Faster Than Light Travel

-Star Wars

"It never occurred to me to think of SPACE as the thing that is moving.” 
-Scotty, Star Trek 2009

Faster-than-light travel is the travel between two locations in space in less time than light could. It is very popular in science fiction stories such as The Foundation because it allows interstellar travel that would otherwise be practically impossible. Such travel allows for contact with aliens and the colonization of planets beyond our solar system. Simple exploration of planets is much facilitated by it, as well. Faster-than-light travel also provides a convenient method to remove uninteresting travel times in stories. Such uses make it a necessity in outer space operas and a major leap for actual space travel.This could lead to moral questions about colonizing inhabited planets or terraforming planets for habitation, but the actual process of traveling faster than light does not have any obvious moral conundrums.

An important thing to note about faster-than-light travel is that it does not necessitate actually moving at a speed greater than light. Einstein's theory of Special Relativity states that the speed of light is the maximum speed in the universe, so exceeding it would be impossible according to current scientific understanding. The more plausible theory for faster-than-light travel involves warping space-time to artificially shorten the distance between the two points in space. This allows ships to reach a location faster than light could without actually breaking the speed of light. The creation of a wormhole is one possibility for such spatial warping, as is a special space-time bubble around the ship as in Star Trek. The creation of a field is a plausible way of creating such a bubble -- gravitational fields work by the warping of space-time by matter and energy. This method of faster-than-light travel seems like it could very easily be feasible in theory; practical achievement is another matter entirely. The mass of the ship attempting to travel faster-than-light is minuscule, and so would only cause a minuscule gravitational warping of space-time. To shorten the distance in space enough to travel faster than light would require much more warping. This warping, if not from matter, must be from energy -- massive amounts of it. In the present there is simply not a power source capable of safely and efficiently producing the amount of energy required.

"Quotes." IMDb. 2009. Amazon. Web. October 5 2013.