• 2 months ago
Welcome Michael Swaim back to the channel for Futureproof, where Swaim explores science fiction technology and their real life counterparts.
This week Swaim explains: hyperspace!

Written by: Michael Swaim
Hosted by: Michael Swaim
Edited by: Rob Menzer

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#hyperspace #starwars #scifi

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😹
Fun
Transcript
00:00Hey everyone, welcome to Future Proof,
00:02where I nerd out about classic sci-fi staples
00:04and their real-world counterparts.
00:06I'm your host, Michael Swayne,
00:08and if you're looking for my real-world counterpart,
00:10he manages a Jiffy Lube in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
00:13Terrible man, just the worst.
00:15Anyhow, today I gotta go fast,
00:17like so much Sanic the Hedgehog,
00:19because we're talking about hyperspace, subspace,
00:22and all the other made-up spaces
00:24that help our fave starships explore the cosmos
00:27at faster-than-light speeds.
00:29That's about a billion kilometers an hour,
00:31which is how fast something moves
00:33when it has no mass whatsoever, like a photon.
00:36Photons are straight-up anorexic, B.
00:38And A, they're waves of electromagnetic radiation
00:42traveling through space
00:43at the speed of the cosmological constant,
00:45which they indeed define.
00:47Okay, let's science.
00:49♪♪
00:56Now, in the sci-fi pulp of the 1950s,
00:59we didn't even need faster-than-light travel
01:01because our own solar system was still rife with mystery.
01:04In movies like Destination Moon,
01:07The Flying Discman from Mars, and Stranger from Venus,
01:10you know, those famous movies we all know
01:13and are still aware of,
01:14we imagined alien creatures emerging from local space.
01:17Interestingly, even 50s sci-fi
01:19sometimes referred to sub-etheric space,
01:22a play on the old-fashioned and bullshit idea
01:25that space is filled with a medium called ether
01:27through which gravitational
01:29and electromagnetic forces travel.
01:31At any rate, now that we know our cosmic backyard
01:33is completely devoid of intelligent life,
01:36arguably Earth included, sci-fi has had to go farther.
01:40Without hyperspeed, Star Trek's Federation
01:42and Star Wars' Galactic Empire would take eons to traverse,
01:46and even communicating would be a huge problem,
01:49especially if you've got one of those
01:51Vader voice box wheezy things.
01:53According to Einstein's theory of special relativity,
01:56you can only feel movement
01:58when you're either accelerating or decelerating.
02:00That's why you feel like you're sitting still,
02:02even when your self-driving Tesla malfunctions,
02:04cranks it to 100, and cruises right off the turnpike.
02:08The thing that's unique about light is
02:10it goes the same speed no matter
02:12what your frame of reference.
02:14No matter how fast you go,
02:16light still looks like it's going away from you
02:18at light speed on account of those massless photons.
02:22That makes the idea of ever catching up to
02:24or surpassing it not just a matter of getting La Forge
02:27to route more power to the warp drive,
02:29but one of violating the basic laws
02:31of the universe as we know them.
02:33So instead, most current sci-fi uses the concept
02:37that hyperspace or subspace are alternate dimensions,
02:40and by traveling through them,
02:42you can traverse more space than in our home dimension.
02:45Stars, Trek, and Wars both rely on this model,
02:48as does Event Horizon.
02:50Of course, in that case, subspace is hell,
02:52and you get there by jamming a pencil
02:54through a folded piece of paper.
02:56Minecraft kinda has the same deal,
02:58since one block in the nether, aka Minecraft hell,
03:02equals eight in the overworld.
03:04In Marvel canon, most teleportation
03:06is accomplished via subspace,
03:08and subspace is also the dimension
03:10where extra mass goes when superheroes shrink
03:13or where extra mass comes from when they grow.
03:16Ant-Man has like a timeshare there.
03:18On the DC side, the Flash can canonically
03:20run faster than light, which is nuts,
03:23because Reverse Flash is sometimes depicted
03:25as running faster than that.
03:27The Astral Plane in Dungeons & Dragons works similarly.
03:30That bag of holding your paladin picked up
03:32is actually a portal to a pocket of Astral Plane,
03:35and you tunnel through the same plane
03:37to teleport or apparate.
03:38Of course, in Harry Potter, you can travel instantaneously
03:41by throwing green snuff into a fireplace,
03:44because Harry Potter is stupid and for children.
03:47Slipping into an alternate universe
03:49isn't the only way to achieve fictional
03:51faster-than-light travel, though.
03:52Take Stargate, the forgotten third sibling
03:55of sci-fi things that start with star.
03:57It relies on the wormhole theory of hyperspeed,
04:00which is a series of linked portals
04:02that dematerialize and then rematerialize you,
04:06like a souped-up form of teleportation.
04:08It kinda looks like going through a glowing water slide.
04:11In theory, a civilization advanced enough
04:14to move wormholes around and survive the trip through them
04:18could set up a network of them
04:19and skim around to wherever they need to be.
04:22Although a legit wormhole has never been observed
04:25in our universe in real life, lots of physics proofs,
04:29including Einstein's theory of general relativity,
04:31mathematically call for their existence.
04:34And who are you to question Einstein?
04:36No one, that's who, unless Niels Bohr is watching this video
04:40in which case, sincere apologies.
04:42Another classic banger,
04:43The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, good stuff,
04:46relies on an infinite improbability drive
04:49that projects a starship to every conceivable point
04:52in every conceivable universe simultaneously
04:55to forgo all that mucking about in hyperspace.
04:58Although how the ship decides at which point to emerge
05:00is never fully explained.
05:02My personal favorite are the ships in Futurama,
05:05which move the universe around themselves
05:07instead of moving through the universe.
05:09Not to mention the fact that scientists
05:11in the Futurama-verse increased the speed of light in 2208
05:15to allow for faster ships.
05:16That's a complete load.
05:18Nothing's a complete load, not if you can imagine it.
05:21How could we make even that nonsense possible?
05:24Well, one way would be to shrink the universe
05:27while keeping the speed of light constant,
05:29therefore making it relatively faster
05:32as it traverses what we perceive to be
05:34the same amount of space in less time.
05:36Another way would be to get as high as possible
05:39off an old can of paint.
05:41Go ahead, try it.
05:43So if we accept that there's no way
05:45to break the laws of physics,
05:46is there any conceivable way to travel faster than light
05:49by merely bending them?
05:50That's a hard maybe.
05:52In 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre
05:55proposed the kind of warp drive
05:57that at least theoretically gets around
05:59this whole speed limit problem.
06:01The reason propelling something as fast as light
06:03is seemingly impossible is that things gain mass
06:06the faster they travel.
06:07Therefore, anything with any mass at all
06:09is only going to get heavier and heavier as it speeds up,
06:13requiring more and more energy to accelerate it,
06:16and thus it can never keep pace with a massless photon.
06:19At light speed, you'd need an infinite amount of energy
06:22to keep pushing the infinite weight of your ship forward.
06:26What the Alcubierre drive supposes
06:28is that a ship could travel as fast as
06:3010 times the speed of light
06:32by creating a warp bubble around itself,
06:35which is to say shrinking spacetime in front of itself
06:38while expanding a bubble of spacetime behind.
06:40According to most calculations,
06:42this would still require a tremendous amount of energy,
06:45say the equivalent of the entire mass of Jupiter.
06:48In other words, the Enterprise can zip around all at once
06:51as long as it devours planets faster than Galactus.
06:54Several notable physicists have added to
06:57or improved upon the Alcubierre drive idea,
06:59perhaps most famously Harold White.
07:01He proposed throwing a torus of negative mass
07:04around the ship, which for reasons I don't fully understand
07:07would make the drive much more energy efficient.
07:09In fact, he and his team are currently at work
07:12trying to prove that this kind of warp bubble
07:15can be observed in real life.
07:16And they claim to have created
07:17a little tiny nanoscale one in the lab.
07:21Unless you think he's just some lone lunatic,
07:24like that fabulous bastard from ancient aliens,
07:26you should know that he's an award-winning NASA engineer
07:29and the experimentation is being done
07:31at NASA's Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory.
07:34That's about as official as you can get
07:36or else an incredible waste of American tax dollars
07:39depending on your viewpoint.
07:40In May of 2021, White announced that they might have found
07:43the right configuration required
07:45to test a chip-scale Alcubierre drive.
07:48Now all we need to do is download all of our consciousnesses
07:51into computer chips and we're good to go.
07:53Perhaps the biggest logical leap necessary
07:56to get an Alcubierre drive off the ground in real life
07:59is that it requires negative mass in order to function.
08:02Negative mass is just what it sounds like,
08:04the opposite of mass.
08:05So that means instead of accelerating
08:07in the direction that it's pushed,
08:09it accelerates backwards, opposite-wise.
08:12This was long thought to be merely hypothetical,
08:15but in 2017, Washington State physicists
08:17created the conditions for negative mass
08:20by cooling rubidium atoms to just above absolute zero,
08:23creating what is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.
08:26And what a condensate.
08:28Under these special circumstances,
08:30particles move extremely slowly and behave like waves.
08:33They also tend to sync up and travel together in a pack
08:36as a substance known as superfluid,
08:38which is capable of flowing continuously
08:40without losing energy.
08:42Long story short, the WSU team shot a bunch of lasers
08:45at the superfluid because real physics
08:47and fake physics are hardly differentiable.
08:50The lasers affected the spin of the rubidium atoms
08:52and turned them, at least briefly,
08:55into objects with negative mass.
08:57In theory, you strap a bunch of those bad boys to a Taurus
09:00and eat Jupiter,
09:02and you're halfway to a functioning warp drive.
09:04See, that wasn't so hard, was it?
09:06Faster-than-light travel may still be
09:08a little more than a gleam in some four-eyes' four eyes,
09:11but it's our only hope for ever meaningfully exploring
09:14beyond our own solar system.
09:15Of course, the faster you travel, the more time dilates,
09:18meaning everyone you left behind will be long dead
09:21by the time you reach your destination.
09:23But we'll worry about that on the next episode
09:25of Future Proof.
09:27Hey, that's this show.

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