Hyperspace concepts

Travelling faster than the speed of light (or its concept anyway) create problems in that a) There is an infinite energy barrier to overcome at the speed of light and b) Complex numbers are always involved when describing time, mass and length.

It would seem that for an object travelling faster than c, relative to rest, time both increases and assumes a negative dimension. Also, the faster the object travels, the more its mass apparently decreases.

It would seem, from a certain perspective, that a faster-than-light object also travels back in time. Of course, if a spaceship were to leave Earth at some point, travel to a distant star and then return, but during its journey it travelled back in time to sometime near the point of departure, it would seem to the people back on Earth as if the ship had achieved super-luminal velocities.

These seeming paradoxes and impossibilities could be the means by which faster than light travel is achieved. If gravity and magnetism could be combined, anti-gravity may be possible. A ship with an anti-gravity drive could be built and placed in orbit, where it is restrained by gravity. Operating the anti-g drive could fool the parent planet that the ship has negative mass and the ship would start to move away from the planet. If the anti-g drive were used to its full potential, the ship may actually be propelled into the super-luminal realm. With the paradoxes described, this could be termed “hyperspace”, but this does not mean that objects in normal space do not affect those in hyperspace.

A reversal to “realspace” could be achieved by travelling near an object’s “mass shadow”, thus entering another solar system. Another method would be to restart the anti-gravity drive in reverse. It may be possible that, for a ship in hyperspace, the outside universe is only apparent through the gravitational effects of bodies in it. This comes on to a common problem in science fiction: navigating in hyperspace.

A different method for entering hyperspace could involve quantum mechanics and warped space. A very thin craft (but probably very wide if it is to have passengers and/ or crew) could be accelerated to relativistic velocities using several methods (solar wind, a giant orbital laser, plasmas). As its length contracts, a space-warping device (actually the opposite of Star Trek’s Warp Drive) could be activated until the length has been contracted to Planck orders of magnitude. Over a certain period of time, the craft may actually breach the light barrier due to a similar process as quantum tunnelling. The craft can then continue to be accelerated by outside means.
Similarly, a length-warping effect could stretch a ship and create a similar illusion to space as the mass-altering method on gravity.

The interesting thing about super-luminal travel in Star Trek is that the value for gamma effectively remains the same. In reality, it may actually be possible to “jump” or “warp” from rest to super-luminal velocities and keep (the magnitude of) gamma at unity. Of course, this would mean that a star ship, for example, could instantly travel faster than c one minute and then the next return to rest/ “classical” velocities, but when faster than c it can only travel at around 1.42 times the speed of light. Not quite the basis for an interstellar federation, but still plenty of potential for near-stellar trade/ exploration!

(“gamma” refers to the ratio in relativistic physics between rest mass and mass at relativistic velocities. The inverse of gamma determines length contraction and time dilation. “c” refers to the speed of light in a vacuum, a universal constant)