FTL, The Third Rail of Hard SF

Posted on By admin
Image: www.thebrighterside.news

FTL, The 3rd Rail of Hard SF

By Ray Tabler

Definition of terms, right up front:

FTL – Faster than light travel (or communications, for that matter).

Hard SF – Science fiction which scrupulously adheres to the laws of physics, as we currently understand them.

Third rail – The electrified rail of a set of subway or surface train tracks, which crackles with high voltage.

Colloquially, the “third rail” is applied to some part of a situation you don’t want to touch. Severe consequences ensue, if you do. This is such a useful metaphor that people have appropriated it to describe political issues as Social Security, as a program, is purported to be the “3rd rail” of American politics. The system is so popular that even hinting at cuts or reform will result in spectacular political death for the politician who brings the subject up. People have been warning that Social Security is about to go bankrupt for as long as I can remember. So, I’m not sure how much voltage remains in that 3rd rail. Still, the saying has entered the lexicon, and we use it to describe the forbidden. Touch the 3rd rail at your peril.

Faster-than-light travel is, according to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, not possible. The closer you get to the speed of light (abbreviated as “c”), in a vacuum, mind you, the greater your mass, and the greater the energy required to accelerate. The actual theory is more complicated than that. (Isn’t it always?) I don’t pretend to follow the math, so, I’ve repeated the TLDR version: “Can’t be done. Don’t even try.”

“Hard” science fiction restricts itself to what can happen, according to the “proven” laws of science. (Note the quotation marks. More on that later.) Six-armed, green men, and sassy, red-skinned princesses on Mars, and steamy, dinosaur-infested swamps on Venus technically fit into hard SF, until probes got there and found both planets to be lifeless rocks. One’s cold as hell. The other’s hot enough to melt lead. Now, both Barsoom and Amtor are firmly across the line in science fantasy.

Not that a cracking yarn can’t be told within the confines of hard SF. Poul Anderson’s Starfarers series depicts the effects on human society of slowboat generation ships between interstellar colonies. Heinlein provided his own take in Time for the Stars. And, Alastair Reynolds told an exciting tale of humans and intelligent elephants riding asteroid-based generation ships to other solar systems in Poseidon’s Children.

Even supposedly hard SF tales cheat jut a little bit. We really don’t know how to build a contained biosphere that will sustain a population in a generation ship for decades on end. Nor do we understand how to put the human body into suspended animation for such long-term trips. And, the fastest spaceship the human race has managed to build so far is the Voyager 1 probe (61,500 kilometers/hour, 38,000 miles/hour, 11 miles/second). At that rate, Voyager would take something like 70,000 years to reach the nearest star (Alpha Centauri). And it’s not even headed that way. Actually, the fastest man-made object might be a manhole cover atop a 1950s nuclear test lowered down deep borehole. The bomb packed a lot more mega-tonnage than expected, and data indicates the metal manhole cover flew off of there at ~125,000 miles/hour.

There’s a lot more market for stories that don’t waste decades traveling from one colony to another. Maybe that’s an aspect of our modern world, where people can fly to the other side of the planet in less than 24 hours (assuming no long layovers). We’re just too impatient. But there it is.

The long-term trend has been the inevitable migration of SF tropes from hard SF to science fantasy, as we learn more and more about how the universe works. Can’t zip to other stars. Mars and Venus are lifeless rocks. No flying cars. This would be discouraging…Would be, until you look closer.

Science moves on. Maybe not as fast as we’d like, maybe not in the direction we expect, but she does not stop. Modern medicine has curing cancer, and growing organs in the lab. Space travel is becoming something more people can afford (if you’ve got a spare few million laying around). And, suddenly, thinking machines are (arguably) here.

There is a slow, unnoticed bleed of science fiction into science fact. And there always has been. It’s just that we have been petulantly assuming that because technology doesn’t deliver on the schedule we desire, it’s never going to happen. That’s not the case. The future is coming, with the creeping, inevitability of a glacier.

In 1994, a Mexican physicist name Miguel Alcubierre, presented a paper at a conference which proposed a way to travel faster than light. The Alcubierre “warp drive” offers a loophole to circumvent Uncle Al Einstein’s cosmic speed limit, by creating a bubble of curved space, within which a space ship could still obey the laws of physics while traveling at c+. Maybe c++.

Okay, don’t go online looking for tickets to Apha Centauri just yet. Did you know that Pan Am Airlines once pre-sold tickets to the moon, in expectation that they would be offering that service in the future? There are some major technical challenges to building and operating an Alcubierre drive. It’d take a lot of energy. And you need something called exotic matter. But, it’s theoretically possible. Which is a lot closer to FTL than before. Maybe the warp drive isn’t in the same neighborhood as fusion power (somehow just 30 years away for the last 60 years). I’d speculate FTL might be just over the horizon. Of course, I’m an incurable optimist.

Still, the fatal flaw to hard SF is the wording “…scrupulously adheres to the laws of physics, as we currently understand them.” The thing is, we don’t really understand them. Our grasp of the way the universe works is limited, embarrassingly so. Here we sit on a tiny lump of iron and rock, spinning endlessly, trying to catch glimpses of the wider cosmos, and puzzle out what’s going on. 500 years ago, we thought we were the center of creation. 200 years ago, we thought man would never fly, outside the occasional balloon ride. 100 years ago, travel to the moon was a fantasy. Today, the smart money says FTL is impossible. Who will be the first to reach out and grab hold of that 3rd rail?

END.

Reference links:

· Third Rails

o Mass transit – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail

o Politics – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail_(politics)

· Edgar Rice Burroughs

o Barsoom – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barsoom

o Amtor – https://www.edgarriceburroughs.com/series-profiles/the-venus-series/

· Generation ships

o Starfarers – https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/445653

o Time for the Stars – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars

o Poseidon’s Children – https://www.goodreads.com/series/70560-poseidon-s-children

o Voyager – https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-fast-are-the-voyager-spacecrafts-travelling

o Super-fast manhole cover – https://www.boredpanda.com/fastest-object-launched-iron-cap-robert-brownlee/

· Recent advances

o Medical – https://listverse.com/2024/11/09/10-major-recent-advances-in-medicine/

o Commercialization of space – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_spaceflight

o AI – https://ai-thinking.ai/can-ai-think-for-itself/

· Miguel Alcubierre – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Alcubierre

· Pan Am moon tickets – https://www.neh.gov/article/long-spacex-pan-am-was-booking-flights-moon

· Alcubierre drive

o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

o https://beardedcolonel.co.uk/blog/no-joke-can-build-warp-drive/

o https://www.thebrighterside.news/space/nasa-says-that-warp-drive-is-getting-closer-to-reality/

Shameless Self-Promotion Section:

Check out my novels at Histria Books https://histriabooks.com/product-tag/ray-tabler/

And visit my website, https://raytabler.com/, for Science Fiction You Can Enjoy!

Uncategorized