futuristic space voyage

Could It Be Real?

Do you remember how we as Kids used to Fantasize about being the characters of our favorite T.V Shows and Movies and when we grew up, we were soon told that most of that didn’t exist? This Blog will be one of the many other Blogs on What If our childhood fantasies existed, as a Part of our blog series, Questioning Fantasies.


A series in which we will provide a new idea about what-if Fantasies were real.

We all had our own dreams in which we teleported into leaving our existing reality, in my case, it was travelling through space. Growing up watching Star Trek and Star Wars, traveling to the ends of the Universe was my reverie. 


Well, as our current technological advancements stand, making a Spaceship able to Warp Drive me halfway across the universe is still extremely far-fetched but we can still try to reach the nearest Star System or Galaxy.


When in space, traveling is quite simple. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most renowned physicists, gave the law of Inertia that should help us in this. We do not have much friction in space and thus all we need to do is attain a speed at which we can reach our destination in our life span. How do we perform that? Just throw enough stuff out of the back door of the spaceship.

Well, while that works too. It’s inefficient, just imagine the amount of mass or energy one will need to install in the rocket for propulsion to attain a speed which is at least a percentage of the speed of light. Loading up a huge spaceship with propulsion fuel and blast them off at the back of the spaceship and ride the momentum of the blast to accelerate is a highly impractical solution because of a dilemma put forward by Albert Einstein. He put forward an argument that a vehicle like a rocket or a particle with a definite mass cannot attain the speed of light as a body when under acceleration will constantly need energy more than its mass to propel itself forward. So practically, when a body is under acceleration, the energy needed to propel that mass will keep on increasing. So, the body will need almost infinite energy to attain the speed of light.

But what if I really need to destroy a death star about 3 Billion Light years away? Well, then let’s bring the real fantasy into the game, let’s build a warp drive.


We all loved the scene when our favorite characters would zap into a tunnel like structure and appear almost million light years away, but is that really possible?

Albert Einstein in 1905 gave humanity the idea of space-time and brought doom upon the Space Geeks by proving that no object or particle with mass can travel faster than light or mass-less photons (particles of light) as proved in above paragraph. If, even light takes 4 years just to reach the nearest star System, then for a human (with a mass) to reach there in mere seconds is seemingly impossible.

But what if we move space-time itself? Inspired by Star Trek itself, an idea of Alcubierre Drive was born. In Layman’s terms, its space surfing!


How can it be done? Imagine a spaceship at a point in space. The idea of Alcubierre drive is that we design a device in the spaceship with which it can contract the space time in the direction in which the ship is travelling and expanding the space time behind the ship in a manner to not induce time dilation. A spaceship that bends space time in such a manner actually replicates the motion of surfing and this really solves the problem with faster than light travel. How?


Well, Space expands in a manner through which some celestial objects can move at a speed faster than light from the perspective of earth! This isn’t fictional, it works on real physics but the only limiting agent here is our technological advancements because there hasn’t been discovered a way to expand and contract space time but let’s assume that my friend Kavan, who wants to be an engineer, designs a real Warp Drive.


Now, thanks to Humanity’s achievement, a new kind of exploration will be born. We won’t have to worry about sustainable development as much (but till then we must) and Tourism Industry will rise to a new glory. Nations would hurry to capture as much area as they can, or maybe new and magnificent nations will emerge.

Scientifically, we will be able to research about our origins in better depth and studying anomalies regarding Black Holes and Neutron Stars will become much simpler and maybe we might find a planet which has a better sustainable ecosystem based on a completely new and undiscovered element (though, this one is quite farfetched even in this discussion).


Breakthroughs will happen in every field possible and who knows maybe some crazy guy (Possibly me) might also revamp Storm Troopers and Build a real Death Star. The Era of Jedi will emerge or maybe not, maybe humanity will itself have a breakthrough and become less dumb and live peacefully or maybe we will encounter another species of organisms like us, and we will rule over them. At this point, this cloud-cuckoo-land of mine does seem slightly plausible.

I will be back next time with another fantasy to question and another idea to explore.

Until then, Live long, and prosper!

Author- Christopher George  AKA THE C-MONKE