But interestingly, faster than light travel has developed a set of wide-ranging conventions that writers repeatedly use, essentially allowing several broad categories of technology with their own capabilities and limitations. It can fall on just about any sci-fi setting - either a well thought out device that uses as much of modern science as possible, or something that Runs on Nonsensoleum but gets the characters from Point A to Point B. Writers resolve this problem by creating a system of some kind that allows for travel faster than the speed of light. There's a whole bunch of stuff about this on the analysis page, but trust us - it's not likely to happen. The problem is that as far as present-day science is concerned, going faster than - or even just as fast as - the speed of light is, for all human intents and purposes, impossible. Thus, in order for the protagonists to be able to plausibly visit a new Planet of Hats every week, they need to travel through space at speeds faster than that of light itself. Other planetary systems are so far away from us that it takes even the fastest thing in the universe - light itself - years, decades, or millenia to reach them. Nowadays, we know that the rest of our solar system is almost certainly devoid of other life forms - so we've got to go outside the system.Īnd that's where the "space is honking big" part comes in. This has been an issue for writers since The '50s or so before then you could get away with having your aliens come from Neptune without totally losing the audience. Faster-Than-Light Travel is a staple of Space Opera that allows an "out" to the unfortunate fact that space is honking big, making it impossible (within physics as we understand it now) to get anywhere remotely interesting within the average lifetime of a civilization.
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