#THE PROBLEM OF BEING FASTER THAN LIGHT FULL#

And they don't even need to do that! The replicators will crank out a bologna sandwich just like mom used to make.

#THE PROBLEM OF BEING FASTER THAN LIGHT FULL#

Seeking out new worlds and new civilizations is no more difficult than gassing up the car and packing a cooler full of junk food. The various crews of Trek's slate of television shows and movies can get from here to there without much fanfare. The enlisted members of Starfleet enjoy spacecraft capable not only of moving at a significant fraction of light speed but of dispensing with this universal constant altogether. In the 23rd and 24th centuries, traveling to the edges of the cosmos is as simple as pushing a button, presuming you've got a well-stocked store of dilithium crystals. Perhaps most famous among these fictional solutions is Star Trek's warp drive. Waiting decades or centuries for our protagonists to arrive on another world can make for stagnant storytelling, so we've dreamed up hyper-drives and subspace tunneling. Science fiction writers have imagined all sorts of solutions for this specific problem. We are a society hell-bent on immediate gratification. The point is, there's a whole lot of space out there and getting anywhere interesting takes way too long. The numbers get a little wiggly, owing to the constant movement of the two involved planets, but a crewed trip to Mars, using current technology, would take about nine months. Getting to Mars, our best candidate for setting boots on another world, is an even worse prospect. It's so big that just getting to the Moon, which seems so close sometimes you feel like you could reach out and grab it, takes a few days. Bigger, even, than several IKEAs strung end to end, if you can believe it.

The problem of being faster than light