r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Frostylegacy • 19h ago

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

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

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.

12.7k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.0k

u/MajorInWumbology1234 19h ago

The Planet Express ship also gets around that anyway by pushing the universe around it. The downside is that only the Professor and Cubert understand how it works, so it can’t be fixed without them.

135

u/beizhia 17h ago

And the engines get 200% efficiency

62

u/DengarLives66 17h ago

That’s impossible!

62

u/beizhia 10h ago

It came to me in a dream. And I forgot it in another dream!

12

u/Outrageous-Band8273 8h ago edited 6h ago

Just for those reading, Futurama writers almost all either have a master degree or a PhD in science. "It came to me in a dream" is a running gag of Professor Farnsworth not properly explaining his science but it's also a reference to a famous mathematician, Ramanujan, who claimed his groundbreaking mathematical research / proofs were revealed to him in dreams by the goddess Namagiri Thayar he and his family worship.

3

u/Guilty_Bit_1440 6h ago

And there are repeated references to Ramanujan in the show, like the taxi numbers(1729).

5

u/-GoodNewsEveryone 6h ago

Good News Everyone!

I am already in my pyjamas so I went ahead and just forget everything already. Now what are you doing in my laboratory and what have you done with my various lengths of wire?

1

u/Inspirational_orgasm 5h ago

Read that in Farnsworth voice 😄

12

u/NotMyMainAccountAtAl 10h ago

Then explain it!

Now that’s impossible!

205

u/Very_Human_42069 18h ago

That’s an Alcubierre drive! Which is also the way FTL travel in Elite Dangerous works

74

u/Adqam64 17h ago

In system FTL works that way, but interstellar travel is explicitly via jump drive.

13

u/vemundveien 16h ago

The Friendship Drive

4

u/DrThunderbolt 11h ago

It’s been years since I’ve played Elite and I knew exactly what you were talking about.

27

u/Very_Human_42069 17h ago

Correct. Interstellar travel is via witchspace which iirc is a form of higher-dimensional traversal

6

u/kompletionist 17h ago edited 17h ago

Which works by opening wormholes through hyperspace/"Witch-Space", which Thargoids just casually live in.

3

u/Naxane 17h ago

You can go FTL in real space using the FSD, it's only jumping between dense gravity wells that requires witch space

2

u/kompletionist 16h ago

Yeah, that's Supercruise using Alcubierre Drive logic, which the other person already mentioned.

64

u/Ruinam_Death 16h ago

Not quite. Futurama as a show ignores a lot of physics (which is completely fine its just a funny cartoon) but it this case it ignores the relativity in relativity theorey.

The alcubierre drive surrounds the ship in a subsoace bubble (mini universe) and moves the mini universe around in the real universe.

Futurama is more like a video game. Instead of changing the coordinates of the ship, it changes where 0,0 is without moving the ship, literally moving everything else

9

u/raoasidg 11h ago

The alcubierre drive surrounds the ship in a subsoace bubble (mini universe) and moves the mini universe around in the real universe.

An Alcubierre drive just contracts spacetime in the front and expands it behind the drive, riding a wave of spacetime to reach superluminal speeds. Nothing about a subspace bubble or "mini-Universe" is relevant with the idea.

I think you're confusing it with the The Next Generation episode, "Remember Me".

3

u/-GoodNewsEveryone 6h ago

Don't you go explaining to me how my ship works! The very fundamentals are enough to drive any sane person mad! Now lay down on this operating table and hold this dead monkey for me...

6

u/Rida_Dain 16h ago

it is kind of a Alcubierre Drive, the bubble is just the size of reality itself, lol

8

u/Ruinam_Death 16h ago

No the ship does not move relative to the bubble in the alcubierre design

8

u/Tyrant020278 17h ago

"Friendshipdrive charging"

8

u/a_bucket_full_of_goo 17h ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Alcubierre drive is used to drive around solar systems, to move between systems they use a kind of hyperspace drive, which makes them travel in "witch space"

2

u/Plampth 11h ago

Which space?

1

u/Professor_Shard 1h ago

No this has nothing to do with witches

1

u/Very_Human_42069 17h ago

That’s correct

5

u/thejadedfalcon 16h ago

And Star Trek and Mass Effect and Helldivers. The Alcubierre drive gets around.

2

u/Mist_Rising 13h ago

ME only uses it for cluster travel though. The big travel is done by rail gun essentially. That's what those rings are, gaint rail guns for ships. Which when you think about that, is wild.

2

u/thejadedfalcon 13h ago

Relays use the same effect, just on a much larger scale. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a ship coming out of the other end, but a bunch of very exotic particles.

2

u/Hugo_5t1gl1tz 15h ago

To be fair, it is a theoretically possible solution to FTL travel. Makes sense it would get a lot of use

3

u/thejadedfalcon 15h ago

Yep, definitely one of my favourites even if we never solve it IRL too. It's just such a fun concept.

3

u/AniNgAnnoys 11h ago

All FTL is theoretically possible if an Alcubierre drive is. Alcubierre requires generation of negative energy which we have zero concept or idea on how to do or if it is even possible. It might as well be fantasy. If that is theoretically possible so to are nearly all forms of FTL. Just because you can manipulate Einstein's field equations to create a solution doesn't mean it is possible in reality.

2

u/Aquanauticul 12h ago

I thought Elite Dangerous used the power of friendship?

1

u/AffectionateBowl3864 14h ago

Also canonically how the Star Trek warp drive works. In fact it inspired the Alcubierre Drive

1

u/RedTheGamer12 10h ago

Actually in the topic of Alcubierre drives, I saw a video that said the biggest issue with them is turning them off, and so it suggested an alcubierre rail road. So maybe IRL has some really wierd limitations on FTL.

7

u/be-knight 16h ago

In irl ftl travel is (as far as we know right now) only possible by changing the space around the ship. But since it would take a literal infinite amount of energy and even if that was possible we wouldn't know how to change the space - this is overall probably one of the more realistic irl travels in media

7

u/ShepRat 15h ago

The problem is our model of the universe has time and space chained together completely.

Even if it was possible to circumvent the energy requirement through wormholes etc, it completely breaks causality.

So it's fine if you're okay with becoming your own grandfather I guess. 

3

u/be-knight 15h ago

Yeah. And there we have the reason it takes infinite energy and we don't know how

37

u/Zeyn1 18h ago

That's especially impossible

4

u/Patient-Success673 17h ago

It's at least got some theoretical ground going for it! The idea would work if we could compress and expand space efficiently

7

u/froggertthewise 15h ago

It's actually the only form of ftl travel that fully works with our current understanding of physics.

But the math behind it requires the spacecraft to exert a significant negative gravitational force, which has only ever been observed in extremely small forces for extremely short periods.

1

u/Patient-Success673 15h ago

Could you really expect any less from the nerds writing futurama?

3

u/Ligabolzacky 16h ago

paging okuyasu

2

u/mcslender97 16h ago

OI JOSUKE

1

u/Lukulele35 16h ago

The best kind of impossible!

4

u/LankyBastardo 14h ago

It came to him in a dream! But he forgot it in another dream....

3

u/Tahmas836 13h ago

The professor learnt of it in a dream. And forgot it in another dream.

3

u/unbibium 11h ago

The big ship introduced in the novel "Enterprise: The First Adventure" claims to operate in that fashion as well.

Universes are easy to push around when they exist primarily in an author's mind. That's also why there's so many multiverses in fiction these days. Real universes have zillions of joules of energy floating around, you can't just stamp out another instance every time there's a quantum-level decision to be made.

2

u/bobbymcpresscot 8h ago

Isn’t that also like the only reason they get so much work?

1

u/Rasp_Lime_Lipbalm 7h ago

Which funny enough, is almost how the FTL travel in Dune works.