Day 106: Interstellar

I watched Interstellar for what must be the twentieth time over the weekend. I'm not quite sure why I keep coming back to this movie, but every six months or so I get the urge to watch it again. I may have an unhealthy number of rewatches under my belt at this point, but I'd never had a blog before when I watched it, and media tends to take on a new perspective when every piece of it is up for review. While I was watching it (rather critically this time) I thought back to my post about megastructures. That was a really fun post, so I decided to make another one today going over one of my favorite sci-fi tropes, interstellar travel. I was just going to do a review of the movie, but I thought this would make for a more interesting read instead. If you haven't seen Interstellar though, I highly recommend you do.

First up, probably the most grounded interstellar approach is stasis, cryosleep, hypersleep, or whatever else you want to call it. It goes by a hundred different names in a hundred different series, but it always has a familiar set of tropes that goes along with it. There's usually a vat or some sort of machine that the characters load themselves into for a long nap. The idea of course, is that spending years trapped in a tiny vessel space would suck, so why bother? The most interesting part about this trope in my opinion, is how it is almost exclusively reserved for series where humans aren't yet capable of using more advanced methods of space flight. While sleeping in the depths of space, the ship usually trundles along at speeds significantly lower than we would prefer. The characters who use this method lament the fact that they're going to lose years worth of time compared to those on Earth who age normally instead of dreaming their lives away, but at least they don't lose their minds in the vast emptiness of space. Also, it seems to be a good excuse to film your actors in the nude, if you're into that sort of thing.

In my opinion, nobody ever did this better than Ridley Scott. I mean, just look at how sleek those pods are. Too cool.

Next up for the grounded approach is near-relativistic travel. Ok, this one might not be used much for interstellar travel, but it is used in near future settings a lot more often. I think of this as the brute force approach, and it's got to be the most brutal of all the methods of space travel. It's very simple: go fast. The faster you accelerate, the sooner you get there, so it usually comes along with a bunch of other cool tropes, like g-force drugs and suits, fusion drives, and the good old fashioned armor plating a ship would need to not explode the second it hits a dust particle. Shields? What the hell is that? The thing that really makes this the most space-orc approach to going to distant places is the fact that when you get going really fast, everything else tends to go faster around you. When you get to wherever you're going, tens, hundreds, or sometimes even thousands of years may have passed for everybody else, meanwhile you've barely aged. Recently I read 'The Forever War' and this is a huge part of the novel, where being sent to fight in space is essentially a death sentence because even if you live, none of your loved ones back home will. Like I said, brutal.

One thing I really liked about 'The Forever War' was how Haldeman used near relativistic travel in combination with the next trope: faster than light gateways. Combining low tech with high speed makes for interesting plot devices, and usually this requires a naturally occurring thing somewhere that you have to get to first. Collapsars, wormholes, jump gates, they go by many names and many different explanations. Interstellar also uses this trope, combining hyper sleep and the wormhole apparently sent by future humans (that is just too cool, I mean come on). Mass Effect has a similar take with the Mass Effect Relays that reduce the mass of anything that passes nearby, allowing for incredibly fast travel. I like this one a lot because it plays into the rest of the story in a big way rather than just kinda being there. The relays are not naturally occurring, but remnants of prior civilizations that have risen and fallen over the millennia. Secretly, they were created by the Reapers that like to show up and wipe out all life in the galaxy every 50,000 years. I'm not sure where this trope started exactly, but my favorite iteration are the gateways in Cowboy Bebop. They're maintained by humans, and are therefore vulnerable in the same way anything made by humans is. Over the course of the show they get hacked into, destroyed by ship accidents, used as tricky environmental hazards by the main characters, and probably a bunch of other cool plot points I'm forgetting.

Ok, now we're getting to the good stuff, IE. space travel that doesn't make you cringe at the thought of actually engaging in it.

I can physically hear this image.

Anyway, warp travel is so cool because if you just squint your brain a little you can see it being possible. It makes a lot of sense intuitively because humans have been riding waves at the beach and in rivers for thousands of years. Riding a wave through spacetime so you aren't technically going faster than light is also a really fun way to give the universe a big fat F U for putting a silly speed limit on us in the first place. The best part about this method is all the theoretical backing from actual physicists, who may or may not have a little too much confirmation bias going into making this work on paper. All we need is negative energy (whatever that is), more power than is currently produced on Earth, a magnetic field that would rip the iron from your blood, shields that can absorb any impact, something to make all the inertia in the ship go away, and it could totally work!

The old hyperspace VS warp drive debate rages on even to this day, but to be honest, I've never really had a good grasp on the difference. Hyperspace as popularized by Star Wars seems to function almost identically to warp drive, just a whole lot faster. Is there any difference really between going into hyperspace and warping space around you? What is hyperspace exactly? Maybe someone in the comments can enlighten me on this one. Sure looks a lot more psychedelic though ...

The latest iteration of interstellar travel that I've heard of actually comes from the fantasy side of literature. I'm not sure where this originated exactly, but I first encountered this idea in 'The Stormlight Archives' wherein a spirit realm or alternate dimension (in this case, a place called Shadesmar) is used to traverse the universe instead of traveling through the vacuum of space. This is probably one of the more efficient methods of travel, seeing as the characters in Stormlight can actually just walk through the alternate dimension to get to another spot on their planet. I imagine they can probably walk all the way to another galaxy if they really wanted to. They use a boat in the other dimension to speed things up, but still. This is easily one of the most original ideas IMO, especially given the walking aspect, and I haven't seen a newer idea since reading this one.

Maybe one of these days I'll take a shot at coming up with my own interstellar travel idea, but for now, I don't think I'm capable of beating out these great ideas we've had over the past century or two. I didn't cover generation ships in this post, or portal travel a la Rick and Morty, and I'm sure there are a bunch of other ways people have come up with that I didn't get to. Let me know what your favorite method of interstellar travel is in the comments!

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley

P.S. I'm currently on a trip to the beach with my family, so the timing of my posts my vary. They'll probably be earlier rather than later so I can write during the coldest part of the day rather than swim.