FTL travel in Science Fiction

[YaDinghus]

 Science fiction often relies on FTL travel and comnunications being a thing. I would like to find an FTL possibility for a game I am programming that stretches what we know about physics as little as possible. I had thought about 'Tachyons', but a friend of mine pointed out that 'Tachyons' are the sci-fi way of saying 'A Wizard did it', so whatever comes up, if it involves Tachyons, it's off the table.

Alcubierre-White warp drive, no matter how you refine it, requires too much power output even for a Kugelblitz to provide, and I think it still requires some kind of 'negative energy' to create the space dilation behind the vessel, which we don't know how to create. As mentioned before, if you want to make negative energy from Tachyons - clear.

Worm Holes are another popular method for FTL travel in Sci-Fi, as seen in the Star Gate franchise and in Farscape, for example. If anyone has an idea how you could find, create or even control a wormhole without trampling the physics flowerbed, as long as ot doesn't involve Tachyons, let me hear it!

I've always been quite a fan of Babylon 5's Hyperspace idea, though I believe it involves Tachyons somewhere. If someone has an idea how to get Tachyons out of Hyperspace, I would be most obliged. 

Last but not least, there is the concept of a slipstream drive. I haven't ever seen or heard any explanation of how this is supposed to work, just that it's really flashy in Andromeda.

Ok, there's still whatever Mass Effect is, or what happens in Battlestar Galactica. I could just do it like them and use FTL as a dramatical tool, but sice I want to involve space navigation in the gameplay, I'd better have a concept and a set of rules to go by that aren't completely arbitrary.

 

Since I'm pretty much alone on this project now, I don't have an idea if the game will ever be published. If it is, I'll post a code here for anyone willing to join in any test phase, and be credited as a scientific advisor. The game will be strictly f2p, no ingame purchases. My only selfish motivation is to have something I can present to potential employers/investors in the gaming industry, because while I'm good at my current job, I don'twant to do it forever

[Moontanman]

54 minutes ago, YaDinghus said:

 Science fiction often relies on FTL travel and comnunications being a thing. I would like to find an FTL possibility for a game I am programming that stretches what we know about physics as little as possible. I had thought about 'Tachyons', but a friend of mine pointed out that 'Tachyons' are the sci-fi way of saying 'A Wizard did it', so whatever comes up, if it involves Tachyons, it's off the table.

Alcubierre-White warp drive, no matter how you refine it, requires too much power output even for a Kugelblitz to provide, and I think it still requires some kind of 'negative energy' to create the space dilation behind the vessel, which we don't know how to create. As mentioned before, if you want to make negative energy from Tachyons - clear.

Worm Holes are another popular method for FTL travel in Sci-Fi, as seen in the Star Gate franchise and in Farscape, for example. If anyone has an idea how you could find, create or even control a wormhole without trampling the physics flowerbed, as long as ot doesn't involve Tachyons, let me hear it!

I've always been quite a fan of Babylon 5's Hyperspace idea, though I believe it involves Tachyons somewhere. If someone has an idea how to get Tachyons out of Hyperspace, I would be most obliged. 

Last but not least, there is the concept of a slipstream drive. I haven't ever seen or heard any explanation of how this is supposed to work, just that it's really flashy in Andromeda.

Ok, there's still whatever Mass Effect is, or what happens in Battlestar Galactica. I could just do it like them and use FTL as a dramatical tool, but sice I want to involve space navigation in the gameplay, I'd better have a concept and a set of rules to go by that aren't completely arbitrary.

 

Since I'm pretty much alone on this project now, I don't have an idea if the game will ever be published. If it is, I'll post a code here for anyone willing to join in any test phase, and be credited as a scientific advisor. The game will be strictly f2p, no ingame purchases. My only selfish motivation is to have something I can present to potential employers/investors in the gaming industry, because while I'm good at my current job, I don'twant to do it forever

This is interesting, probably total BS but it's interesting.

 

[beecee]

1 hour ago, YaDinghus said:

 Science fiction often relies on FTL travel and comnunications being a thing. I would like to find an FTL possibility for a game I am programming that stretches what we know about physics as little as possible.

OK, here's my speculative hypothetical.....the maximum speed  limit,"c" only applies to massive objects. Perhaps an advanced civilisation may be able to manipulate the Higgs Boson and field which is said to give  matter the property of mass,  to somehow reflect that matter as having zero mass: Just a thought.

[Janus]

56 minutes ago, beecee said:

OK, here's my speculative hypothetical.....the maximum speed  limit,"c" only applies to massive objects. Perhaps an advanced civilisation may be able to manipulate the Higgs Boson and field which is said to give  matter the property of mass,  to somehow reflect that matter as having zero mass: Just a thought.

Except zero mass, just means you are required to travel exactly at c, and wouldn't allow for FTL travel.

[swansont]

There is a part of sci-fi that doesn't try and explain the physics it breaks, or only gives it a cursory mention. 

[StringJunky]

Einstein-Rosen bridge aka wormholes for travelling and you can spin up  a yarn on FTL communications with entangled devices where it was fictitiously discovered that information can be transferred between entangled particles which work as in binary coding and the wave function can be collapsed and restored gigatimes per second.  

Edited May 29, 2018 by StringJunky

[YaDinghus]

8 hours ago, Moontanman said:

This is interesting, probably total BS but it's interesting.

 

Can't really watch videos while at work. Could you give me a compressed version?

 

7 hours ago, beecee said:

OK, here's my speculative hypothetical.....the maximum speed  limit,"c" only applies to massive objects. Perhaps an advanced civilisation may be able to manipulate the Higgs Boson and field which is said to give  matter the property of mass,  to somehow reflect that matter as having zero mass: Just a thought.

Photons have no mass, always travel at c. It would be fast as light travel, which would already be pretty cool, but a civilization that covers a decent portion of the galaxy would necessarily diverge politically

 

5 hours ago, StringJunky said:

Einstein-Rosen bridge aka wormholes for travelling and you can spin up  a yarn on FTL communications with entangled devices where it was fictitiously discovered that information can be transferred between entangled particles which work as in binary coding and the wave function can be collapsed and restored gigatimes per second.  

Intriguing. Entangled Particle communications was used in Mass Effect 2, as a method of communicating in real time with the guy who runs Cerberus. Now, I'm aware that we need to break or circumvent the known laws of physics at some point. I know there's a hypothesis that claims every particle in the Universe is entangled, but using this for FTL anything seems quite a reach because if everything is entangled, how do you know which particle to pull to affect another specific particle? Also there's the issue that you're not actually actively controlling which state the wave-function collapses into, just that you make a measurement and this immediately determines the measurement of the entangled particle. Now if you COULD restore the wave function (how?) I could go for a frequency modulation approach where the mere frequency of measurement events encodes a message. On the other hand, if all of this fails, entangled particles would have to be 'produced' somewhere and taken to galactic communication terminals, and could be a scarce trade commodity.

Concerning wormhole travel: any specifics on the possible mechanism?

 

6 hours ago, swansont said:

There is a part of sci-fi that doesn't try and explain the physics it breaks, or only gives it a cursory mention

The physics shouldn't be so much as explained to the players, but implied by the game mechanics. A smart and interested player should be able to figure out something about it, and not have to rely too much on a suspension of disbelief

[beecee]

7 hours ago, Janus said:

Except zero mass, just means you are required to travel exactly at c, and wouldn't allow for FTL travel.

Well that didn't last long!  Good point.

[StringJunky]

25 minutes ago, YaDinghus said:

Intriguing. Entangled Particle communications was used in Mass Effect 2, as a method of communicating in real time with the guy who runs Cerberus. Now, I'm aware that we need to break or circumvent the known laws of physics at some point. I know there's a hypothesis that claims every particle in the Universe is entangled, but using this for FTL anything seems quite a reach because if everything is entangled, how do you know which particle to pull to affect another specific particle? Also there's the issue that you're not actually actively controlling which state the wave-function collapses into, just that you make a measurement and this immediately determines the measurement of the entangled particle. Now if you COULD restore the wave function (how?) I could go for a frequency modulation approach where the mere frequency of measurement events encodes a message. On the other hand, if all of this fails, entangled particles would have to be 'produced' somewhere and taken to galactic communication terminals, and could be a scarce trade commodity.

Concerning wormhole travel: any specifics on the possible mechanism?

 

You entangle two known particles and embed one in each device. You then manipulate the photon or other particle to one of two known values and restore the wave function. This changes the state of the particle at the other end which is then read. if necessary use two groups of two to handle incoming and outgoing transmissions; two in each device. The mechanism of how this is done is down to you. There has to come a point where the reader has to suspend the real science in SF. There is no such thing as accurate scifi. You can use this for real-time video and remote control across light-years.   If the Star Trek writers can do it you can... look how many of us were prepared to suspend our belief watching that. Don't get hung up on accuracy but focus on the story line, which ultimately is what matters. Watch a few scifi films or read SF books critically and see where they fudge the science yet it still looks/reads  ok.

Edited May 30, 2018 by StringJunky

[YaDinghus]

11 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

You entangle two known particles and embed one in each device. You then manipulate the photon or other particle to one of two known values and restore the wave function. This changes the state of the particle at the other end. The mechanism of how this is done is down to you. There has to come a point where the reader has to suspend the real science in SF. There is no such thing as accurate scifi.

Just found something on entangled atoms in BEC's that return to their equilibrium state after being exposed to sharp magnetic field variations from the University of Georgia that seems promising for the FTL communication method you propose. 

[Sensei]

In hypothetical cyclic and perfectly deterministic Universe you could simply always travel to the future Universe, but with slightly offset from current date.

e.g. hypothetical deterministic Universe time of life is t_u, current time is t_now

so you travel just in time to t=t_now+t_u-100y

in e.g. 100y introduced offset, your spaceship will be able to travel up to e.g. 99.999 ly distance, with v = ~c. (While crew sleeping etc. without breaking speed of light limit)

But entire Universe will die, new one will born (looking the same, because it's perfectly deterministic) and will be there waiting for your arrival, once again.. Your spaceship disappeared from now, and appeared 100 ly far away just-in-time.

In non-deterministic Universe (parallel Universes, multiverse, probabilistic Universe ), such journey could end up in Universe in which nothing you recognize, and everything is strange to you, you have to relearn everything from scratch. It could be quite amusing in the game "oups! We ended up in completely different parallel Universe, with completely different physics!" (that reminds me old '80 years game in which when you wanted to move left, you had to press right, when you wanted to move up, you had to press down button etc.). You could add to this counter counting down, when such unstable Universe will collapse and player has to travel once again from this "hell".. Wrong Universe.. Sorry..   It could be quite amusing addition..

ps. Chess analogy: players often play old chessmasters games, that were recorded, remembered in books, but move couple figures back to their original positions on timeline, and try to figure out way to save them from failure. To train their brain.

ps2. Whatever you will tell in game story, players won't bother much, I am afraid.. They're used to FTL travels, from movies and other games. You need to be innovative to catch their attention.

 

14 hours ago, YaDinghus said:

Since I'm pretty much alone on this project now, I don't have an idea if the game will ever be published.

You need to have good 3D gfx artist, and even better sfx/musician. After making trial/demo version, release it and upload to e.g. Kickstarter and ask people to donate development of project, if they think it's worth it. That depends on quality that you will show to people.

You can get gfx artist on the street, there are people drawing caricatures of people for cash, and students in artistic universities.

Edited May 30, 2018 by Sensei

[YaDinghus]

17 minutes ago, Sensei said:

In hypothetical cyclic and perfectly deterministic Universe you could simply always travel to the future Universe, but with slightly offset from current date.

e.g. hypothetical deterministic Universe has time of life is t_u, current time is t_now

so you travel just in time to t=t_now+t_u-100y

in e.g. 100y introduced offset, your spaceship will be able to travel up to e.g. 99.999 ly distance, with v = ~c. (While crew sleeping etc. without breaking speed of light limit)

But entire Universe will die, new one will born (looking the same, because it's perfectly deterministic) and will be there waiting for your arrival, once again.. Your spaceship disappeared from now, and appeared 100 ly far away just-in-time.

In non-deterministic Universe (parallel Universes, multiverse, probabilistic Universe ), such journey could end up in Universe in which nothing you recognize, and everything is strange to you, you have to relearn everything from scratch. It could be quite amusing in the game "oups! We ended up in completely different parallel Universe, with completely different physics!" (that reminds me old '80 years game in which when you wanted to move left, you had to press right, when you wanted to move up, you had to press down button etc.). You could add to this counter counting down, when such unstable Universe will collapse and player has to travel once again from this "hell".. Wrong Universe.. Sorry..   It could be quite amusing addition..

ps. Chess analogy: players often play old chessmasters games, that were recorded, remembered in books, but move couple figures back to their original positions on timeline, and try to figure out way to save them from failure. To train their brain.

ps2. Whatever you will tell in game story, players won't bother much, I am afraid.. They're used to FTL travels, from movies and other games. You need to be innovative to catch their attention.

 

You need to have good 3D gfx artist, and even better sfx/musician. After making trial/demo version, release it and upload to e.g. Kickstarter and ask people to donate development of project, if they think it's worth it. That depends on quality that you will show to people.

You can get gfx artist on the street, there are people drawing caricatures of people for cash, and students in artistic universities.

That's actually pretty awesome. After all, if it's absolutely deterministic, your previous self would have started your journey in a previous cycle of the Universe and take your place in the current cycle. An issue is: where do you hide out to prevent your own destruction? Probably there would be some kind of alert system that wakes you in case of danger. In which case you need some kind of sensor system that is constantly running. Even at miniscule power, this will drain your energy source by the time you wait out the end of your cycle, cause we're talking potentially 10^40+ years. Also, you need to suspend your animation for this time, and 'pumping' entropy out of your system takes energy. I guess since the physics themselves are possible, these are mere details compared to creating unlimited amounts of energy for a warp drive or trying to stabilize a wormhole.

If the Universe isn't deterministic, I guess you could get the kind of dimensionhopping that is seen on Rick&Morty.

Thanks for the tip about looking for street and college artists. I have tried working with other people on this, frjebds and family, but they're not really motivated enough to really do anything that doesn't have a paycheck in the foreseeable future

[Sensei]

Just a thought. There could be item which player can get (e.g. buy as addition to the app in Google Play Store? ) to skip the all parallel Universes with the wrong physics (in non-deterministic parallel Universes). Pretty precious item..

 

[YaDinghus]

14 minutes ago, Sensei said:

Just a thought. There could be item which player can get (e.g. buy as addition to the app in Google Play Store? ) to skip the all parallel Universes with the wrong physics (in non-deterministic parallel Universes). Pretty precious item..

 

No. 100% f2p. 

[swansont]

7 hours ago, YaDinghus said:

 The physics shouldn't be so much as explained to the players, but implied by the game mechanics. A smart and interested player should be able to figure out something about it, and not have to rely too much on a suspension of disbelief

Then you are creating a new set of rules. The primary issue is that they be self-consistent

[YaDinghus]

21 minutes ago, swansont said:

Then you are creating a new set of rules. The primary issue is that they be self-consistent

That's always the primary issue, unless you are making a deadpool game. But I'm focusing on the issue that the rules not just override but fit into reality as we know it. Some kind of disjunction will have to occur for it to 'work', but I want this to be as small as possible

[dimreepr]

50 minutes ago, YaDinghus said:

That's always the primary issue, unless you are making a deadpool game. But I'm focusing on the issue that the rules not just override but fit into reality as we know it. Some kind of disjunction will have to occur for it to 'work', but I want this to be as small as possible

You can't write a ghost story without ghosts...

[YaDinghus]

19 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

You can't write a ghost story without ghosts...

Sure you can. You can write a 'ghost story' that scares the shit out of people where in the end it turns out they've been gaslighted the entire time

[dimreepr]

1 minute ago, YaDinghus said:

Sure you can. You can write a 'ghost story' that scares the shit out of people where in the end it turns out they've been gaslighted the entire time

If you insist, OK let me rephrase, you can't go faster than light; so whatever method you chose, is a ghost.

[swansont]

1 hour ago, YaDinghus said:

That's always the primary issue, unless you are making a deadpool game. But I'm focusing on the issue that the rules not just override but fit into reality as we know it. Some kind of disjunction will have to occur for it to 'work', but I want this to be as small as possible

Physics is interdependent. Once you break it, you end up breaking most of it. 

So, as I had implied before, one strategy is to not investigate or explain how you break it, or the implications of it, to the extent possible. Because if you try, it will be impossible, since nature doesn't work that way.

[dimreepr]

9 minutes ago, swansont said:

Because if you try, it will be impossible

Surely you mean improbable.

[YaDinghus]

28 minutes ago, swansont said:

Physics is interdependent. Once you break it, you end up breaking most of it. 

So, as I had implied before, one strategy is to not investigate or explain how you break it, or the implications of it, to the extent possible. Because if you try, it will be impossible, since nature doesn't work that way.

Ok so call it my desire to create a very good illusion of unifying sci with fi...

[dimreepr]

8 minutes ago, YaDinghus said:

Ok so call it my desire to create a very good illusion of unifying sci with fi...

Then copy 'Star Trek'.

Or Dr. Who etc... 

[swansont]

36 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Surely you mean improbable.

There's an example of ignoring physics and coming up with a self-consistent fiction.

[YaDinghus]

11 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Then copy 'Star Trek'.

Or Dr. Who etc... 

Hell no