Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Faster than light travel, when you really, positively need something before yesterday.

I know, it’s a fantasy most of us want very badly. It’s a mainstay of science fiction, and all those movies make it seem like just a minor thing. You know, the captain says “Ahead warp factor nine”, and the audience just says, “Huh, that’s pretty fast.”

Seriously, at warp factor 9 (looking at the original Star Trek series), it would only take a little more than six days to reach one of the nearest possibly habitable planets we’ve found, Kapteyn 6. This little jewel is circling a red dwarf star, is well within the habitable zone, and is what is classed as a psycroplanet. That doesn’t mean the planet is crazy, though you might be for choosing to live there, as psychroplanets have surface temperatures that range between -50C and 0C. Scientists consider this less than optimal for human existence. I do love that dry, scientific humor.

But hey, at warp factor nine, if we don’t like the neighborhood, we can just zip over to another planet. That’s what they do on television.

This is where fiction doesn’t really resemble reality, and reality starts to look a lot like fiction. Warp factor nine isn’t nine times the speed of light, it’s 729 times the speed of light. Even at that speed, crossing the entire Milky Way galaxy would take more than 5000 days.

The problem is, we’re pretty sure you can’t travel faster than the speed of light, at least not by conventional means. You see, it isn’t the ship, or the technology, that seems to be the limiting factor here, it’s the fabric of the universe itself. Light is the fastest thing we know of.

Let that sink in for a minute, because trust me, it will be important.

All the forces that hold the universe together, things like gravity and the bonding forces between atoms, all have to travel from one “bit” of the universe to another, even if the distance they are traversing is very small, like say inside an atom, the force still has to make the trip.

Under normal circumstances, we don’t even notice this, and we can’t even really measure it, because it moves bloody fast and the distances we’re talking about are relatively small. When you pass the speed of light, however, strange things are likely to happen.

Why? Because all those forces that hold stuff together in a way that is conducive to life, liberty, and the pursuit of far planets with sexy aliens, can’t get from point a to point b as fast as the object is moving forward. The unpleasant probable upshot of this is that they will not in fact be holding together those things that they are generally responsible for keeping in one piece. You know, things like atoms.

You do remember what happens when you split an atom, right?

I could be wrong, but I’m thinking colonization of another planet will require living people, not a bunch of scattered atom bits.

So, I think we’ll be signing up for the slow boat to whatever planet we do finally make it to, or we’ll be finding some new way to take the plunge. Unfortunately, that means I won’t be alive to set foot on it, and odds are that first trip will be measured in centuries, not days.

Still, we can dream.

Cheers,

Michelle