![]() An apparent gift, but in fact a terrible curse. Also, to be eligible for resurrection, they had to be wearing a cruciform-a parasitic alien organism that attached itself permanently to their chests, copied their DNA, and granted them immortality by not allowing them to die. They died horribly, and upon arrival of the ship at destination and decelerating to normal speeds, they were reassembled and resurrected by a Resurrection Cache, in a long and painful process that diminished their physical and mental abilities with each time and left them deeply ‘scarred’. The humans aboard these ships, however, were destroyed by the forces acting upon them. You can create awesome story conflicts around the technology necessary to keep FTL travelers intact, or at least alive.īut the most ingenious use of the physical damage potential in FTL travel I’ve read so far, was in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos.įTL ships accelerated so fast, that light-year distances were covered almost instantaneously. These bubbles could, of course, malfunction. In Haldeman’s Forever War, they had man-sized bubble-suits filled with a special gelatinous substance that flooded all their bodily cavities (even their lungs), and that prevented them from massive compression. Welcome to hell.įTL travelers need technology to prevent them from turning into pulp the instant someone says “Engage!”. ![]() Imagine how the human body reacts to hundreds, even thousands of Gs. Ever seen a pilot’s face in G training? Yeah. Humongosaurian! The forces acting upon the tender flesh of the humans aboard such a ship are equally fantastic. The acceleration needed to propel a ship at faster-than-light speeds is enormous. So if you ignore relativity and assume time always flows the same for everyone all the time (heh), there are still plenty of dangers you can envision for FTL travelers. That’s one of the awesome things about science-fiction. Also, the technological development that takes place while they are in transit to their destinations creates big differences between their weapons and defenses, and those of the aliens they clash with.įTL travel mustn’t follow Einstein’s rule at all. The story’s main conflict is based around the fact that time dilation causes these soldiers to be completely removed from human society, suffering of enormous cultural clashes each time they have “shore leave”. The most recent book I’ve read that played on time dilation for FTL travelers was Joe Haldeman’s Forever War.Ī group of soldiers are sent out to fight a war against an alien force, flying from one stage of battle to the next, each time losing centuries in ‘normal time’. Or arrive to find their world already centuries ahead of yours. You couldn’t just visit your parents on another colony every month, or you’d see them age by decades every time. This creates awesome story potential, of course. That means that for a ship traveling at FTL speeds, a trip from A to B might take a month, but when it arrives, the time that passed on A and B can be much greater, from a couple of years to decades and even centuries, depending on the distance between them and the speed of the ship. You can imagine it this way: the tremendous speed at which the space ship moves, rips the ship and those aboard it from the normal space-time continuum and ‘envelops’ them in a temporal bubble. That means that for people on a ship traveling faster than light, time flows “slower” than for the people on a planet. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, any object flying at or above the speed of light suffers a time dilation proportional to its speed. The most common downside of FTL travel in fiction is caused by good old relativity. It has undoubtedly more advantages than disadvantages in fiction, but let’s talk about the flipside of it for a change. FTL travel has many faces, though, depending on the technology of its world (and the writer’s creativity), and with those many faces come many perils. Especially space opera, with its galaxy wide empires, space wars and alien civilizations. Faster-than-light travel makes the science-fiction world go round. ![]()
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