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| James H. Schmitz |
The human imagination knows no limits. Einstein can tell us that the speed of light sets an insurmountable limit for objects with mass, but deep down we don't believe it. There has to be a way to break that limit! Otherwise, how could we reach the stars during the short span of our lives, return to Earth and tell here what we have seen?
People in our time, especially our civilization, are determined that we must get everything we want. I want to be immortal, so I must be; if I can't, at least my children or my grandchildren. (We don’t usually go beyond our grandchildren…) I want to travel to the center of the galaxy; if I can't, someone will. I want to do whatever I want with my life, so I will… no matter what!
To break the limitation imposed by the
special theory of Relativity, we try to find shortcuts similar to those I
mentioned in the first post of this series:
a) Travel across unknown dimensions of space.
Perhaps James Schmitz is the sci-fi author who has best used this method. His subspace
has many other possibilities, in addition to making possible travel at hyper-luminal
speeds for the inhabitants of the Hub, the name of the Milky Way region
colonized by Earth people. For example, a space fortress can be built in that
unknown dimension, as in the novel Legacy,
also titled A Tale of Two Clocks.
b) Travel across wormholes. I discussed this
in another post.
c) Travel through the world of tachyons. These are
hypothetical particles that would always travel at speeds greater than that of
light. They are strange particles, for if they don’t have any energy, they
would travel at infinite speed, and as they get more energy, their speed would
decrease, without ever reaching the speed of light. Furthermore, their mass
would be imaginary, in the mathematical sense of the term. On the other hand,
the world of tachyons, if it exists, would be very strange: its
four-dimensional space would consist of three-dimensional time and
one-dimensional space. If we want to get somewhere, navigating in such a world seems
a bit difficult.
d) Travel using the warp drive. They would make
use of the Alcubierre
metric, a solution to the equations of General Relativity that would allow
space to be deformed in such a way as to form a bubble that could move faster
than the speed of light. If we could get a spaceship inside that bubble, or if
the ship contains a device that would create the bubble around the ship, it would
be possible to travel with the bubble at superluminal speed. That device is
called a warp drive, in honor of
the engine that let the crew of the spaceship Enterprise travel
between the stars in the famous 1960s science fiction series, Star Trek.
The downside is that travel at superluminal speeds could lead to destructive paradoxes, in a similar way as time travel. I described one of them in detail in the post titled The v>c world in this blog. This makes us think that, as in the case of time travel, travel at superluminal speeds is probably impossible.
In fact, just as for time travel there is
a special version of the Fermi Paradox
(if time travel were possible, where are the
time travelers?), in the case of superluminal travel, the
original version of the paradox would be applicable: if travel at superluminal speeds were possible, where are
the ET intelligences that should have discovered it before us?
Despite the media, that release periodically
news
like this, announcing that travel at superluminal speeds is just around the
corner, and despite Arthur C. Clarke, who in 1960 predicted that we would reach
the stars by 2080, I think it’s more sensible to forget about interstellar superluminal
travel, not just for now, but for a long time (millennia?) or even forever.
Thematic Thread on Space Exploration: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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