
Speaking of Star Trek. An article at Space.com details conditions that make possible Star Trek-like warp drive. Basically you create and manipulate a bubble of space-time that actually can “travel” faster than light (remember the line in the Star Trek movie about space moving, not the Enterprise).
“The idea is that you take a chunk of space-time and move it,” said Marc Millis, former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project.”The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it’s not moving at all. It’s the space-time that’s moving.”
Personally, for my own FTL traveling pleasure, I favor the way Rudy Rucker conceives of traversing space-time as a matter of dimension-shifting to become “bigger,” then like an inch worm, return to “normal” size at some far-off destination. Like an ant traveling from Concord to Denver (almost scale with miles as AUs).
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The hyper space travel routine in Babylon 5 was sort of neat, as was the idea of travel through connected Rings in Stargate… but those were just visual connections.
One of the idea chains that would be theoretically nice to explore is the idea that time in the function of Time-Space is related to gravitational fields no matter how weak that define our common dimension. If we could side step that such as moving outside of the gravity dimension of space-time then we could in effect pop from one point to another as there would be no time ‘used’ or passed in the process.
There is nothing that is impossible as long as imagination is a function of sentient beings.