io9

What about that solar powered sail ship Sisko built that went from Bajor to a Cardassian planet, proving the Bajorans were space-faring long before the Cardassians showed up?

It still sounds as improbable as it did then, but it made for a cool episode.

Neal asher's underspace/U-space/runcible gates from the Polity universe.

all need AI's to use, like pushing out out ot and into a different space where energy is alot more effective, but requires alot of energy to enter.

also while in u space people go nuts if they look into space.

with time dilation, you just need to get near lightspeed

Never heard of "The Jaunt" but I just did a wikicheck, jaunting was a term for telepottation in Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination". King mentions this in his story so that's cool. I like the Stargate through a door & ta-daa you're there method. Especially the way Dan Simmons used it.

Slip stream/ ether stream from Outlaw Star

I love the Twilight Zone where the astronaut is put to sleep for the long journey but wakes up to discover a faster unmanned craft beat him to his destination and he basicly wasted his life and connections with everyone he knew for no reason.

So teleportation? Are you dead, and your exact duplicate steps out at the destination? Or is it still you?

I can't remeber which short story I read that dealt with this?

I guess the tardis is the best way to travel, though you don't have an excuse for being late anymore ^^

There's also the hyperspace "bands" made popular by David Weber. Within each ascending band everything is a little closer or the speed of light is faster. I don't quite remember off hand.

@aspiringexpatriate: Solar-sails have been a staple of SciFi for a while now. I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure that NASA was looking into them at one point...

[blag.xkcd.com]
A good - and fun - explanation of the "science" behind them.

While the Infinite Improbability Drive is awesome, I am still intrigued by the Starship Bistromath, which uses bistro-mathematics to flip a ship across interstellar space.

And the TARDIS - nothing like vworping in and out of reality via the vortex.

Glad these are available, since we are in the middle of a dilithium shortage.

"In fact, they send a convicted murdered through while awake, in exchange for him getting a full pardon."

Oops, I found a goof! Should be murderer. :)

@wolfjoat: I can think of a number of other examples that use similar alternate dimensions/universes to travel through. Does it still count as pressing the pedal down if you're actually shortening the road, or changing physical constants along the way?

@Silver_Back: Maybe he got murdered? Who knows! And...okay, dammit. Fixed.

How is warp drive supposed to work? I was under the impression that it didn't make the ship go faster, but just bent space so that the ship didn't have to travel as far.

There is Jack Vance's "Intersplit" which allows the ship to enter a space where FTL flight is possible, but the ship has to have a probe tip in the real universe so it can see where it is going.

Larry Niven did a lot with Hyperspace, a better description than most, including "The Blind Spot"

My personal space cruiser uses the Lensman universe drive, where you just step on the etheric gas and go faster. None of this Einstienian mucking about with relativity.

Of course, at speeds above a few hundred parsecs an hour, streamlining becomes important.

The TARDIS, of course. ;-)

One of my favorites was from the anthology "I, Robot", in which the two intrepid roboticists Powell and Donovan are sent faster than the speed of light in a prototype ship, and the effects of the voyage literally kill them and then bring them back to life.
As a practical joke, the "Brain" robot that designed the ship played sounds of bells tolling and eulogies being said over the loudspeakers while the two were in their "dead" state.

Don't forget "Somewhere in Time" where Christopher Reeve travels through time (and space) by immersing himself in the time period he wanted to travel to and convincing himself he was there.

Although they don't specifically say so, this method would undoubtedly work for space travel under the same parameters.

I'd suggest that the FTL drive in Galactica isn't misnamed; the ships arrive at their destination faster than a beam of light would, therefore, they get there faster than light. No?

@tyr540: Ward drive (supposedly) works by sort of partially encasing the ship in a supra-universe bubble which then exist in a different universe (subspace) where it can move fast than the speed of light...

I think that the ship partially exists in both universes at once (or flips back and forth)

@Seth L: Sounds like you're thinking of The Prestige. In the book, the machine teleports you and makes a shell-like dead version of you which is left behind. The film has a much more morally distressing version wherein the machine teleports and creates a fully conscious fully-you double and it's sort of a crap-shoot which one is actually which.

@Seth L: Its a delicious question.

As an athiest I don't believe in a soul. Would you even notice? The one you would stop existing and the other one would think it was you. At that point isn't it? What is you isn't necessarily the cells that make up your brain, who you are changes over time. Is the matter you or are you the sum of whatever meme like programs are running through your hardware at one time.

If its new identical hardware and the same program is running...

Its a tough call.

Maybe too tough to call for you to be comfortable risking it for simple travel. But what if the payoff was upped? What if you could get hooked up to a machine that could scan your entire brain and create an artificial replica in an artificial body (think something like data, fully functional)

the cost is the process of scanning your brain fries it. You wake up in the new body, but its not really you, its a perfect immortal copy.

Most people I've asked this say that they'd be willing to do this near the end of their lives, but not now.

We apparently place a high value on our matter.

Mine is from Bruce Coville's "My Teacher" series, though I don't remember what it's called. Basically, the starship drive folds a slice of space up (like a noodle, if I'm remembering the analogy correctly) so that where you are is right next to where you want to go, and the ship can step across.

Both the Buck Rogers TV series (with Gil Gerard) and Cowboy Beebop have an affair that's not quite hyperspace and not quite Stargate -- basically, one can set up a shortcut bolthole "Just hop me from Point A to Point B" thing between two gate-like structures.

Unlike hyperspace or most FTL drives, anything can go through them, so it doesn't require a special kind of ship. Unlike Stargates, you can only go from one fixed spot (that has a working gate) to another fixed spot (that also has a working gate).

While the Tardis is cool like a Ferrari would be a wonderful car, I'll choose suspended animation. Let's face it, I'm pretty much restricted to Honda types for the rest of my life, so I'll continue that trend and focus on technology that I might see in my lifetime. Also, imagine the power of compounding interest used in conjunction with suspended animation. ...might get that Ferrari after all.

Pinlighters! Gocaptains! The Up-And-Out!

(Ok, cats too.)

Ahh, Cordwainer Smith, you total weirdo.

In the Instrumentality books (by Smith,) humans develop a kind of hyperspace drive that lets them go into the Up-And-Out, but there are predators there that eat minds.

I actually like his earlier ideas (or rather, the technology that develops before the Up-And-Out,) where humans undergo a process that turns them into "scanners," which are kind of emotionless, robotic beings that can withstand the unfettered horror of space.

Whr is cranchng wire, plz?

What about how they do it in timeline? Pop yourself into a universe where really really fast travel (or time travel, it doesn't really matter there's a universe for everything) is possible, move really fast, then pop back.

I remember in the old Star Fleet Battles game there was a weapon similar enough to the Wave Motion Gun that you could, in a BPV battle, retrofit the USS Enterprise with the WMG and cause all kinds of mayhem.

Yeah.

How about Lint speed from the animated Tick universe? When you get your pants out of the dryer, how is the lint already in your pocket? It's just that fast.
Also, from the Hitchhiker books, theres the bad news, because nothing in the universe travels as fast as bad news, the downside being when you get there, nobody wants to hear from you.
Or there's the Italian Resturant drive, which is based on the theory that the rules of mathmatics never work right inside an Italian Bistro.

Or, as they did in Futurama, just increase the speed of light so you can travel faster.

@capntim: Consider this situation. If someone makes you unconscious, makes a perfect copy of you including all memories, and then destroys the original. Then only the people involved in the procedure would know you are a copy. When you wake up, there is no way for the copy to know anything happened because it can remember everything up to being unconscious. Is that copy still "you"? What if the original was not destroyed, and both original and copy awake at the same time? There is no way for you to know if you are the copy or the original!

Now let's imagine we don't actually need people to perform this replication; it can be a natural phenomenon. And imagine that you don't need to be unconscious for very long, just a tiny fraction of a second. And that this replication / destruction process happens continuously, at all moments. Would this situation be any different from us living normally?

@papercup mixmaster: There was also an Outer Limits episode that used the consciousness-teleportation-from-one body-to-another convention.

Come on now!

The stargate uses SEVEN chevrons to allow travel to another gate in our galaxy. As explained by Daniel Jackson in the movie, you need six points in a 3D space to uniquely identify a point (the target gate). Then you need one additional point to identify the source gate (usually filled in by pressing the big red button on the DHD). Seven chevrons. The eighth chevron is used when you are traveling outside of our galaxy (e.g. from the Earth gate to the Atlantis gate). This is to specify what galaxy's stargate system you are providing the necessary seven chevrons for. Finally, the ninth chevron has only been used once, and it allowed for time travel. This, however, has never been explained in the series.

Get your facts right!

Harry Harrison's Bloater Drive from "Bill the Galactic Hero". Your ship expands to fill the cosmos, then contracts in the direction you want to go. When you resume normal size, You're there! Bowbity bowb!

Cordwainer Smith's FTL was called planoforming. (I find Smith to be the most original and compelling SF writer in the pantheon. No axes to grind, here.)

@Signal: See? its a great question.

Personally I think that the software is more important than the hardware its running on.

of course your software is constantly changing too. Thats why i'm happy to be who and what i am at any given movement. The me of 10 years ago is barely similar to the me now, and he hasn't lamented his death. I'm sure the me of now will be just as quiet when either i've been replaced by another iteration of myself, or i've died entirely.

Alastair Reynolds' 'lighthuggers'. Hard sci-fi to a certain degree, the drives would push a ship close to the speed of light, and the tapered prow was covered in tens of metres of ice to ablate and absorb any impacts at that speed - which would be rather nasty on a thin hull. I liked the tyranny of distance in his books - even with high tech gear, there was no way to beat the lightspeed limit...

Lost of names for the same inaginary thing, of course. Remember tesseracts? Or the folded scarf analogy?

I've read of books involving 'generation ships', which always struck me as an awesome idea and probably the only really feasible way to get people to neighboring solar systems. (Maybe a little boring, though.) The biggest problem there seems to be that extended space travel involves a lot of environmental toxins in the ship itself, which might adversely affect the passengers' reproductive capabilities.

The horror of the machine from The Prestige to me is not the question of which body you are, because they're both presumably separate perfect copies of you- the horror was (SPOILER ALERT?) that character killing himself over and over again in the ultimate act of self-negation. It seemed kind of cosmically sick to me in a way that suicide isn't: endless reduplication, creating a fully human life identical to your own, and then ending your own.

Dark Star

I can think of three more.

In some of Orson Scott Card's Ender books, Jane, the intelligence that developed in the ansible network, was able to somehow transport ships across vast distances. It's kind of explained here.

In Vernor Vinge's Marooned In Realtime, complete stasis fields called "bobbles" are used to completely freeze time in a spherical area, and nuclear explosions push the bobbles through space.

In A Fire Upon The Deep, Vinge posits the existence of "zones of thought" in the galaxy, in some of which the laws of physics differ from ours and allow FTL travel.

@Seth L:

Wall around a Star by Frederick Pohl.

You step into a unit, then step back out and live your life as usual. Your exact duplicate steps out of a box elsewhere on a one way trip and lives his life far, far away.

Sometimes your body is tailored to a new environment like aquatic or heavy-G, but you're still you. But as far as your consciousness is concerned you will never see your loved one at home again (unless they come with), and "you" could go back, but it would just be an essence of you, and you would still be without your love.

Thats all I can remember from the book

I've never read "The Jaunt", and I must do so now.

I really liked how they did FTL travel in the game "Mass Effect".

@B:

Hahaha, hell yes!!!

From a stylistic point, I like the drive in the _Alien_ franchise -- the time dilation effect reverses after you exceed the speed of light, so subjective time is slower than outside time. In other words, a three-week trip might seem like three months to the crew. So, the crew does the hypersleep thing, to avoid having to stock food etc for a long boring trip. (I don't know what the author of the article was talking about. Ripley's problem was that she was adrift in a non-FTL lifeboat with a broken beacon, not that the trip was supposed to take that long.)

Larry Niven's "Known Space" has three levels of Quantum Hyperdrive if I'm not mistaken.

I think the third was seeded into the superconducting mesh holding the Ringworld together under the Scrith, effectively turning the entire structure into a MASSIVE hyperdrive vehicle.

Big fan.

There's also Babylon 5's jump gates which open a jump point into hyperspace. The really big ships don't need jumpgates cuz they can make their own jump points. I'm just sayin'.

@Smeagol92055: Are you SURE you're remembering that story correctly? I remember that they actually died, were revived, and while dead each had his own insane vision of the afterlife.

@wolfjoat: It's like higher "wavelengths" of spacetime where all points are closer together and there are gravity waves all over the place that you can ride by projecting "Warshawski sails" made of gravitons. In hyperspace you're traveling at sublight speed, so the real speed limit of c is respected, but since all points are closer together than normal, from n-space's POV you're effectively traveling FTL.

The leviathan's ability to Starburst was pretty cool. I think they could also use it as a defensive weapon.

I remember a story where the method of travel was a "stop" drive. It would anchor the ship in place and teh universe would move by it. Unanchor when you are close to where you want to be. If I remember right you had to travel at sublight to the actual destination.

I really liked the hyperspace gates from Cowboy BeBop, still dont think its actually faster than light as it takes a few hours to get to Earth from Mars but it was still a pretty awesome take on inter-planetary travel...

There was another show when I was little (damn memory I cant remember its name) but I remember they had ships like raptors from bsg and when they "jumped" theyd have to charge up the engine to generate a "hyperspace bubble" then they disappeared in a flash... twas awesome

There's always the method used in Richard Morgan's _Altered Carbon_ and sequels, where they download your mind from your cortical stack, transmit it via laser to your destination world, then download you into a new 'sleeve' (ie. body)...

Or the Void Which Binds, using the universal force of love to instantly teleport yourself anywhere you've been before...