Breaking the Limits of How Fast We Can Go
Since the beginning of human evolution we have had an obsession with speed. We grew legs to walk, grew muscles to run, and when that wasn’t enough invented ways of going faster than biology would allow us. Bicycles, automobiles, roller blades, aeroplanes, even heelys all exist because of our need for speed. The fastest a human has ever gone was during the Apollo 10 mission where the trio of astronauts traveled mach 32.3, or over 32 times the speed of sound. What are we running from? Or are we running to something? That is the million dollar question, are we going to other planets to get away from our own, or because of curiosity and the prospect of new places? Humanity is driven by curiosity and a habitual need for adventure, this could be what we are running to, new, virgin lands unexplored, needing a flag planted in the dirt. But are we really running to something? Maybe humanities hunger for adventure has been sated by the centuries of exploration and innovation, maybe it’s that same exploration and innovation that has created conditions that we now wish to run from? Global warming, political divisions, pollution, discrimination, all these things are reasons to leave and not come back, to start humanity fresh, without the centuries of problems and mistakes, to forge a new future, seperate from the past. With the sound barrier shattered like a champagne glass in an opera house, the next milestone that Humankind is working toward is interstellar travel, which requires speeds that make the speed of sound look like a sloth that other sloths say is slow. Near to beyond lightspeed is what’s required but the method is the question. Humanity has been running from and to things for hundreds of thousands of years and we will continue to do so whether it is just for curiosity’s sake, or to escape the harshness of the future. There are many ways that humanity could continue to stretch the term “fast” to its limit, from simply building more powerful engines, to concepts that seem more at home in an episode of Star Trek. Real life science doesn’t discriminate the far-fetched from the simple however, and to this day scientists are studying warp drives, wormholes, and faster than light speed travel in the hopes that one day we may get to where Gene Roddenberry would call “The Final Frontier”. The reality of travel today may seem far off from the warp speeds of Star Trek or the wormhole jumping of Interstellar, but modern day science has crept up on sci-fi and taken some of the technology and ideas for itself and sometimes the reality of interstellar travel can seem more fake then the fiction that did it first.
Eight minutes and twenty seconds, thats how long it takes for light from the sun, a massive celestial body sitting at the center of our solar system which is almost ninety three million miles away, to reach earth. That means light, unobstructed, travels at six hundred seventy million, six hundred sixteen thousand, six hundred and twenty nine miles per hour. Light has, for the longest time, been the fastest thing people can imagine, over six hundred million miles per hour is an absurdly large number afterall. At speeds that many people consider maximum, it can be hard to even think about traveling at speeds faster than that, but I. A. Crawford, a physicist working at University College London, in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, says that “there are reasons to believe that traveling faster than the speed of light (FTL) interstellar space travel may be consistent with the laws of physics”(3) , meaning that it is possible. The main problem with faster than lightspeed travel is that because of the principle of causality time dilation, anything travelling faster than light, theoretically would travel back in time. Tachyons are hypothetical particles that are hypothesised to travel faster than light, meaning that, in our current understanding of physics and relativity, it may be possible to travel faster than light. Physicist Charles Bennett of John Hopkins University has a couple thought about this however, he says that Einstein’s theory of relativity, so far has held out, and he also mentions that faster than lightspeed travel may not even be useful in the long term. There is no maximum velocity that the Universe can expand out, it is infinite and everything is moving away from each other just as fast as the universe stretches. If the universe is expanding at a speed faster than the speed of light, which it almost certainly is, being able to travel even just at the speed that the expanse is happening would only mean staying still, not moving toward anything while eternity leaves us in its dust.
Lightspeed isn’t the only way that humanity can run toward the cosmos, and it isn’t even the only way of traveling faster than light. The Alcubierre Drive was speculated based on Einstein’s field equations in general relativity(8). The Alcubierre Drive or Alcubierre warp drive was thought up by Miguel Alcubierre, the namesake of his creation, in 1994. The Drive works not by travelling faster than light in normal space-time like we do with any other method of transportation, but by using a negative energy density to shift space time, condensing the space in front of it and expanding the space behind it, resulting in travel that is effectively faster than lightspeed(McMonigal, Lewis, O’Byrine). This is just theoretical however, since a negative energy density would require exotic matter with the correct properties, and without it, it would be impossible, but Alcubierre argues that a Casimir vacuum between parallel plates could provide the negative energy density. Physicists have argued that since Einstein’s equations don’t take quantum mechanics into account, the Alcubierre drive could be pointless, as the quantum gravity theory would eliminate the problems with relativity and allow for traveling back in time. Warp drives may seem like simply popular culture but are being worked on to this day. Using Alcubierre’s design as a basis. Physicist Harold White, who works at NASA, in 2012 made improvements to the design that had previously been the standard, a football shaped ship attached to a flat ring encircling the ship, the ring would bend the space to allow for travel, while this ship sits in a little bubble of un-warped space. The energy required for this design was astronomical and was compared to the total mass-energy of Jupiter, but White’s new design, which involves rounding out the ring to more of a donut shape and oscillating the intensity of the space-warps bring down the required energy quite a bit, and in his words, “The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation,” So the prospect of warping to another galaxy like Picard or Kirk may not be too far off.
Kirk and Picard may be more of an apt reference than previously thought, as another way to traverse the great expanse of space is quite a bit more sci-fi than the other possibilities. Wormholes, stargates, black holes. All examples of what many sci-fi shows, books, etc. use to quickly explain away traveling vast stretches of space almost instantly, a plot device, and many take it as just that, nothing more, nothing less. The Doctor has to save the trapped group of humans, Bill and Ted have to write their book report. Thor has to get back and save Asgard, all situations that, in their respective media, are solved with wormholes, The Doctor puts the group in a bus and drives through the dangerous wormhole to the safety of the London street, Bill and Ted ride the temporal wormhole through time collecting historical figures to get a A on their report, Thor flies through a wormhole to save his home but destroys it instead. The sci-fi bleeds into the real world however, wormholes are being considered a possibility by real scientists for large scale interstellar travel, with popular culture getting some things right about it. Interstellar is a film by Christopher Nolan about a group of astronauts that are searching for a new place to bring humanity after threats to the survival of humanity become too big to ignore(7). The astronauts use a wormhole near Saturn to travel to a distant planetary system and evaluate the habitability of some of the planets (Nolan). One of the films strongest suits, in my opinion, is the prominent feature of the dangers of wormhole travel, one being the time dilation associated with the changes in gravity and speed, which could make any attempt to return futile, as it’s possible, if we use a wormhole, that by the time that the mission would return, Earth would have simply ended. The film also dives into more out there subjects as well, like the existence of fourth dimensional objects like the Tesseract seen in the film. A Tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square, with each you simple add a dimension, causing the Tesseract to, instead of six faces, to have eight cubical cells on its “Hypersurface”. This helps to illustrate the dangers of wormholes and black holes as well, they are unexplored and unpredictable, maybe traveling into one spits you out somewhere else in the cold, dark, infinite expanse of space, maybe it rips you into individual quarks and spews you back out, and maybe it shows you a higher dimension, so far higher than the 3rd dimension that we live in that the impossible is now possible. That’s the inherent danger with wormholes, the unpredictability is only countered so much by the math and science that we can put into it, and without trying to throw something in, we may never know if we can even travel with wormholes. The difficulty and danger inherent with wormholes is an excellent example of the problems with any “solution” to the problem of traveling faster than the speed of light.
Popular culture is the backbone to society, and science fiction has rose through the ranks and, in recent times, become one of the most influential parts of pop-culture. The power that pop-culture and by proxy science fiction can’t be questioned. Everyone from the youngest to the oldest know of Ironman, Jean-luc Picard, or The Doctor and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t know know a sci-fi medium well enough to recite quotes. James Kakalios in the Preface to The “Physics of Superheroes”(9) wrote “I hope you will be so busy enjoying this superhero ice cream sundae that you won’t realize that I am sneakily getting you to eat your spinach at the same time.” You can enjoy the tasty ice cream of superheroes and science fiction, while the spinich of real life science and curiosity are snuck in. This influence doesn’t just teach basic science to the masses, and actually has a larger, more important job that can’t be forgotten, it implants an interest in the sciences into young, impressionable minds, so that a child you loves Ironman may grow up to be the engineer that builds the first functional warp drive, and a fan of James T. Kirk may grow up to be the astronaut that leads them first mission through that wormhole . This influence and the fact that so much of science fiction directly relates to the reality that it was created in, forms a bond that allows general interest to become a profession.
Science has done wonders throughout time. We’ve gone to the moon, vaccinated against diseases, harnessed power from the sun, and discovered electricity. Many Scientists would love to add interstellar travel to that list soon, but how? Interstellar travel is one of the most prominent questions to modern science with many teams and individuals like I.A Crawford, Charles Bennett and Harold White, working on the answer. Solving interstellar travel would seem a stubborn inquiry and no matter how many solutions were thought up, from the Alcubierre Drive to tachyons to wormholes, seem to be a perfect answer. This sprint for the next discovery to prove or disprove a method seems to be only eclipsed by faster than light speed travel in popular culture, most specifically, science fiction. Whether you are a fan Christopher Nolan or Gene Roddenberry, both, or neither, you can’t deny the wonder of the worlds they have created because the people in charge of studying our own world can’t deny it either. New and theoretical science each day marches closer and closer to sci-fi and is closing the gap between reality and fiction. Sci-fi technology and subjects like warp drives and wormholes may seem far off, and the “Final Frontier” may seem even further, but the hard work of scientists like Miguel Alcubierre with his Alcubierre Warp Drive and Harold White’s new design may just get us to something similar to Star Trek before we know it, as it may just be moving faster than light.
Works Cited
Everett, Allen, and Thomas Roman. “Time travel and warp drives.” (2012).
2. Barceló, Carlos, Stefano Finazzi, and Stefano Liberati. “On the impossibility of superluminal travel: the warp drive lesson.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1001.4960 (2010).
3. Crawford, I. A. “Some thoughts on the implications of faster-than-light interstellar space travel.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 36 (1995): 205.
4. Morris, Michael S., and Kip S. Thorne. “Wormholes in spacetime and their use for interstellar travel: A tool for teaching general relativity.” American Journal of Physics 56.5 (1988): 395-412.
5. Kubrick, Stanley, and Arthur C. Clarke. 2001: A Space Odyssey. United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corp, 1968.
6. Mallove, Eugene F., and Gregory L. Matloff. The Starflight Handbook: A Pioneer’s Guide to Interstellar Travel. 1989.
7. Nolan, Christopher, Jonathan Nolan, Emma Thomas, Lynda R. Obst, Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine, John Lithgow, Wes Bentley, Casey Affleck, Hans Zimmer, Lee Smith, Hoyte . Hoytema, and Nathan Crowley. Interstellar. , 2015.
8. McMonigal, Brendan, Geraint F. Lewis, and Philip O’Byrne. “Alcubierre warp drive: On the matter of matter.” Physical Review D 85.6 (2012): 064024.9. Kakalios, T., and R. Muller. “Books-The Physics of Superheroes.” Physics Today 59.4 (2006): 67.
