Space Travel De-mystified
Well, here we are living in a world where we can barely get human beings to the moon and with NASA constantly canceling projects like network TV drops shows, the chances of sending people to Mars get worse and worse. But science fiction writers aren’t simply going to give up writing about faster-than-light spaceships because our current society seems to be in a bit of a rut–nothing truly monumental has happened in the last twenty years, at least nothing like the first moon landing.Space travel, however, is rather complicated, depending on the sort of story you intend to write. If you write hard SF you may find yourself in a bind. Einstein–that unrelentingly intelligent bastard–basically makes faster-than-light travel impossible (theory of relativity and all). Yet there are so many different types of fictional, and real, methods of traveling in space. What methods are realistic and what methods are fantasy? Fantasy Faster-than-light Standard & Lightspeed (i.e. at the speed of light)Your typical, commonly used, rarely explained method. Basically, it literally goes faster than light by its own power and within real space–not a wormhole, hyperspace, etc.. This is the type of drive you can’t really explain because it’s so unbelievable anyway it would be a waste of your time, and the time of your readers. You’d find yourself in a conundrum if you did. Einstein made this obsolete as a realistic approach–though it sort of was fantasy to begin with–by postulating that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more fuel you need to close the gap. The problem is that you eventually hit a point where no matter how much fuel you add, the fuel’s weight counteracts the push it would provide. You’d hit a point where you couldn’t ever put enough fuel in the ship to go any faster. It was a lot more complicated than that, because it’s Einstein, but you get the idea.Generally speaking, your standard form of FTL drive has a fuel source that is tangible and accessible and in some way or another works like rocket fuel–meaning it burns away or dissipates and doesn’t have any affect on the fabric of space. HyperdriveI’m referring to your typical instant-to-light-speed drives. Strangely, these are also drives that are never really explained, mostly because you don’t have to. Your audience simply has to assume that you can go from zero to light speed in less than sixty seconds and there isn’t anything out of the ordinary about that. Maybe you’d come up with a really inventive way to make this work, but most likely you’ll just resort to calling it an FTL drive or give it a fancy name and leave it at that. If the rest of your story is good it won’t really matter anyway. Jump DriveThis may have a different name. You could call it a teleport drive. The idea is that your ship simply disappears and reappears somewhere else. These are also called “discontinuous” because the traveler never traverses the actual real-space distance. You simply poof into existence somewhere else–like a genie. These could be in many different forms–jump to anywhere, jump to a ‘node’ in a specific location, jump only certain distances, jump in known space, etc. Either way, it’s all fantasy because, as far as we know, you can’t just disappear and appear somewhere else. The Middle Ground (meaning ones that are plausible, but without any real, consistent evidence to support it) Fold DriveThis is somewhat like a jump drive, as from the perspective of someone watching it would look like the ship simply disappears and reappears somewhere else. Fold drives revolve around the idea of being able to actually fold space so that two points are put side by side. Think of it this way: take a piece of paper and poke a hole on each end (longways), then fold that paper until those holes meet up and put your finger through it. That’s folding space. The concept is, well, probable, but not possible in our near future. The energy required would be considerable. However, since space is filled with events where things get screwed up from black holes and the like, it wouldn’t be all that surprising to realize that folding space isn’t all that hard…at least to the universe. “Trail” DriveThink of this as being like a railroad. A train has to have tracks to get from one point to another. The idea behind a “trail” drive, or railroad drive, is that the ship could achieve FTL in one of two ways: along a fix structure that allows the ship to do so, or along a trail of materials that the ship could use to achieve FTL.In the first case you have two problems. The first is figuring out how to use such a structure to allow a ship to break the light barrier, which, according to Einstein, is impossible. Perhaps if the structure manipulates real-space it my be possible. The second is that you would have to build this structure in the first place, which would take thousands upon thousands of years most likely. You need a lot of material and you need people to watch over the structure when it breaks.The second case is probably even more ridiculous. If you were to put a trail of matter that could be used to propel a ship to the speed of light you would have presented several problems while solving another. While you have figured out how to get a ship up to speed without the ship having to carry its fuel source with it, you also have created a big problem: you can’t do these travels all the time. You’d have to put the material there, which would take thousands of years, and you’d have to keep putting it there every time it is used. This would be a logistics nightmare. It would still be possible, but it is very unlikely that someone would waste the time to do this. Realistic Ion DriveThese are
More Reasons Why I Hate J. K. Rowling!
(This is an old post that I accidentally made a draft when I was editing it. Sorry if it shows up in your RSS feed again! The comments are amusing, though. It should also be noted that the book discussed below was eventually released as a proper publication.) You’d think it would be incredibly hard to do, but J. K. Rowling has once again pissed me off by doing something that no respectable writer would do in her position. You can find the story here. The short version is that Rowling is going to publish seven copies of a new book called The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Yes, only seven. We’ll get back to that in a minute. Six copies are going to her friends and family, and the last copy is going to be put up for auction for charity–the bid starts at $62,000. Okay, now the only good side to this is that she’s raising money for kids. Here is my problem. You are the richest damn person in England and practically the richest woman in the whole freaking world. So, instead of saying “thank you fans for making me filthy stinking rich” you’re going to take a nice dump right in the face of everyone that supported you by not making this book accessible to everyone. Gee, thanks Rowling. I appreciate it. I mean, goodness, I spend over $200 of my hard earned money buying your books, reading them, and then spending another $300 going to the movies and buying them on DVD. But, your reward to me as your fan is to slap me in the face and make what could be a very interesting reading experience impossible. Now hold on before you think I’m a horrible grumpy man ignoring that she’s donating to charity. Take this into account. What if Rowling had simply gone to her publisher, who presumably wouldn’t think twice about this, and said “I’d like to publish this book from the HP series, but I don’t want any royalties. All royalties should go to such-and-such charity”? Think about that. The publisher gets its profit and that little charity gets millions of dollars to help kids in Europe. The seventh HP book sold millions of copies. We can assume that a couple million would be sold of this other book. If 1$ from every purchase goes to unfortunate kids, that’s easily a million dollars, if not more. If she donated her advance too, which would probably be considerable anyway, just imagine? So not only is she spitting in the face of her fans, she’s also spitting in the face of all those unfortunate kids in Europe by telling them “well, I don’t care enough about you to actually do something that could bring you considerable money”. So, Rowling has spit in the face of gay people, spit in the face of fans (twice), and now spit in the face of unfortunate European children. Congrats Rowling, you earn the Worst Person of the Month Award. Keep it up and you might get Worst Person of the Year.