The Rules of Space Travel

The hit new video game Mass Effect takes its name from a fictional type of starship propulsion component of the same name. The creators of the expansive universe of Mass Effect decided that they wanted to craft a story unencumbered by the restrictions of so-called Eisteinian space. In doing so, the followed in the well-trod footsteps of Star Wars, Star Trek, Frank Herbert's Dune, Niven's Known Space, and dozens if not hundreds of other fictional universes with warp drives, hyperdrives, ansible space, hyper space, inertialess drive, singularity drives, and Adam's memorable Infinite Improbability Drive. Why is everyone in such a hurry to abandon Einstein?

They're in a hurry to do so because they're in a hurry. There are, as Carl Sagan popularly put it, "billions and billions" of stars in the galaxy, but they're so far apart that it takes eight years to travel from here to the closest one at the speed limit of the universe, the speed of light. It would take significantly longer for a ship starting from rest and needing to return to rest at the other end. This means that if your protagonist is travelling a hundred or so light years -- probably the smallest realistic distance between habitable planets out there on the galactic arm -- at least a hundred years, probably quite a bit more will pass , while he's en route through conventional space.

Some writers include this detail in their stories. Orson Scott Card, a master at the mechanics of hard sci-fi, handled it adroitly with both stasis fields (The Worthing Saga) and relativistic time dilation (Speaker for the Dead). Cryogenics -- being frozen and re-thawed at your destination -- was the mechanism in Lost in Space, Pitch Black, and Aliens, in recent cinema. These methods explain how you can get from point A to point B without aging a dozen or a hundred years, but make it hard to, say, respond to a distress signal or encounter new life and new civilizations every week.

The theory of special relativity, developed by Eistein but based on and augmented by the works of numerous other scientists, is a well-established and verified piece of modern science. It shows why nothing can travel faster than light -- not even if you get up to 3 miles per hour slower than the speed of light and throw a 40 mph fast ball out he front door of your spacecraft. At high speeds -- "relativistic" speeds -- space and time behave differently, and everything becomes, well, relative. Lengths, time duration, and mass are no longer the same for every observer. Hitting the gas pedal no longer produces a uniform acceleration, but rather brings you closer and closer to the ultimate speed limit without ever reaching it (like trying to eat a whole cake by eating half, and the half of what's left, then half of what's left and so on.)

One last trope of science fiction space travel is included in Mass Effect: teleportion gates. Called mass relays here, they work like the stargates from Stargate or the wormholes of countless of works. Like time dilation and cryogenics, they have some foundation in hard science: it is theoretically possible for either man-made or natural "holes in space" to connect two otherwise distant points. The amounts of energy required to create such holes, let alone determine where they come out , are beyond astronomical, and there are lethal forces with gradient steep enough to rip the individual cells in your body apart to consider.

Mass Effect pays homage to, and builds on, a massive body of science fiction literature, cinema, and gaming. The extent to which it contributes to this legacy remains to be seen, and only the future will tell.