Faster than light travel in science fiction

Hi guys - in this video I take a look at faster than light travel concepts in sci-fi, and how they (plausibly) get around this theoretical impossibility.

#sciencefiction #booktubeSFF #scifi
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MY STUFF
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MY SCI-FI NOVELS

DELPHINE DESCENDS
After her family is killed and her homeworld occupied, young Kathreen Martin is sent to the distant world of Furoris for re-education. She will live the rest of her life as a serf – to be bought and sold as a commodity of the Imperial Network.

When her only chance of escape is ruined, a chance mistaken identity offers her a new life as the orphaned daughter of a First-Citizen Senator and heiress to a vast fortune.

She vows to claw her way into power to sit among the worlds’ elite. Then, with her own hands, she will reap bloody vengeance on them all.

But to beat them, she must play their game. And she must play it better than them all.

BLACK MILK
Prometheus has the chance to bring his wife back from the dead, but doing so will mean the destruction of Earth.

Spanning time, planets and dimensions, Black Milk draws to a climactic point in a post-apocalyptic future, where humanity, stranded with no planet to call home, fights to survive against a post-human digital entity that pursues them through the depths of space.

Five lives separated by aeons are inextricably linked by Prometheus’s actions:

Ystil.3 is an AI unit sent back in time from the distant future to investigate Prometheus’s discovery...

The mysterious Lydia has devoted her life to finding a planet that the last remaining humans can call home…

Tom Jones (he’s a HUGE fan!) is an AI trapped inside a digital subspace, lost and desperate to find his way back to his beloved in real-time…
Dr Norma Stanwyck is a neuroscientist from 24th Century Earth whose personal choices ripple throughout time...

Prometheus must learn the necessity of death or the entire universe will be swallowed by his grief.
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GOODREADS
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[javanpoly]

I applaud your exposition about the nature of faster than light travel! For human expansion and exploration of the cosmos, a method of travel that can cross distances in the blink of an eye will be necessary. The seemingly insurmountable wall that is light has to be only a minor speed bump in technical terms. I have no idea what methods will be available in the future, but I often think about the Renaissance Philosophers never in their wildest dreams could have imagined the internet, and the New Horizons spacecraft. As Mister Spock said, " There are always possibilities"🖖

[adrianburchell]

The most disturbing FTL drive i read is the Transition Drive in Evan Currie's Odyssey One series, where they uses tachyons for instantaneous travel, whilst other alien humans and other aliens use the Alcubierre Drive. The Transitition drive hurls the ships forward using tachyons, but not all at once, from an observer's point of view, the ship starts to disintegrate from the front to the rear, whilst on board, you see the what's in front of you dissolve and then shoots away from you.
However, thats not the worse of it, once you arrive at the other end, you are literally feeling sick, with many crew vomiting afterwards.
Have a pleasant trip!

[battle]

My all time favorite FTL mode of transportation in sci fi has got to be the warp in the warhammer 40k universe. The implications of having to use a twisted, nightmare dimension, that exists juxtaposed to our own dimension, to travel the stars always fascinated me.

[kirtmanwaring]

Fantastic work and I love the channel. I do have to say the scope of a story’s world and even the amount of world building with factions and such feels actually much larger to me without FTL space travel when it's done right. I think of A Deepness in the Sky and the first part of the Expanse.

[wesparker]

The speed of light is 300, 000, 000 m/s, not 300, 000 m/s. It's not just a "theoretical" limit, c is a settled upper speed limit.

[williamcoley]

Hi all and Daryl ; I liked this discussion enough to make a video recording of it . If I remember correctly, Peter Hamilton uses antimatter drives to achieve some pretty handy velocitys.

[PeBoVision]

It has always amazed me how Kubric translated Clarke's final chapters into a visual kaleidoscope that represented how I imaged travelling faster than light would "look" to a human mind.

And all without CGI.

We may have lost the 'starship gravewards' of the text, but we gained a brilliant visualization of what one would likely experience.

53 years later and it remains an oft-referenced masterpiece of sci-fi visualization.

[flowaroundtherock]

This is honestly some of the best content on YouTube :)

I am reading the Hyperion series at the moment. I'm currently 2/3 of the way through Endymion and I love it.

I haven't read Revelation Space but I have read House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. I believe in that universe there is no faster than light travel but speeds up to 0.999 of light are possible. The scope of the ideas in that book are massive. I look forward to re-reading it at some point.

[KevTheImpaler]

I actually thought Ursula Le Guin handled the issue pretty well in the Left Hand of Darkness. The envoy had to travel to the planet in a spaceship limited to light-speed, and suffered the consequences in that his friends and family aged and died while he was travelling. However he had a communication device that was not limited to light speed because it relied on some gravity or quantum gravity effect. I thought that was pretty good for 1967. I heard in a YouTube vid that the universe has expanded faster than light-speed, because the universe is 14 billion years old, but 80 billion light years across. I have also read that if you have a pair of related subatomic particles, if you observe one particle so that it collapses into a known state, so does the other subatomic particle at instantly the same time, although it may be many thousands or millions of miles away by then.

[david]

Just finished Tau Zero per your suggestion in another video. Brilliant novel and concept. A truly different sci-fi story

[marcogomez]

Though not from a book, but a video game, the idea of FTL travel on Mass Effect may be interesting to you.

In that fantasy work, there is a matter interaction called Mass Effect, in which the mass property of a finite portion of matter can change (increase, or decrease). The ships have motor in which I assume the mass of special minerals is manipulated to generate the necessary energy to bend space around its shell. That sounds like an alternative to get the massive energetic requirements instead of the more complex explanation of connecting to a distant pass to get the energy from the big bang

[frankwalder]

I considered a 400-ton spacecraft (about the size of the ISS). By the time the spacecraft had reached it had a mass or about 10, 000, 000-tons, but the thousand light-year journey only seemed to take six weeks for the crew. To them it seemed they returned after a voyage of three months, which is no-where near a record for time spent by humans in space. The problem is that 2, 000 years have gone by on Earth, which means everyone and everything is different. I concluded that a person can travel as if they were moving at a gazillion times the speed of light, but they can never return to where they came from because it will have changed to much in the interim.

One of my "happy places" is on the second planet of Lalande 21185, a fictional world developed in Universe Sandbox2. It is approximately 49-trillion miles away, not that far by stellar measure. It still takes most of a century to complete a round trip with fusion powered ion drives. Even my WiFi connection requires 16-years and eight months for a response to any emails I send, not very timely. We need to do better!

[ross.metcalf]

I love sci-fi discussions, I wish there were more on youtube.

[KeyserTheRedBeard]

exceptional video Book Odyssey. I smashed the thumbs up on your video. Keep up the superb work.

[DavidGreen_au]

I quite liked the FTL version described in David Weber's Honorverse, there was hyperspace where ships would draw propulsion from "sails" dipped into gravity waves, and there were "junctions" which were instantaneous links between certain stars. Holding these "junctions" garnered considerable military and financial leverage, which is part of the core of the conflict under-pinning the series.

[tishardnatthaniel]

the revelations space universe one is pretty interesting

[christophniessl]

One quite interesting FTL method is the negation of inertia in the Lensmen universe by E.E. Smith. I am quite sure that Doc Smith didn't know anything about the Higgs field (c.f. Higgs boson) which makes mass of any particle besides the Higgs boson possible through interaction with said boson. If you could negate this higgs filed somehow, e.g. using the Bergenholm generator to generate an anti-higggs-filed, all particles inside this filed wouldn't have any mass, so accelerating beyond c isn't a problem. One must "just" make sure that by losing their inertial mass the other properties of matter aren't changed. How? use uranium instead of iron and ask a handy Arisian mentor.

[jasperdoornbos]

Hi Darrel, i just discovered your channel, love it. How do you like Jack McDevitt? Kinds regards, Jasper

[martinstent]

Did I miss it, or was there no mention of hyperspace? As used by Robert Heinlein Asimov and so on? Just add an extra dimention and you can "jump" through hyperspace to a new destination because you are actually leaving our 3 dimentional space. I looked everywhere in my office, but I just can't find the damn portal!

[locutusdborg]

You should read Macroscope by Piers Anthony. The FTL used is amazing, the book was written in the 60's and basically predicts the internet, albeit on a galactic scale.