So You Want To/Write a Hard Science Fiction Story With Space Travel: Difference between revisions

The other main problem with FTL travel is what it can do to life in your universe even ''without'' time travel. If your space pirates can just jump into hyperspace at the first sign of trouble, you'll never have any exciting [[Space Battle|space battles]]. If you can ram a planet or another spacecraft while travelling at FTL speeds, you risk turning even the tiniest FTL shuttlecraftshuttle-craft into a planet-killer that will put even the largest, fastest slower-than-light kamikaze to shame.

The third problem with FTL travel is more practical: ''we don't know how to do it in [[Real Life]]''. Every attempt to come up with a way to do so has run into intractable problems. Quantum entanglement can occur instantaneously across vast distances, but it can't convey any actual information faster than ''c''. The Alcubierre space warp requires the energy output of an entire sun just to create, and there's no guarantee that you could actually make the space warp ''move'' -- and even if you could, there's even ''less'' of a chance that it could move faster than ''c''. WormholesWhat wormholes are depends on which type of wormholes they are. The wormholes that general relativity posits in uncharged, ifnon-rotating eternal black holes are Schwarzschild wormholes. If they even exist, they will spontaneously collapse faster than it's possible to traverse them. One candidate is Ellis wormholes. You, as the writer, will have to ''invent'' a way to travel faster than light, and then cover all the repercussions of the method you come up with. But first, you might want to earn a university-level physics degree before even coming up with the pitch for the story.