In that universe, there is an absolute now which exists throughout all of space. Most FTL concepts are conceptualized within a Newtonian understanding of the universe. FTL, no matter how you accomplish it, opens the door to time travel. And the few that are somewhat based on science, such as wormholes or Alcubierre drives, involve speculative concepts that haven’t been observed in nature.īut FTL has another issue, one that I only started appreciating a few years ago. They’re just plot gimmicks to enable the type of stories authors want to tell. Generally they’re not based on actual science. I’ve written before that there are lots of problems with all of these ideas. Often the ansible shows up in stories where actual FTL travel is impossible, but an interstellar community is enabled by the instant communications. An interesting example is the ansible, a device that allows instant communication across interstellar distances. There are a wide variety of other FTL technologies that often show up in science fiction. (I’ll be using this version in an example below.) One variant, popularized by Isaac Asimov in his Robot and Foundation series, has hyperspace as a realm where ships jump through it to instantly move light years away. Over the decades, hyperspace came in a wide variety of fashions and with a lot of different names: subspace, u-space, slipstream, etc. One of the earliest and most enduring was hyperspace, a separate realm that a spaceship could enter to either travel faster than light, or where distances were compressed. If relativity was mentioned, it was just as a superseded or wrong theory.īut by the early 1930s, authors found a way to seemingly avoid outright ignoring Einstein by simply hand waving technologies that bypassed the laws of physics. “Doc” Smith and Edmond Hamilton simply had their adventurers accelerate away at thousands of times the speed of light. Interestingly, the earliest interstellar space opera stories in the late 1920s largely ignored relativity. One of the earliest and most pervasive is FTL (faster than light) travel. Space operas, to tell adventure stories among the stars, often have to make compromises. I’ve always loved space opera, but when I was growing up, as I learned more about science, I discovered that a lot of the tropes in space opera are problematic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |