Overcoming the Challenge: Faster-Than-Light

In this post, I’m going to explore one of the more interesting challenges sci-fi authors face and a little bit about how we’ve decided to overcome them. This challenge, of course, is traveling faster than light. Some may see it as a basic sci-fi trope. From Star Wars to Stark Trek and everything in between, people are always routinely flying around the galaxy at FTL speeds. The kinds of stories we make wouldn’t work well without it, but this challenge is much more complex than it seems if we want to make a story that is in any way plausible.

Traveling faster than light is in no way easy. Most importantly, we need to get something out of the way from the start: it is impossible to actually fly faster than the speed of light. Physics tells us that light is the speed limit of the Universe, nothing ever flies faster than light. Einstein helped us understand the basic principle behind this. In essence, as matter approaches the speed of light all sorts of strange things happen, but in order to actually reach the speed of light, the matter would have to become energy.

Physically Flying Faster Than Light

As a result, all forms of FTL travel in sci-fi must cheat in one way or another. There are numerous possibilities. Harder sci-fi might make use of wormholes or simply have near c (c being the speed of light) travel that takes a long time but still allows for some interstellar trips to be realistic. Another reasonable approach uses the Alcubierre effect. This is a real-life space-warping hypothesis put forth by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. Here's an excellent video explaining this idea. In theory, if you had enough energy, you could warp the fabric of spacetime around a ship by contracting the space in front and expanding the space behind. This would create a sort of “space wave” that a ship could ride. This does not violate the laws of physics because in this drive space is moving, not the matter in the space, and there is no speed limit we know of on the movement of space itself. In fact, theories of the expanding universe assume that far in the future, distance galaxies will accelerate away from us at beyond the speed of light (due to expanding spacetime), all but disappearing forever from conventional view. Modern physicists have considered that if we are ever to actually create an FTL spacecraft in real life, it would probably work something like this. The greatest hurdle is generating enough power to create the effect, which is unlikely without the use of fusion or antimatter power generators. In fictional universes, Star Trek’s warp drive also probably works something like this, hence the use of the term “warp”.

Hyperspace is another interesting possibility for FTL, and it is one of the more commonly used. Hyperspace is a fictional dimension of space that allows ships to travel faster than light relative to normal space. Technically this would also not violate the laws of physics since the ship never travels faster-than-light in actuality, or that the laws of physics in hyperspace or simply different than real space, but the ship would seem to travel faster-than-light, blinking out of and into normal space. While Star Wars does not describe in detail its method of FTL, it seems to use something like this.

Skipping From A to B

Then, of course, are wormholes, jump points, and stargates, or space folding all of which work similarly. A wormhole is a real, albeit theoretical idea of a sort of tunnel that connects two points in spacetime, allowing a ship to move near instantly from one point to another. The only downside is that natural wormholes, if they do exist, would not be stable long enough to use and would be entirely unpredictable. Artificial wormholes are a better option, but the power needs would likely be enormous. These methods are also less flexible and better for connecting two distinct points that don’t change.

Frank Herbet's Dune and many other series imply traveling interstellar distances by folding space in such a way that a ship does not actually travel very far at all but rather two points in space are brought temporarily close together so that it is a simple matter to fly from one to the next. A jump point may work similarly, although there is the implication that only certain areas of space are feasible for this or that there are predetermined links through space that would allow it. Wing Commander (a movie and several video games) makes use of this option.

Traversing Alternate Realities

Finally, there are the more…interesting solutions, and from where I drew some of my inspiration. In Warhammer 40K, ships move using The Warp. This has no relation to warp in Star Trek. The Warp is an alternate dimension of chaotic energies inhabited by demons, essentially the “hell” of Warhammer. Ships can enter the Warp, which is not associated with the space or the time of normal space, allowing them to emerge somewhere else without regard to distance. The crazy part is that this would, technically allow travel of space and time, and this happens a few times in the books.

FLT Travel in the Darksea Universe

I didn’t want to get too fantastical, but I decided a combination of hyperspace and Warhammer’s Warp would be a good fit for my book. I also wanted to be a bit different, staying away from the classic idea of warping space because I felt that was too overused.

Enter the two methods in Darksea for traveling faster than light: hyperconduits and PSIspace translation. Why did I create two methods of FTL when a single method is the norm and certainly simpler? I did not want to be caught in the kinds of quandaries that plague hard science books. For example, the Star Carrier series by Ian Douglas is an excellent example of how space travel and combat might actually work for an advanced species, but it is also incredibly tedious and cumbersome and ends up defining a lot of what happens in the books. I wanted the challenges of FTL to be an important part of my story, but I didn’t want the challenges of FTL to control my story.

That said, traveling through space should be hard. In works like Star Wars, all types of ships zip around the galaxy at will, crossing tens of thousands of lightyears in what seems like hours or days with little thought to the actual travel itself. While Star Wars certainly works as a story, I feel making spaceflight that easy is a bit disingenuous to the science. Everything we know about physics and energy tells us that traveling between the stars will be hard and complicated and take tremendous power, regardless of our level of technological advancement. Something more than just pulling the hyperspace lever is needed.

I solved this challenge by having an “easy and slow” method of FTL, and a “fast and dangerous” method.

Hyperconduits are easy, relatively speaking, for the civilizations of Darksea. All but the smallest spacecraft can generate them so long as they have a fusion drive and enough space for the proper engine. Combat fighters, shuttles, and dropships are about the only craft not capable of having this. However, I limited the speed of hyperconduits to about four times c. This may seem very fast, but to put it into perspective, at that speed it would still take a year to reach Alpha Centauri, the closest star to our sun, from Earth. Obviously, something much faster needs to be possible to traverse across tens of thousands of lightyears.

I decided to add PSIspace translation, the truest act of cheating the physics. Similar to Warhammer, PSIspace translation involves entering another dimension entirely where the true distances between points become almost meaningless. This also went well with my focus on psionics, since that is how PSIspace can be navigated. There are many dangers involved, and the power required is so tremendous that only large ships are capable of translating.

Some may balk at the lack of science in my solutions, but to them, I can only say this. If we are to ever create such an interstellar civilization, or if any other alien species ever has, then they have found some way to cheat physics because no other solution seems truly reasonable.