently stuck with what relativity gives us to work with, although there have been many variations on the Alcubierre drive and some good work done on wromholes (by the aforementioned Prof. Thorne, among others.) If we ever find experimental support for M theory or some other scheme that unifies relativity and quantum mechanics, it might offer new possibilities - or it might blow the current ones out of the water. Again, we just don't know.

Personally, I think a lot of authors are avoiding FTL not because it's hard to justify on its own, but because it implies such an advanced technology that the society capable of it might very well be unrecognizable. Sometimes, when people ask "can we achieve warp drive?" it seems they are really asking "Will we one day live in a space opera type of setting?" On the latter, I'm far more skeptical.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

So, you have a working theory of quantum gravity that is consistent with general relativity? Man, Kip Thorne would love to know about that, you should call him.

Of course if you don', you should probably avoid making statements about what a wormhole does or does not do, seeing as it isn't settled science.

More than a few "careful phyisicists" will be glad to tell you that wormholes aren't FTL tunnels for spaceships.

Just sayin.

 

[Da'an]

Wormhole generation drive.

Plug in your galactic spatial co-ordinates and press the big red button.

Some glowy things on the front of the ship will spark into life, arc some electrical discharge and a big swirly thing will be created in front of the ship that will suck the ship in and deposit it at the place your co-ordinates were directed to.

And if anyone asks HOW the Wormhole Generation Drive will work, I'll say "it works very well, thank you".

 

[PurpleBuddha]

So, you have a working theory of quantum gravity that is consistent with general relativity? Man, Kip Thorne would love to know about that, you should call him.

Of course if you don', you should probably avoid making statements about what a wormhole does or does not do, seeing as it isn't settled science.

More than a few "careful phyisicists" will be glad to tell you that wormholes aren't FTL tunnels for spaceships.

Just sayin.

Which is about as meaningful as discussing the physics of the universe prior to the big bang. Right now, all we can do is guess.

 

[Shazam!]

Which is the one where you fool 'space' into thinking that your ship is a tachyon particle?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I'm a big fan of the notion of "folding space," since that would merely require an insanely fanciful control of gravity (and therefore, from a sci-fi context, need not be explained except in the most abstract sense). Jump-gate systems are a close second, something like "Transwarp Conduits" in Trek where starships can use a pre-existing network to traverse the distance quickly, but with the entry and exits of those tunnels being strategic/economic choke points.

 

[sojourner]

I wouldn't use FTL, if i were writing a sci-fi series/novel i have always been interested in using sub light interstellar travel as a plot point. It would create some very interesting scenarios in any future Human interstellar Empire, the farther out colonies would be technologically backward whilst the closer colonies would be wealthy and fairly modern. An over crowded solar system might offer its prisoners the chance to be deported on a sleeper ship to the outer colonies rather than serve their prison sentence etc...

Even restricted to lightspeed, you couldn't really have an "interstellar empire". Just too much time would pass between contact with your colonies beyond more than say 10 lightyears. Likewise the deportation of prisoners. In a slower than light ship, by the time they reached an "outer colony" it would most likely be just as developed as the "core worlds" and would resent the prisoners' presence.

 

[Peter the Younger]

So, you have a working theory of quantum gravity that is consistent with general relativity? Man, Kip Thorne would love to know about that, you should call him.

Of course if you don', you should probably avoid making statements about what a wormhole does or does not do, seeing as it isn't settled science.

More than a few "careful phyisicists" will be glad to tell you that wormholes aren't FTL tunnels for spaceships.

Just sayin.

Well if they have proven that the Morris, Thorne, Visser and the rest are wrong, then I haven't seen anything about it. Now, if you're talking about something specific, like "can we move something the size of the Enterprise through a wormhole?", sure, it would take some really ludicrous numbers to make that happen, and there's some evidence to suggest that really huge amounts of exotic matter won't play nice, so it's highly unlikely. But that doesn't rule out all forms of wormhole-based interstellar travel.

 

[skep155]

I wouldn't use FTL, if i were writing a sci-fi series/novel i have always been interested in using sub light interstellar travel as a plot point. It would create some very interesting scenarios in any future Human interstellar Empire, the farther out colonies would be technologically backward whilst the closer colonies would be wealthy and fairly modern. An over crowded solar system might offer its prisoners the chance to be deported on a sleeper ship to the outer colonies rather than serve their prison sentence etc...

Even restricted to lightspeed, you couldn't really have an "interstellar empire". Just too much time would pass between contact with your colonies beyond more than say 10 lightyears. Likewise the deportation of prisoners. In a slower than light ship, by the time they reached an "outer colony" it would most likely be just as developed as the "core worlds" and would resent the prisoners' presence.

Disagree, i think its manageable. For example if you found a system like Xi Scorpii (which has at least five stars in it) that actually had planetary systems then you could cut down the travel time between those particular stars to days/weeks/months. Kind of like Firefly. E.g In relation to Alpha Centauri A the Alpha Centauri B star is about as far away as Pluto is in our own solar system. However the farther out you go from Sol the harder it would be to maintain a functional unified govt between seperate star systems. Presumably you would need some sort of strict codified constitution with various local governments pledging commitment to the brotherhood of mankind. Whether it would work who knows, but at least we'd be out there.

 

[Anwar]

If you want to do a story with FTL, you just need to do two things:

1) Have a character state that Einstein was wrong, AND

2) Never mention how the drive works, just that it does.

 

[sojourner]

I wouldn't use FTL, if i were writing a sci-fi series/novel i have always been interested in using sub light interstellar travel as a plot point. It would create some very interesting scenarios in any future Human interstellar Empire, the farther out colonies would be technologically backward whilst the closer colonies would be wealthy and fairly modern. An over crowded solar system might offer its prisoners the chance to be deported on a sleeper ship to the outer colonies rather than serve their prison sentence etc...

Even restricted to lightspeed, you couldn't really have an "interstellar empire". Just too much time would pass between contact with your colonies beyond more than say 10 lightyears. Likewise the deportation of prisoners. In a slower than light ship, by the time they reached an "outer colony" it would most likely be just as developed as the "core worlds" and would resent the prisoners' presence.

Disagree, i think its manageable. For example if you found a system like Xi Scorpii (which has at least five stars in it) that actually had planetary systems then you could cut down the travel time between those particular stars to days/weeks/months. Kind of like Firefly. E.g In relation to Alpha Centauri A the Alpha Centauri B star is about as far away as Pluto is in our own solar system. However the farther out you go from Sol the harder it would be to maintain a functional unified govt between separate star systems. Presumably you would need some sort of strict codified constitution

Sounds like a setup for a tea party

with various local governments pledging commitment to the brotherhood of mankind. Whether it would work who knows, but at least we'd be out there.

Anyway, I believe I caveated most of this when I said:

Just too much time would pass between contact with your colonies beyond more than say 10 lightyears.

 

[skep155]

Even restricted to lightspeed, you couldn't really have an "interstellar empire". Just too much time would pass between contact with your colonies beyond more than say 10 lightyears. Likewise the deportation of prisoners. In a slower than light ship, by the time they reached an "outer colony" it would most likely be just as developed as the "core worlds" and would resent the prisoners' presence.

Disagree, i think its manageable. For example if you found a system like Xi Scorpii (which has at least five stars in it) that actually had planetary systems then you could cut down the travel time between those particular stars to days/weeks/months. Kind of like Firefly. E.g In relation to Alpha Centauri A the Alpha Centauri B star is about as far away as Pluto is in our own solar system. However the farther out you go from Sol the harder it would be to maintain a functional unified govt between separate star systems. Presumably you would need some sort of strict codified constitution

Sounds like a setup for a tea party

with various local governments pledging commitment to the brotherhood of mankind. Whether it would work who knows, but at least we'd be out there.

Anyway, I believe I caveated most of this when I said:

Just too much time would pass between contact with your colonies beyond more than say 10 lightyears.

Theres around 10-11 stars within 10 light years, i still class that as an interstellar Empire XD