Science Fiction Starships

Hollywood has produced many movies with a space theme, usually under the genre of science fiction. These have entertained generations of people and given joy to many. They have also helped to inspire our minds about what it may be like on other worlds, or indeed what different variations of life may have emerged for which we might one day have dialogue.

Since these movies often involve traveling from one planet to another, or one star to another, they often feature engineering machines to carry the occupants. These spacecraft and starships vary in their credibility. Some are highly credible and based on perturbations of minor extrapolations of the present and we might consider those mundane depictions. Others are utterly fantastic and mind-boggling in how they operate, often breaking any sense of engineering practicality or the known laws of physics.

An interesting question is whether science inspires science fiction or the other way around. Fortunately, we have been the beneficiaries of both approaches. In general, for science fiction stories that are focussed on near-Earth space or say out to Mars and Jupiter, they tend to be based on extrapolations of the state-of-art, and by definition, they have credibility. But also, in general, the further out one envisions, such as to interstellar or intergalactic distances, the vessels take on all sorts of complex forms, some of which have no resemblance to any operating principles for which we might be aware.

Yet this has tremendous benefit. When Gene Rodenberry conceived the idea of a warp drive, his vision was not to have anything that looked like a conventional rocket and so he didn’t want any fire or combustion products being emitted from the back, the way that they do in a reaction engine. The art team working around him then came up with the warp drive concept, so familiar within the Star Trek franchise.

Then, in 1994, a physicist based out of Cardiff University in Wales, wrote a paper using the mathematics of General Relativity theory where he showed that in principle the superluminal motion of a slice of space-time was possible in principle. Since although special relativity prohibited objects with mass going faster than the speed of light limit, it did not prohibit space itself from going faster than this speed. This is after all what we think happened during the Big Bang at the start of the Universe, that it underwent exponential expansion to a superluminal size in a fraction of a second.

Since then, thousands of papers have been published on the idea of a warp drive starship and many academics are actively working on both the theoretical framework but also laboratory based experiments into the nature of space-time and whether a warp bubble could ever be constructed. In some sense, science fiction promotes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

From the perspective of our ancestors, our technology today looks like magic. Similarly, imagine what the technology of the human civilization will be like in 1,000 years from now, or even 10,000 years. Would we be able to recognise any of the principles of physics upon which such technology is based? Would the second law of thermodynamics still apply? Would entropy always increase? Would time always move towards the future? We can only speculate at what may be possible in a future for which we won’t live to see.

The future is utterly fantastic!