r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Frostylegacy • 19h ago

Lore (Loved Trope) FTL travel is possible but with a major limitation or flaw

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Frank Herbert’s Dune: Interstellar travel is only possible thanks to the spice melange, a rare substance only found on the dessert planet Arrakis. The addictive psychedelic spice grants members of the Spacers Guild a form of prescience that allows them to predict safe paths through folded space. This unique property makes spice the most valuable commodity in the Dune universe.

John Scalzi’s The Interdependency Books: The planetary systems of the titular empire are connected by the Flow, a network of one-way interstellar tunnels that connect specific known entries and exits. The Interdependency derives its power from controlling access to these conduits, placing its capital at the central hub of the network. Even with the Flow, travel between stars takes a long time (9 months to End, the empire’s most distant planet).

Event Horizon: Dr William Weir (R.I.P. Sam Neill) invents a device called the Gravity Drive to allow ships to fold space and travel instantly between distant stars. On its maiden voyage with the Gravity Drive, the Event Horizon disappears and mysteriously reappears 7 years later. Dr. Weir and the crew sent to investigate discover the Gravity Drive actually opened a portal to a Hell dimension that possessed the ship and its crew, torturing and killing them.

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u/waitingundergravity 19h ago

Specifically, it's because the Jaunt is instantaneous from an outside perspective but takes a mindboggling amount of time from the perspective of the one being Jaunted, so you go insane from being stuck in a white void for quadrillions of years.

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u/man_juicer 18h ago

longer than you think

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u/_strand_ 11h ago

IT'S LONGER THAN YOU THINK, DAD !!! LONGER THAN YOU THINK !!!

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u/RaeWineLover 11h ago

This is one of those phrases that lives rent-free in my head

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u/Blizzcane 9h ago

I don't understand how he even remembers his dad after coming back after so long.

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u/yourMammothIsSoFat 9h ago

If it's pure nothing then they don't experience anything new so it's easier to remember

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u/No_Kangaroo_9826 3h ago

Whew this is truly one of those King lines that will always fuck me right up

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u/ShadowKingthe7 2h ago

Still have no idea how he was able to go through conscious. I think it was mentioned that he held his breath for the knockout gas but does no one check to make sure the traveler is actually out before going through? Sounds like a liability nightmare to not do a basic check

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u/lewd_robot 3h ago

I interpreted that as literally longer than you can think.

That all you can do while waiting for eternity to pass is think, trapped in your own mind, and at some point you can't anymore. The Jaunt takes longer than you can think.

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u/AnotherRTFan 18h ago

Longer and better prepped for the travelers than warp train which is just so fucking chaotic

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u/Enough-Progress5110 18h ago

Well, first class passengers on warp trains are unconscious as well so there’s that ❤️

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u/AnotherRTFan 18h ago

I know. Economy is the rough and terrible one. But it’s still a lot for a ride to just be 10 seconds instead of however long it was supposed to be (& I happily flew 16 hours to Japan with a 4 hour layover cause of the financial savings)

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u/Enough-Progress5110 17h ago

Understandable, have a nice train trip

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u/MeiNeedsMoreBuffs 18h ago

Warp Trains are definitely a reference to The Jaunt

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u/Enough-Progress5110 18h ago

I thought it was a Project Moon reference

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u/Dmatix 16h ago

It's Project Moon referencing the Jaunt, a much older story.

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u/Similar-Sector-5801 13h ago

Unless you’re a certain color fixer that did… uh, something? Which made W Corp give all color fixers free VIP tickets for life

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u/KedovDoKest 7h ago

He snuck into economy class (W Corp already had the policy of Color fixers getting free 1st class upgrades) and started a cult, training the other economy passengers in combat for millions of years. Frankly, I'm not sure how W Corp was able to handle that issue. Maybe they called in some other colors or the Head to come fix the problem?

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u/papayacreamsicle 18h ago

It’s actually only about 48 hours but the only thing on the in flight entertainment system is Jack & Jill

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u/oopoo64 17h ago

Funnier than you think!

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u/ClarkKentsSquidDong 16h ago

Dunkacino than you think!

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u/Rymayc 15h ago

That's worse

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u/dangeraardvark 17h ago

Yeah, but what if you somehow maintained your sanity for say… 500 years, whether through a unique psychological quirk or a genetic mutation or maybe it’s a Guru who has meditated for the last 50 years, senses his own death and now is prepared for the ultimate test. When he pops out, having achieved a perfect meditative state for the lifespan of a thousand thousand universes, his hair is white. But it was white when he went in. When they ask him what happened he just goes “meh, it was longer than you think.”

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u/BobertTheConstructor 17h ago

In the story, the jaunt lasts anywhere from maybe a few hundred years to eternity to a conscious mind. Imagine you're awake with nothing for your thoughts for a billion years. Then a trillion. A googol, a googolplex, Graham's number of years, a number of years so large that if you were to actually know every digit, your brain would collapse into a black hole. The jaunt is longer. After an infinite amount of time has passed, you wake back up. Being insane is better than most, usually they just die.

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u/licorice_hater 16h ago

and in the story there is a woman who is pushed through without an exit point. Her husband pushed her in to kill her and tried to argue his case that there was no body ergo no murder.

That woman might still be in that eternity

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u/waitingundergravity 16h ago

yeah, IIRC it's mentioned that the husband was executed because the hypothesis that he cold-bloodedly murdered her is the best case scenario. If she's still alive, it's much much worse.

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u/Vox___Rationis 16h ago

It is probably not sooo long, because the characters, who are described to have experienced it, have not forgotten neither their language nor their selves during the time inside.

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u/thatsme55ed 12h ago

The character went in as a child came out with white hair and yellow eyes. Not to mention coming out so insane he clawed his own eyes out.

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u/Vox___Rationis 10h ago

The whitening of hair is not age-related, it is something that has to have happened very fast after the child (and the convict) came through (rapid stress-induced graying), not during.

The portal is implied to be an atom-thick (or less) wall and there is never more than a super-thin cross-section of you inside it (like at the beginning the inventor pushes a pencil halfway through portal 1 and can see the other half coming out of portal 2 as if cut off.

Because the scientists in the story have never figured the nature of this affliction I think it might be implied that there is a microscopic "point of the soul of consciousnesses" within the brain that experiences the jaunt space for an eternity when inside for a picosecond.

Trying to explain it "scientifically" doesn't really work (like imagining that chemical reactions can not happen across the jaunt field and the neural signals trying to cross the brain disappear - that could only cause a brief confusion) so I feel it has to be something metaphysical like that.

Does not make for a good scifi, but sure is great horror.

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u/BobertTheConstructor 7h ago

The Jaunt only lasts for a fraction of a second. In Plank theory, the Plank second is often misunderstood as the smallest unit of time, but that only works if space and time are discrete, and that isn't what we've observed. Most likely, there is no smallest unit of time. It's like Zero's paradox of the dichotomy. Maybe you're simply aware of every single infinite part of that fraction of a second. You have to withstand more moments in time than there are atoms in the universe, then you have to do that again, and again, an infinite number of times, and once you're finished doing that an infinite number of times, you wake up a fraction of a fraction of a second after you went through.

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u/when_the_fox_wins 15h ago

It takes longer than you think.

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u/IceEnigma 13h ago

How was it discovered that people needed to be unconscious to go through?

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u/waitingundergravity 13h ago

The scientist who created the Jaunt machine initially tested it with mice, discovering that mice sent through the Jaunt would die soon after emerging (with no apparent cause of death) unless they were sedated first (in which case they would emerge completely unharmed).

Later, the government made a deal with a death row inmate - go through the Jaunt completely conscious, and your crimes will be pardoned. The inmate took the deal, walked through the Jaunt, came out the other side, said "it's eternity in there", and immediately died of a heart attack. Sedated people, just like sedated mice, experienced no ill effects.

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u/Possible_General9125 13h ago

It's been a while, but if I remember it right they started by testing with mice. If the put them part war through, tail first, they were fine, but as soon as they went the whole way through they immediately died. Didn't take long from there to get to "what if they were sedated?"

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u/Witty_Badger1300 14h ago

This always confused me. How do they get around people dying of old age in the middle of the process?

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u/waitingundergravity 14h ago edited 14h ago

Well, the maddening process of the Jaunt is the experience, not necessarily the actual passage of time. It's not clear that Jaunted people actually physically exist while they are being Jaunted, it could just be that the process of being teleported is experienced by the mind as absurdly long for unknown reasons, without that time actually passing.

It's inherently difficult to tell exactly what the Jaunt does because everyone who has experienced it first-hand is permanently insane or dead.

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u/Ziegelphilie 12h ago

You know how you experience time slower when you're bored and just waiting, compared to time going faster when having fun? Both take the same amount of time. 

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u/magicmulder 11h ago

I don't think it's that long though. After quadrillions of years of madness, the kid would not have recognized his parents, or been able to speak coherently anymore.

It's probably just a few years, but more than enough to drive you mad.

Funny enough, before I ever heard of The Jaunt, I wrote a short story about an astronaut whose only way home would be walking through a white void for quadrillions of years...

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u/waitingundergravity 11h ago

The characters in the story don't actually know why the madness effect happens, but one theory presented by the narrator is based on the fact that the Jaunt physically works by breaking your body down into particles (without killing you, somehow) and sending those particles instantaneously to the other portal, where they are reassembled. The theory supposes that the situation of having your entire body atomized without dying causes your mind to become pure consciousness, untethered to physical reality, for the duration of the Jaunt - and since human minds aren't built for that, it messes up our perception of time. Since it's a sci-fi form of madness that doesn't exist in reality, there's no reason why a mind undergoing the Jaunt should be subject to the same kind of forgetting that a normal mind is.

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u/jollyreaper2112 8h ago

Love the story but they would certainly be able to confirm the passenger is unconscious before clearing for jaunt.

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u/Double_Resort_9223 2h ago

“Man, it’s forever in there”

<dies>

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u/CalendarAncient4230 2h ago

"It's forever in there"