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FTL: Faster Than Light



Science fiction writers, almost by definition, love science. Yet, ironically, they don’t seem to mind violating it. This happens with time travel, which is the main theme of many a good sci-fi tale. Yet scientists tell us unanimously that time travel (at least going backwards in time) is impossible. That doesn’t stop the author who wants to send his/her character back in time to watch the signing of the Magna Carta. 

Similarly, science fiction authors can’t resist sending space ships out with faster-than-light drives (FTL). This makes sense. If you don’t have a faster-than-light drive, you are pretty much confined to our own solar system. Authors don’t like to be fettered as such. But that pesky Mr. Einstein gave us the laws of relativity, and over the last hundred years, no one has been able to prove Einstein wrong. Star Wars and Star Trek would have gone nowhere (literally) without FTL. The entire series of Battlestar Galactica would have taken place on Caprica where, let’s face it, the Cylons would have won in the first episode. There would have been nowhere for the humans to hide.

Actually there is nothing that prohibits you from journeying to someplace many light years away, you just can’t come back, at least not to the Earth you left behind. Even with conventional engines if you could carry enough fuel to continuously accelerate at 1 G, in about a year’s time you would be approaching the speed of light. At that speed, due to time dilation, you could travel thousands of light years. You could not however tell anyone on Earth what you found out there. From your perspective you were only gone a few years, but thousands of years will have transpired on earth while you were gadding about the universe. Somehow that is not very satisfying to the folks left on Earth who want to know what’s out there.

There are some theoretical ways that have been proposed to (appear to) cheat Einstein. Ever hear of the warp drive? One theory says that you could appear to exceed the speed of light by warping space itself. If you could cause the space in front of a ship to be contracting and the space behind it to be expanding, you could create a situation where the ship could exceed the speed of light. Though how you could actually accomplish this is anyone’s guess. There are also theories about using wormholes or entering into a higher dimensional space (hyperspace).

Science fiction authors have employed these methods and others to get their space ships moving at a reasonable rate. One of the most fun ones was the Infinite Improbability Drive from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Many writers who employ FTL in their stories never bother to explain how it works. This to me seems perfectly reasonable. I myself did this in my novel Star Liner. I set up some rules about it, because it seems to me that it should not be as simple as flipping on a switch, but I did not explain the mechanics behind it. We expect the readers to accept that someday FTL will be achievable and leave it at that. How many stories are there about time travel? Yet seldom does the author go into the nuts and bolts about how time travel was achieved. Speaking as a reader, I don’t need to be told the mechanics of time travel to enjoy the story. The same is true with FTL (unless there is a plot point in the story that is dependent on some component of how the FTL system works.) What I don’t like are stories (usually television) where people are zooming around the universe without any mention of any kind of FTL, or any limitations. That’s just sloppy writing.

So enjoy your sci-fi novel. If it is a good story, well told, it doesn’t really matter what method they used to get there. Personally I think that someday scientists will figure out a way to surpass the speed of light. But then, I am an optimist.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).

Star Liner

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