When trying to think about FTL travel, there are so many things that are overlooked. What are the problems that prevent us from going the speed of light or faster than the speed of light. Its called mass, this little thing prevents us form getting there and beyond. The other problem in space is that current propellan rockets, need to carry there own mass to have something to push against so that they can move.

Now with mass come inertia, and when looking at the two and thinking of light speed. You come up with a problem, as we mentioned in the episode it looks like an Asymptote line, where the line never touches 1 or X. it goes on to infinity alwasy going on. They look like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote. Now that being said with any amount of mass you could not get your self to light speed let alone beyond light speed. In order to do so you would need to remove all mass or atleast your inertia, because that is what makes your mass become so massive you cant push yourself to that marker.

Now with removing inertia other things start to happen. If I understand what im reading, normal propellant rockets would not work because without inertia they have no mass to push against in space causing no force to be directed. So you would need some other means than standerd propellent rockets to move you to say the nearest star.

As in episode 4 we discuss the issues that happen when you take in the effects of the Higgs feild. That and the fact that the math of moving something faster than light, tends to spiral out of control, with negative mass and negative time. In doing some research into how NASA is presuing FTL travel, they are looking into a warp travel, where the ship will warp spacetime around them. http://www.nasa.gov/lb/centers/glenn/research/warp/ipspaper.html. This is an interesting read, on the things to think about when trying FTL travel. Now since Jim nor I or PHD scientest we have to look at what they are doing and the problems that they are running into. We hope to come up with a creative way to solve this problem, eventhough it technically may not work in reality, we will put rules to it and see where it takes us.

If I find any further info on this subject I will add to this.

In my last post, I laid down some info on the Human FTL travel.

Now for the aliens.

I see the aliens as having experimented with other forms of travel. I see them coming to a final result of wormhole travel, also know as folding space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole 

Basically it will be very simple for them, they can create a wormhole by focusing energy particles on a certain point of space, and this will then create a gravity point that will pull the other point of space to it. And all they have to do is traverse the tunnel to the other end that they have pulled to them.

Pro: Simple fast travel over short distance, requires very little of the engines.

Pro: Can create micro wormholes for instant communication to the other ships or places.

Con: to move large ships or fleets requires a lot of energy to create and maintain a stable wormhole while ships fly through.

Con: If wormhole destabilizes it will crush object in space-time itself.

These Posts are from the upcoming episode 3. In there we lay out more info on this, and talk about how they come up with these things. Also let us know what you think.

There are many forms of Space travel throughout books, movies and other media. A lot of them overlap, like subspace travel, usually because its an excepted form of transportation. Also like hyperspace or the more realistic approach of wormhole travel.

With the universe that we are creating, I wanted to there to be more than one type of Distance space traveling. Be it FTL or Folding Space or something else. The main ones that I will talk about are the Human form of FTL travel and the yet unnamed alien races wormhole traveling. I wanted them to have different types of travel, because they have evolved technologically separate, and the humans are a younger space farer.

First of all, the Humans FTL. (The Higgs Field) -Jim

The Higgs Boson - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson. This basically give items mass, and with mass come interactivity with other particles. The idea behind the Higgs field is two parts.

1. The field is generated, which removes all Higgs particles from an object. This means that the object no longer has mass;  it is still held together because of the strong force, and the bonds between the particles are still there. Now the thing that makes this fiction is that the Higgs boson is theoretical, so coming up with the math to remove the Higgs particles is even more theoretical. What we have come up with is that since the Higgs boson is part of the Universal string theory, we have concluded that bouncing sound waves off a certain metal and said frequency removes this. Now we have a ship that has no mass/inertia and is ready for FTL travel.   "And with great acceleration comes great responsibility...." - Ben Parker

2. The next part is basically a mini-particle collider on the ship. It collides a certain particle together, and calculates and tracks the expelled particles from the other smaller dimensions. Check out LHC from the other post or Google it. Once it finds a particle going said velocity, the ship then attaches to it, and simply goes that velocity. Remember, with no mass you don’t have inertia, and therefore you wont get squished when there is great acceleration.

Pros: Since they do not have mass, they do not have to worry about objects in their way when traveling. It is very similar to neutrino particles, they don’t interact with things they come in contact with. This means the computer has to do very little calculations for traveling any distance.

Cons: Warm-up and cool-down. It takes time for the engines to make all the needed calculations for removing all Higgs particles: this depends on the size of the ship or object it will encompass. Also, the engines have to cool down once they have dropped the field. This will prevent them from "jumping" if they get in a pinch and they will have to rely on regular engines until the Higgs field is ready again.

Cons: Communication. Since they will be traveling faster than they could communicate to each other, this will make the captains of the ships more independent, but this could also cause problems. To compensate, they rely on a pony express of relay ships to bounce signals. These are ships that have very small crews and an engine. 

Next: Alien Wormhole Travel