Gameology – Faster Than Light Travel

“The ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs”

It’s a famous phrase and a famous goof (outside of the EU explanation involving the black holes, but I digress). Parsecs are, after all, a unit of distance, not speed. Thing is, it may have been perfectly accurate after all.

Faster than light travel is basically a given in a science fiction universe. Most of the time it is literally described as ‘lightspeed’ or ‘faster than light travel’. Whether it’s Mass effect relays, warp drives, or FTL jumping the existence of such technology is always for the same reason. To get from A to B in a time frame that doesn’t slow the story down. After all, who would want to play Mass Effect if every time you switched galactic sectors years had passed in game; the Reapers would have decimated the universe just in a shopping trip to the Citadel. Now I’m not here to say that faster than light travel, that is actual FTL wherein the speed of a vessel passes the speed of light (this definition will be important later), is impossible – instead I’m here to say that with the current model of physics is currently not possible. Things change, just Google ‘paradigm shift’ and wade through the Final Fantasy XIII posts and you’re chance to find lists of all the times regularly accepted science has changed. But I digress. Let us talk about faster than light travel.

Faster than light travel is ruled over mainly by the special theory of relativity. I’m not going to go into this as that’s a lot of words and numbers, but feel free to do some research as the relativitys are fascinating (bonus points for looking up the twin paradox). Instead Ill condense what we need to know in a simple sentence – to achieve acceleration to FTL speeds an object would require an infinite amount of energy. That is what the equations all come out as at the minute. No currently quantifiable amount of energy would be enough to push something fast enough to break that barrier, and that required energy increases with the mass of an object, and let us just say that spaceships are heavy beasts.

Are all these games wrong in having such science then? No, actually. Shocker, I know. I’m going to be nice here and just say that their technology is sound, but their definition is off. Now I want you to do something. Get a piece of paper and a pen. This piece of paper represent three dimensional space, our universe. Mark two points in opposite corners, point A and point B, and draw a straight line between the two of them. This line now represents the quickest and shortest route between these two points in this 3D space. To keep the numbers simple we’ll call this distance 1 light year – it would take one year at the speed of light to travel between these points. Faster than light travel, using the proper definition of the time, would mean travelling that very same line, the same distance, in less than one year. There is no way inside of three dimensional space to achieve this.

Now take the corners that the two points are marked on, and fold the paper so they touch. The line that shows the shortest distance in the three dimensional universe that is the sheet of paper hasn’t changed. It’s still one light year, and is still officially the shortest and quickest route. But from outside this universe we can see a shorter route, a fourth dimension that goes from point A, leaves the paper, and enters the paper again at point B. Congratulations, you’ve just found quantum physics.

Congratulations, you’ve just found quantum psychics

This extra-dimensional distance is obviously significantly shorter than the original 1 light year line. For the sake of this article we’ll even say that at sub-light speeds, that is to say normal speeds, this distance can be travelled in less than a year. Therefore you can get from point A to point B quicker than light can, simply by travelling a shorter distance to the same point. Yay for shortcuts.

This extra-dimensional travel has many names, and is already a method of ‘apparent’ FTL (FTL travel where the travel actually occurs at speeds slower than light, as in it just appears that something has travelled faster than light) within video games. Halo is the example here, with it’s ‘slipspace’. Everytime something goes slipspace in Halo it is, for all intents and purposes, leaving the known universe and entering an unknown set of dimensions. Better yet this is completely possible inside the current model of physics. If a way to effectively bend the universe or jump outside of the known dimensions can be devised then we would be able to travel significantly shorter distance and beat light between two points. Even better than that, with powerful enough telescopes, we would be able to watch ourselves leave, and that would be pretty amazing.