I'm givin 'er all I got, Captain!

April 21, 2008 4:57 PM

Where did the idea of faster than light (or near light speed) travel come from, and how is it described in different science fiction/fact works?

I'm thinking partially in terms of the origin of faster than light or near light speed travel in scientific studies, but more specifically in terms of sci-fi. Many different sci-fi worlds, whether TV, film, prose, etc, have some form of travel that exceeds the limits of the speed of light. What are the various names of these forms of travel (hyperdrive, FTL, warp speed, etc), what are the technological requirements, affects, etc?

In terms of non-fiction, what are some of the challenges/possibilities discussed by scientists about near/faster than light travel?

posted by Saxon Kane to Technology (24 answers total)

* This sounds kinda like homework
* It's pretty broad
* The idea of faster-than-light travel came from.... wanting to go faster than light. Are you asking for like the first conception of such a thing? It's a lot older than you'd think.
* There's a HUGE difference between faster-than-light and near-light travel. Lumping them together doesn't really even make sense. There are many ways to get to near light speed, although most of them probably aren't that practical because they involve relatively low acceleration speeds, so you spend a long time getting there.
posted by RustyBrooks at 5:09 PM on April 21, 2008

Yeah, what RustyBrooks said. You want to narrow the question down so that 1) it makes sense, and 2) we have a shot at answering it? The idea of faster than light (or near light speed) travel came, obviously, from Einstein's theory of relativity. What else did you want to know?
posted by languagehat at 5:14 PM on April 21, 2008

Faster-than-light travel originated when the first pulp hack had to translate a cowboy story into a space opera, and "he rode that mangy mare to the nearest town with a bar" became "he flew that bucket of bolts to the nearest galaxy with a bar."

I think it was a bar. It may have been a stimu-center.
posted by hexatron at 5:36 PM on April 21, 2008

I remember this being a fun book... seems relevant, anyway.
posted by mdn at 5:37 PM on April 21, 2008

Response by poster: OK... trying to reformulate...

This started last night, when I was watching the mini-series that started the new Battlestar Galactica show. Some of the ships had "FTL" capabilities, but making the jump was a bit of ordeal... it required plotting out the route of travel, securing the ship, and the camera work indicated that it was something of an unpleasant experience physically (one character remarked "I hate this part").

It lead me to think about Dune and how Frank Herbert wrote about "folding space," which, while a form of faster than light travel, is markedly different in terms of its operation, how it is powered, the effects it has on travelers, etc., although I don't recall details. Then there are the various Star Trek series; if I remember correctly, in the OT Warp speed indicated a multiplier to light speed (Warp 3 = 3x speed of light) whereas in TNG Warp was depowered to be a portion of the speed of light (Warp 3 = 30% of speed of light). I might be getting those confused...

Anyway, then in various science fiction/fact works there are different levels of space or physical means of traveling faster than light, such as hyperspace or going through a wormhole, etc.

So, I guess what I'm asking is primarily for people to riff on their recollections of forms of FTL travel (or something similar to it) in various sci-fi works. What was it called, how was it powered, how did it work, how was it similar to or different from some other form of travel, etc. Just whatever you can remember from your own sci-fi fandom.

Secondary would be details regarding the rel life possibility of near/faster than light travel: how might it be powered, what might it do to travelers, etc.

Does that make more sense?

And this isn't homework
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:00 PM on April 21, 2008

Let me start with the simplest:

You just go real fucking fast, with rockets. ISTR that this was basically the mode of travel in the Lensmen books: you turn off inertia with a magic gizmo, turn on your rocket, and zip -- you're going real goddam fast. None of this relativity crap, so faster than light is just a number.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:28 PM on April 21, 2008

(Mostly cribbed from Halopedia:)

In the Halo universe, ships travel via "Slipspace" or "the slipstream", a polydimensional tangle governed by alternate physical laws which allow FTL travel without relativistic restraints. Most ships are fitted with specialized Shaw-Fujikawa drives which open rifts large enough for them to pass through into this realm.

Slipspace travel isn't instant; a distant journey could take longer than six months. Because of this, most nonessential crew are stored in cryosleep, pumped full of chemicals to keep them stable and sleeping for the trip. It's not entirely pleasant -- clothing can fuse with the skin during the freezing process, causing welts and rashes and aching joints... also called "freezer burn".

Slipspace is also unpredictable, for humans, at least -- slipstream"eddies" can alter travel times up to 10%, which plays havoc with strategic coordination. The more advanced Covenant ships can make pinpoint jumps with laser precision. Covenant ships are also faster, traveling at around 9LY per day compared to about 2.5 for humans.



(A bit less rigorous idea than the above, but funnier, too: In Futurama, the engines of the character's main spacecraft do not move the ship itself, but rather the universe around it. This was a reference to the way George Lucas filmed the first Star Wars movies by moving the cameras around stationary scale models.)
posted by Rhaomi at 6:36 PM on April 21, 2008

Faster-than-light travel is not an uninvented invention.
It is crummy sci-fi PLOT DEVICE that will not happen until we find dilithium crystals.

Besides, you don't need FTL drive to reach other galaxies. You can do it in a few days (or even seconds), thanks to relativistic time-dilation. And when you return, you could meet your own great-...-great-grandchilden. How cool is that?

Something I hadn't thought about is--humanoid robots are another crummy plot device.
SF author Bruce Sterling explicates here.

I think by now we all know that commuting by personal air-car ain't gonna happen either.
How about ray guns? Is there hope?
posted by hexatron at 6:46 PM on April 21, 2008

The question probably really is, when did we learn we couldn't go faster than light?
posted by gjc at 7:01 PM on April 21, 2008

You can do it in a few days (or even seconds), thanks to relativistic time-dilation.

Sorry, you can't. In your frame of reference, time will pass normally. If you're traveling at the speed of light (which you can't) to a destination 50 light years away, you're going to age 50 years.
posted by knave at 7:07 PM on April 21, 2008

We learned that we couldn't go faster than light when Einstein published the Special Theory of Relativity. Science fiction writers started writing about faster-than-light drives when they realized that space opera was boring if it took centuries to travel between stars.

FTL in science fiction is like time travel: it's necessary if you're going to tell certain kinds of stories. There really isn't anything more to it than that.
posted by Class Goat at 7:09 PM on April 21, 2008

Sorry, you can't. In your frame of reference, time will pass normally. If you're traveling at the speed of light (which you can't) to a destination 50 light years away, you're going to age 50 years.

Um, no. this is totally wrong and missing the entire point of relativity. If it's fifty light-years away, assuming you are traveling at the speed of light, observers will see you take fifty years to get there -- that's why it's considered 50 light-years away, after all, because it takes light fifty years to get there. But you would not age at all (again assuming you are traveling at exactly the speed of light, which is, as you note, impossible).
posted by kindall at 7:29 PM on April 21, 2008 [1 favorite]

Thanks, kindall.
Time dilation is absolutely real and has been observed directly (in an atomic clock flown around the world. It came back younger than it's non-traveling twin.)
posted by hexatron at 7:40 PM on April 21, 2008

Seconding the Nick Herbert book. As an aside, his Quantum Reality is the most lucid explanation I've ever seen of the major interpretations of quantum mechanics for the layman. Also, he seems a bit odd.

Some FTL travel in SF does not occur through the mediation of starships. Sometimes, as in Neal Asher's Polity novels or Dan Simmons's Hyperion "cantos," it's done by stepping through a kind of portal formed by wormholes and such that (if I recall correctly) are by and large carried between stars on ships obeying relativity as we know it.
posted by adamdschneider at 8:23 PM on April 21, 2008

kindall: Hate to continue a derail, but Wikipedia's article on Time Dilation says: "Locally (i.e., from the perspective of any observer within the same frame of reference, without reference to another frame of reference), time always passes at the same rate."

How is this consistent with a 50 light year trip somehow taking you less than 50 years?
posted by knave at 8:37 PM on April 21, 2008

knave - time slows down the faster you go.

If the people left behind are the reference for time and the speed of light, the travelers experience less time the faster they go.
posted by porpoise at 8:48 PM on April 21, 2008

In Ender's Game and it's sequels, they are capable of either at or near light speed travel.

The way it plays out is you spend 6 months, a year, 18 months or whatever on a ship and when you arrive at your destination, time has passed 50 years back on Earth.

A twist in that series is that they were capable of instantaneous communication across any distance. Although, this did mean that any communication from the ship in flight involved heavy amounts of lag, however communication with a distant outpost or a ship at normal speeds a galaxy away could be sent a message as fast as talking to someone next to you. Or playing a video game...
posted by utsutsu at 9:19 PM on April 21, 2008

Well, Larry Niven has two talks he used to give that are somewhat related. In "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel" and "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation" he basically takes a scientific approach to things that are very rarely thought through that deeply by the authors that (ab)use them, applying in particular the Laws of Thermodynamics to any machines that will let you do those things. I don't think he ever did one for FTL space travel per se, although both those talks touch on it tangentially. (For instance, a slow rocket plus a time travel device equals a faster-than-light drive. See?)

True, it is just a plot device. Star Trek came up with the transporter because the special effects budget didn't allow for filming a new shuttle landing every week. Then it became a narrative albatross allowing for cheap deus ex machina, so it had to break frequently enough that McCoy was basically right to fear it.

The various types boil down to a series of assumptions about the fictional universe. The standard warp drive is pretty common, but all it is is technobabble around "we're going faster and faster until we don't need to go any faster". A number of other approaches have been tried including using black holes to get going fast enough or enter another dimension. One of my favorites is the Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle "Alderson drive" (named for a friend at JPL, I think), which postulated a way to fold space right at the boundary of a stellar gravitational field. Each star had an Alderson point in its outer reaches that could take you to the next star in that direction. It would be like traveling along a web from intersection to intersection. Galactica does something similar, but without the "points". In Niven's Known Space universe, alien technology allowed for FTL travel while in stasis or inside a special hull, but only at one speed. You turned it on and went at that speed until you needed to stop. Later, a higher speed was introduced, and a character rode a ship all the way to the galactic core.

Niven also speculated about spacefaring civilizations that didn't have FTL. His early human travelers used "slowboats" where people would go into hibernation for the 50 years or so it would take to reach Tau Ceti (12 ly from Earth). A device called a "ramscoop" (not his own creation) would suck in hydrogen from the interstellar vacuum to run a fusion drive that would push it to near light speed (a Bussard ramjet), but the magnetic scoop would kill a human, so only robots could use it.

Ursula K. LeGuin also envisioned such a civilization in many of her stories, though they could use tachyons to communicate via a FTL radio called an ansible.

Historically, people accepted limitations on speed. You drove a train too fast, the boiler exploded. You sailed a boat too fast, the wind tore your sails. At one point, it was believed that the forces acting on an object going faster than the speed of sound would rip it apart. Chuck Yeager, however, remains alive. (Really!) After the sound barrier was broken more hard sf writers began thinking that we might be able to break the light barrier someday.

Science has delivered periodic ponies that have encouraged this line of thinking, from wormholes to tachyons. The more abstract our understanding of the universe has become, the more arbitrary some of these limitations appear. If there are eleven dimensions, why the hell are we stuck perceiving no more than four?

NASA actually has a status of "warp" drive page, by the way. They haven't gotten very far.
posted by dhartung at 10:25 PM on April 21, 2008 [2 favorites]

Knave, time passes at the same rate, but it looks to you as if the distance is shorter, so it takes less time to reach the destination.

From the point of view of the outside observer, the distance is the same, but your time is slowed, so it still takes you less time as you measure it to reach the destination.
posted by Class Goat at 10:42 PM on April 21, 2008

This is going to be a little chatfiltery ... but here goes.

A while back I was reading an anthology of short SF; one of the first stories in the book was fairly old, late teens or early 20s I think. Definitely pre-WWII. It was the earliest story I'd come across that dealt with FTL travel. (Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the story, except that it may have involved literally dragging planets around, and the inevitable battle between the hero and some aliens on their home planet.)

The author basically used "lightspeeds" as a rate, much as you might talk about "miles per hour." The ship was described as going from 10 lightspeeds to as many as 100 or 1000 lightspeeds pretty casually -- it was clear that the author didn't consider it a 'barrier' or assign much particular significance to it. (In my head I imagined some sort of big dial marked in 'lightspeeds' in some sort of base-10 log scale, physics be damned.) No time dilation or other ill effects from zipping around the universe at such speeds, either.

The other interesting thing I remember about it was that it seemed to be heavier on the nautical metaphors where space travel was concerned, while more recent SF tends to use more aircraft (or legitimate spacecraft) terminology. Again, my impression was that the author had basically taken an ocean liner, grafted on Impossibly Powerful Space Engines, and tossed it in orbit. (Also, you could tool around in space much the same way you could in a body of water; no orbital mechanics to get in the way.) This may have been more my interpolation than anything from the text, however.

Basically, the whole spacecraft business was just a cheap literary device for the plot, which basically was hero-goes-to-remote-place-and-saves-girl, as I recall.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:10 PM on April 21, 2008

Just so you know, in both TOS and TNG, warp is faster than light -- that's the whole point. Wikipedia covers the whole thing, predictably.

Anyway, going "faster than light" was never an issue before it was realized that "the speed of light" was anything more than a ridiculous phrase (like "the sourness of blue", it didn't really mean much to many people.) Over time, it gradually became clear that light, in fact, did have a speed, but no one had any idea that it was a universal, unbreachable constant, or the ramifications of that, so you got people saying "1000 lightspeeds!" -- not because they felt it had any particular significance, just because it was really, really damn fast.

Once Einstein clued humanity into the fact that the velocity of light was a condition of the fabric of the universe, rather than just some number, it meant that authors had to invent some sort of magic way to go faster than light. But there's no real answer to who did it first. It's sort of like asking, "who was the first person to think of a number bigger than a hundred quintillion?"

In reality, the fact that the speed of light is a constant has a ridiculous number of consequences, which many people take years to fully appreciate, and most never do. (I probably don't.) the most relevant to this discussion being that it takes exponentially more energy to go faster, the faster you go. E = mc², as you might have heard, but the really key thing here is c can't change - so if you add E to something, i.e., by making it go faster, m must increase. Your relativistic mass increases, and it takes more work to get you up to that next notch on the speedometer. Ad infinitum. You can never get to the speed of light unless you weighed nothing to begin with. (And then you're a photon.)

So FTL travel needs to avoid this entire business by figuring out some way to change your location in the universe without actually having to deal with increasing your velocity that much. Most SF solutions involve finding some sort of mysterious "other" space to travel through. Hyperspace, subspace, slipstreams, wormholes, whatever.

The Faster-than-light article on WP summarizes all of the modern scientific possibilities better than I could. For most of these huge, wide-ranging questions like this, most of the time you can find out way more than you ever wanted to know by paging through there for a while, you know.
posted by blacklite at 4:18 AM on April 22, 2008 [1 favorite]

Space is to damn big for lightspeed or slower travel to really be economically viable barring earth destroying cataclysms forcing us into it. (see Generation ships)

So, to have an interesting story you have to have faster than light or extra-dimensional travel. Faster than light is basically "warp drive" which somehow hand-waves away or ignores the constraints of relativity (and usually time dilation). Extra-dimensional travel would be wormholes, 'folding', hyperdrive, or 'teraport' travel, which gets around the limitations of relativity by traveling no or little distance in our three dimensional space. The 2D travel analogy is getting from point A to B on a piece of paper by folding the paper so that A and B touch and then travelling in the third dimension. Intriguingly to me, travel time (usually expressed in number of hops with a downtime to recharge or redo navigation) seems to still be related (in fiction) to distance in the three dimensional universe. In 'real' physics, it may be that faraway galaxies are actually closer to a given earth orbit start point than Mars for example. However, in order for characters in such universes to not have unlimited power, it's necessary to constrain such travel with maximum effective distances, 'gate building' requirements, re-charging limitations, inability to use near gravity sources, tough navigation issues, or limited 'natural' wormhole locations. In military sci-fi, the fixed wormholes become important resources to fight over.
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:32 AM on April 22, 2008

I'm speaking strictly of the physics of imaginary science fiction universes in my above comment BTW.
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:38 AM on April 22, 2008

The author basically used "lightspeeds" as a rate

That was "The Star-Stealers" by Edmond Hamilton (Weird Tales, February 1929).

An couple of years later:
"On the other hand, when we do get out, and get started, we will go faster than light."
  —John W. Campbell, Jr., "Islands of Space" in Amazing Stories Quarterly (Spring 1931)

"Light" as speed measurement (= "light speed"):
"We're not supposed to know anything about the five-light drive of the Fenachrone, you know."
  —E. E. "Doc" Smith, "Skylark of Valeron" in Astounding Stories (August 1934)

"Overdrive":
"A nebula is a gas. It is so thin that a comet's tail is solid by comparison, but a ship traveling on overdrive—above the speed of light—does not want to hit even a merely hard vacuum."
  —Murray Leinster, "First Contact" in Astounding Science Fiction (May 1945)

"Hyperdrive":
"Construction is still going on and, through a worker's accident, the ship, still incomplete and utterly unarmed, is sent flashing into the 'other' space, a universe of complete darkness in which its hyper-drive operates."
  —Startling Stories (January 1949)

"FTL":
"Elven agreed softly without looking around, and added 'FTL'—meaning Faster Than Light."
  —Fritz Leiber, "The Enchanted Forest" in Astounding Science Fiction (October 1950)

"Ultradrive":
"Simultaneously, he grew aware of the thrum and quiver which meant he was aboard a spaceship running on ultradrive."
  —Poul Anderson, "Tiger by the Tail" in Planet Stories (January 1951)
posted by languagehat at 8:32 AM on April 22, 2008 [2 favorites]