Can faster than light travel really happen?

 

 

A star field peppered with galaxies

The James Webb telescope is out there, starting its mission to collect light from the the universe's earliest beginnings, eighteen billion years ago. That's a long, long time and brings to mind the vast, unimaginable size of the universe and the distances between suns in a galaxy, let alone between the galaxies themselves. And that inevitably leads to discussion about space travel in fiction. Because, let's face it, without relatively fast space travel, space opera would not exist.

Indeed, the existence of Faster Than Light travel (FTL) is apparently seen as fantasy by the hard SF purists. Sure, that's true at the moment. But let me conjure up the ghost of Carl Sagan doing the 1980s Cosmos. Just a sec...

<Clears throat>

Come with me on a cosmic journey. We’ll start here, on dear old Mother Earth, the only planet we know a huge amount about. Journey back in time, four hundred years…

The world was beginning to open up. Intrepid explorers travelled to the other side of the Earth in search of trade and riches. Dutch merchant ships sailed from Amsterdam to what is now Jakarta in Indonesia to trade in spices. At the turn of the 17^th century, they sailed down the west coast of Africa, re-provisioned at Table Bay and then set off past Madagascar and across the Indian Ocean up to Java. Makes sense, really, if you look at the journey on a map; down to the tip of Africa, then up at an angle to Indonesia. The journey took a year, sometimes as much as eighteen months if the winds were poor or the storms struck hard.

Then in 1610 Henrik Brouwer did something completely counter-intuitive and sailed south from Table Bay. Makes no sense, does it? Well, yes it does. The Earth is not a 2D Mercator’s projection on a tabletop, it’s a spheroid. The distance around the equator is greater than the distance around the lines we call ‘latitude’ to the north and south. Brouwer took advantage of that fact to shorten the distance he had to travel east and had the bonus of the reliable winds of the ‘roaring forties’ to push his ships along. All he had to do was remember to turn left when he reached the longitude for the Sunda Strait, sail up the coast of Western Australia and he was home. Taking this route shortened the journey by two thousand miles and more than halved the duration.

Over the years, sea travel became faster and more reliable. Steam and then diesel replaced sail. When my family migrated to Australia from Amsterdam the sea journey took about a month. Apart from the improved mode of transport, the ship also avoided the long journey around the Cape of Good Hope by going through a short cut – the Suez Canal.

Eventually, the obstacles forced upon us by oceans and continents were removed, too, with the advent of air travel. These days you can get on a jet at Schiphol in Amsterdam and get off twenty four hours laterat Perth International Airport. With airliners like the beautiful and now-departed Concord, you could do the journey in half the time. A trip from Amsterdam to Perth in a Concord would be around twelve hours. Half a day. That's pretty spectacular isn't it? But now there's the Sabre engine, which can operate in both atmosphere and vacuum, and can travel at 5 times the speed of sound. Such an aircraft could make the trip from Sydney to London in four hours. That’s 4 hours. Not bad, eh? But wait – there's steak knives! A spaceliner can do the trip in 90 minutes!!!

So we’ve come down from 350 days, to 1 month, to 1 day, to 1.5 hours. Rams the point home, doesn’t it? Please note also that the improvements are coming ever more quickly as we develop technology.

Still with me? Trust me, it’s all relevant to space travel.

Imagine what reaction a person would have received if, in 1600, she’d said that in four hundred years, we’d be able to travel from Amsterdam to that southern continent we didn’t know anything about, in an hour and a half.

Yes, but that’s just the Earth, I hear you say. We’re talking inter-stellar distances. For Pete’s sake, the nearest star system from ours is over 4 light years away.

Very true.

We have no way of spanning these vast distances in anybody’s lifetime. Regardless, the notion of ‘hyperspace’ in science fiction to allow for the possibility of space travel has been around for a long time. The Grand Master, Isaac Asimov, did rather a lot of planet-hopping. Have a look at his ‘Foundation’ series. Many of the more modern writers like Mc Devitt and Moon have FTL travel but show it as still a very time-consuming business with journeys taking weeks or months. Star Trek used warp drive, which was just a made-up thing, and also matter transfer (as does Linnea Sinclair) and others have portals for almost instant travel. Jack Mc Devitt in his book ‘A Talent for War’ postulated a quantum drive, where a ship moves from one place to another instantaneously. Worm holes would also allow for an instantaneous transfer the movie Interstellar is an example.

But now, there are murmurings that Star Trek's famous warp drive may not be as SF as we thought. This article in The Conversation talks about warp drives and how they would work.  And advances are being made in matter transfer, and although quantum tech is still in its infancy, the potential is there.

In my space opera novels I refer to my version of hyperspace as ‘shift space’. I’ve done that deliberately because in my universe the ships use the geometry of extra dimensions to get around. Ships ‘shift’ to another dimension for the duration of a journey.

It’s pretty much accepted that our 3D notion of the universe is just a perception, that there are many other dimensions we are not equipped to see. Such an understanding certainly helps to explain the apparent complexities of quantum physics and the anomalous behaviour of sub-atomic particles. Way back in the 1980’s Carl Sagan in his wonderful TV series ‘Cosmos’ showed us a tesseract, a four-dimensional object portrayed as best we could in a 3D world. To understand what you’re looking at, think about a standard, 2D drawing of a cube. According to mathematics, there are many, many more than four dimensions out there, not to mention parallel universes.

The biggest limitation imposed upon us in reaching a real understanding of things like this is that we are constrained by our own world view and our ability to perceive. As far back as 1884 E.A. Abbott in his book ‘Flatland’ described the problems of seeing three dimensions in a 2D world. We are faced with the same thing, on a 3D scale, if we attempt to visualise four, five or six dimensions. Or many, many more.

However, I can give you some sort of idea of where I’m coming from. Take a piece of A4 paper. Let’s label two diagonally opposite corners as A and B. Starting from B, we can reach A by going straight up one side then along the top to A. Hang on, you say, wouldn’t you just go across the diagonal, thereby reducing the distance and time taken? Sure you would. Now curl the paper over into a cylinder. All you have to do to get from B to A is move along a straight line. The length of the line will depend on how you make the roll (short edges together or long edges together).

Now take point A in one hand and point B in the other and bring them together so they meet. Getting from B to A in this instance is like walking from one room into another.

That’s my notion of ‘shift drive’. I have included some duration in the journey in the book because I found it useful. Don’t ask me how the shift drive (the engine that makes it possible to take advantage of the geometry) works. I’m speculating a fusion drive to do something or other. When I work it out, I’ll let you know.

But technology moves at a gallop and as more and more corporations and governments jostle for a place in the space race, you can bet there are scientists trying to find an advantage. 

In fact, here's one that's happening right now. NASA and China are both planning manned missions to Mars. Using current technology, it would take six to nine months to transit from Earth to Mars. But using lasers to heat hydrogen fuel, transit times to Mars could be reduced to just 45 days! Read all about it in Scitech Daily.

So watch this space, folks. There may well be FTL in the foreseeable future.

A different take on interstellar travel

The concept of interplanetary travel is a very important aspect of any space opera, where popping around from planet to planet is an integral part of the action. Think Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly and the like.And, of course, my SF books.

Several years ago I wrote an article explaining my notion of interplanetary travel, which involved taking advantage of dimensions beyond our height, width, and depth geometry. This is an excerpt from that article.

"Take a piece of A4 paper. Let’s label two diagonally opposite corners as A and B. Starting from B, we can reach A by going straight up one side then along the top to A. Hang on, you say, wouldn’t you just go across the diagonal, thereby reducing the distance and time taken? Sure you would. Now curl the paper over into a cylinder. All you have to do to get from B to A is move along a straight line. The length of the line will depend on how you make the roll (short edges together or long edges together).

Now take point A in one hand and point B in the other and bring them together so they meet. Getting from B to A in this instance is like walking from one room into another."

 You'll find the full article here.

Recently I've been reading Holly Lisle's books set in her Settled Space universe. She has taken this idea of foldable space to a whole new level. In space it's possible to travel vast distances by using origami points. In one section of Hunting the Corrigan's Blood the MC, Cadence Drake, watches an old vid of Isas Yamamoto explaining how his hyperspace drive works.

“Akiko wanted a crane,” Yamamoto said, smiling down at his little girl. 

“And I was folding it for her—like so.” 

He handed the finished crane to his daughter and took a sheet of paper from the little carved table beside him. He lifted it up and made a crease in the paper, and then another. While he folded it, he talked. 

“It occurred to me that the nature of origami, that is, the art of folding paper, was very much like the problem humanity faced in reaching the stars. Origami is folding two-dimensional paper into three-dimensional objects. Space travel through hyperspace is the folding of a three-dimensional universe into four spatial dimensions to shorten the distances between points.”   

He held up the partially finished crane. It didn’t look like much yet. “You see—I am taking something that was in essence two-dimensional, and I am changing it into something three-dimensional.”

 ***

To me, this is a delightful combination of the concept of worm holes through space with the folding of space through multiple dimensions. The paths are fixed, straight lines from one origami point to another.

But there's more to it than that.

Later in the same section, Yamamoto says,

"Life is not a thing of three dimensions. It is not limited by up and across and back. Life encompasses space, and time, and it goes beyond that. It touches infinity. You sit watching me right now, and in another probability, another child who is also you sits watching another me. In another probability, another child who is also you sits where you are sitting, but that child isn’t listening the way you are. 

In an infinite number of probabilities, an infinite number of children who are also you do an infinite number of things, and none of them can see or hear each other. So how can all of these yous do similar things? You are linked together through hyperspace. The infinite number of three-dimensional yous are all part of a single meta-you, whose home is hyperspace.”

 ***

And that is significant because when a person goes through an origami point, they encounter all those other yous. Here's the first instance we come across of Cadence's ship going through an origami point.

"Space, still and silent and serene, filled with stars that promise everything. Everything. Think of the perfection of space, the glorious swirl of a nebula splashed against the velvet dark—

“Six…five…four…three…”

I am Cadence Drake, captain and owner of the Hope’s Reward. 

“Two.”

I am strong. I know who I am. 

“One.”

I know what I believe.

“Insertion.”

I was no longer alone. In my chair, in my head, I could feel the rest of myself, the multidimensional self that takes its mundane shapes as an infinite number of Cadence Drakes in an infinite number of universes connected by the fact that we are one. Infinite. Of a magnitude with the heavens. And we are more than infinite mirrored and fragmented parts; we are also a single whole. An Entity. We touch, we mirror, we remain Me through that portion of our self, or perhaps I should say Self, that has its home in hyperspace. A part of me can look infinity in the eye and not flinch. A part of me is enormous and magnificent and beyond the pain and the suffering and the despair of my infinite mirrored fragmented mortal three-dimensional lives; is so beyond my limitations and weaknesses and frailties that it regards the infinite parts of me with some tenderness but also with mild, superior amusement.  I am small, puny, insignificant. Mortal. Human. A creature of limited flesh and limited intellect, for a burning expanse of non-time forced to see myself not only as I am, but as I could be in all my infinite capacity, knowing that when the moment ends my sudden wisdom, my godhood, will be stripped from me and I will be thrown naked and shivering and frightened and mortal back into the domain of death.

And the infinite frightened fragments of my greater Self clamor in my head. I am a doctor, on my way to a new world, armed with hope and knowledge, but now fear, too, for I have never taken this shortcut through the stars. I am a dancer; and I am a thief; and a renegade and a lover and a mother and I am old and young and I have a thousand faces and a thousand names a million names a billion names and I know them all all all all and every detail of every life that goes with them and they are nothing nothing nothing because these fragments of my true self are nothing these tiny mortal scraps are meaningless are nothing but I am Cadence Drake I am Cadence Drake I am Cadence Drake— “

—I am Cadence Drake—”

 ***

This pull of the multi-verse happens every single time a person goes through an origami point. Which is why most people are placed in a form of suspended animation for the few moments it takes to go through. Ship's captains, however, have to be awake, aware and in control.

It's such a powerful image. Lisle uses this downside of space travel as an arc in her stories, not so much for the crossing itself but what goes through Cadence's head as she traverses the point. All the regrets, all the possibilities, all the 'if onlys'.

For most authors, real space disappears in hyperspace. We all remember the stream of stars in the Millenium Falcon's front screen. Other people imagine it as grey and formless. My shift space is a bit more colourful than most. I imagine it as a kaleidoscope, rather like those we played with as kids.

But this mental twist to inter-stellar travel is a new one to me. 

From a writing craft perspective, I also admired the way Lisle avoided an info-dump and explained what happens at origami poits as a narrative that is part of the story. We also learn a little about Cadence's history through this device. It's woth taking notes.

For readers, it's a space opera thriller and I loved it. You'll find my review of Hunting the Corrigan's Blood here.

Quotes from Lisle, Holly. Hunting the Corrigan's Blood (A Cadence Drake Novel Book 1) . Holly Lisle. Kindle Edition.

How do you leave breadcrumbs in space?

One of the givens in any space opera is the ability to move through space (relatively) quickly from one place to another. Some people use worm holes. Others use plain old hyperspace. In the Star Wars universe moving from one star system seems to be a bit like driving your car across town. Sometimes stories are written about generation ships which travel through normal spacetime over incredibly long time frames.

That's all well and good. But there aren't any roads in space. Of course, all those ships transporting people around have wonderful navigation systems. The issue, though, is that distance and direction on planet Earth are all based on constants. Locations on the surface have precise coordinates, given in latitude and longitude. Latitude is based on the distance north of south from the equator, and longitude is based on the distance east or west from a given base line (0⁰) which we humans have decided passes through Greenwich in the UK. In the past, longitude was found to be exceptionally difficult to measure. It wasn't until the invention of extremely accurate clocks that we could get it pretty right. To quote Wikipedia "Longitude at a point may be determined by calculating the time difference between that at its location and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)." It's an over-simplification, but we don't need more than that for this discussion.

The point is that in order to navigate between two places, you need to know the position of those two places based on two 'knowns' – your start point, and your end point. Sure, you can recalculate en route. Aircraft do it all the time, because they work in three dimensions: latitude, longitude and height. I assume submarines do, too. If we look at space, working out how to get to other planets has already been done successfully many times. But the further we go, the harder it gets. This io9 article explains it better than I could.

So why do I care? Because my current WIP is very much about following a specific journey made by space-farers in the distant past. There aren't any roads, so I need breadcrumbs, or a ball of string, and I'm not sure how to make it work.

Ah well. That's one of the joys – and the frustrations – of writing science fiction.

Inter-stellar travel. Science Fantasy?

There's been a bit of discussion of late about the vast, unimaginable size of the universe and the distances between suns in a galaxy, let alone between the galaxies themselves. And that inevitably leads to discussion about space travel in fiction. Because, let's face it, without relatively fast space travel, space opera would not exist.
Indeed, the existence of Faster Than Light travel (FTL) is apparently seen as fantasy by the hard SF purists. Sure, that's true at the moment. But let me conjure up the ghost of Carl Sagan doing the 1980s Cosmos. Just a sec...

<Clears throat>

Come with me on a cosmic journey. We’ll start here, on dear old Mother Earth, the only planet we know a huge amount about. Journey back in time, four hundred years…

The world was beginning to open up. Intrepid explorers travelled to the other side of the Earth in search of trade and riches. Dutch merchant ships sailed from Amsterdam to what is now Jakarta in Indonesia to trade in spices. At the turn of the 17^th century, they sailed down the west coast of Africa, re-provisioned at Table Bay and then set off past Madagascar and across the Indian Ocean up to Java. Makes sense, really, if you look at the journey on a map; down to the tip of Africa, then up at an angle to Indonesia. The journey took a year, sometimes as much as eighteen months if the winds were poor or the storms struck hard.

Then in 1610 Henrik Brouwer did something completely counter-intuitive and sailed south from Table Bay. Makes no sense, does it? Well, yes it does. The Earth is not a 2D Mercator’s projection on a tabletop, it’s a spheroid. The distance around the equator is greater than the distance around the lines we call ‘latitude’ to the north and south. Brouwer took advantage of that fact to shorten the distance he had to travel east and had the bonus of the reliable winds of the ‘roaring forties’ to push his ships along. All he had to do was remember to turn left when he reached the longitude for the Sunda Strait, sail up the coast of Western Australia and he was home. Taking this route shortened the journey by two thousand miles and more than halved the duration.

Over the years, sea travel became faster and more reliable. Steam and then diesel replaced sail. When my family migrated to Australia from Amsterdam the sea journey took about a month. Apart from the improved mode of transport, the ship also avoided the long journey around the Cape of Good Hope by going through a short cut – the Suez Canal.

Eventually, the obstacles forced upon us by oceans and continents were removed, too, with the advent of air travel. These days you can get on a jet at Schiphol in Amsterdam and get off twenty four hours laterat Perth International Airport. With airliners like the beautiful and now-departed Concord, you could do the journey in half the time. A trip from Amsterdam to Perth in a Concord would be around twelve hours. Half a day. That's pretty spectacular isn't it? But now there's the Sabre engine, which can operate in both atmosphere and vacuum, and can travel at 5 times the speed of sound. Such an aircraft could make the trip from Sydney to London in four hours. That’s 4 hours. Not bad, eh? But wait – there's steak knives! A spaceliner which will do the trip in 90 minutes!!!

So we’ve come down from 350 days, to 1 month, to 1 day, to 1.5 hours. Rams the point home, doesn’t it? Please note also that the improvements are coming ever more quickly as we develop technology.

Still with me? Trust me, it’s all relevant to space travel.

Imagine what reaction a person would have received if, in 1600, she’d said that in four hundred years, we’d be able to travel from Amsterdam to that southern continent we didn’t know anything about, in an hour and a half.

Yes, but that’s just the Earth, I hear you say. We’re talking inter-stellar distances. For Pete’s sake, the nearest star system from ours is over 4 light years away.

Very true.

We have no way of spanning these vast distances in anybody’s lifetime. Regardless, the notion of ‘hyperspace’ in science fiction to allow for the possibility of space travel has been around for a long time. The Grand Master, Isaac Asimov, did rather a lot of planet-hopping. Have a look at his ‘Foundation’ series. Many of the more modern writers like Mc Devitt and Moon have FTL travel but show it as still a very time-consuming business with journeys taking weeks or months. Star Trek used warp drive, which was just a made-up thing, and also matter transfer (as does Linnea Sinclair) and others have portals for almost instant travel. Jack Mc Devitt in his book ‘A Talent for War’ postulated a quantum drive, where a ship moves from one place to another instantaneously. Worm holes would also allow for an instantaneous transfer.

But now, there are murmurings that warp drive might be an actually thing. And advances are being made in matter transfer, and although quantum tech is still in its infancy, the potential is there.

In my space opera novels I refer to my version of hyperspace as ‘shift space’. I’ve done that deliberately because in my universe the ships use the geometry of extra dimensions to get around. Ships ‘shift’ to another dimension for the duration of a journey.

It’s pretty much accepted that our 3D notion of the universe is just a perception, that there are many other dimensions we are not equipped to see. Such an understanding certainly helps to explain the apparent complexities of quantum physics and the anomalous behaviour of sub-atomic particles. Way back in the 1980’s Carl Sagan in his wonderful TV series ‘Cosmos’ showed us a tesseract, a four-dimensional object portrayed as best we could in a 3D world. To understand what you’re looking at, think about a standard, 2D drawing of a cube. According to mathematics, there are many, many more than four dimensions out there, not to mention parallel universes.

The biggest limitation imposed upon us in reaching a real understanding of things like this is that we are constrained by our own world view and our ability to perceive. As far back as 1884 E.A. Abbott in his book ‘Flatland’ described the problems of seeing three dimensions in a 2D world. We are faced with the same thing, on a 3D scale, if we attempt to visualise four, five or six dimensions. Or many, many more.

However, I can give you some sort of idea of where I’m coming from. Take a piece of A4 paper. Let’s label two diagonally opposite corners as A and B. Starting from B, we can reach A by going straight up one side then along the top to A. Hang on, you say, wouldn’t you just go across the diagonal, thereby reducing the distance and time taken? Sure you would. Now curl the paper over into a cylinder. All you have to do to get from B to A is move along a straight line. The length of the line will depend on how you make the roll (short edges together or long edges together).

Now take point A in one hand and point B in the other and bring them together so they meet. Getting from B to A in this instance is like walking from one room into another.

That’s my notion of ‘shift drive’. I have included some duration in the journey in the book because I found it useful. Don’t ask me how the shift drive (the engine that makes it possible to take advantage of the geometry) works. I’m speculating a fusion drive to do something or other. When I work it out, I’ll let you know.

* This article is based on one I posted on my own blog several years ago. I've updated it a little to take account of new advances in technology. I reckon it will be out of date again very shortly.