This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy. Please share your thoughts on the matter at this article's entry on the Articles for deletion page. |
 | This article may need to be rewritten to comply with Wikipedia's quality standards.(April 2019) |
Interstellar travel is a common feature of fiction such as science fiction and fantasy. [1] [2]
The technology in Star Trek has borrowed freely from the scientific world to provide storylines. Episodes are replete with references to tachyon beams, baryon sweeps, quantum fluctuations and event horizons. Many of the technologies created for the Star Trek universe were done so out of simple financial necessity—the transporter was created because the limited budget of the original series in the 1960s did not allow expensive shots of spaceships landing on planets.
In the fictional Star Trek universe, the impulse drive is the method of propulsion that starships and other spacecraft use when they are travelling below the speed of light. Typically powered by deuterium fusion reactors, impulse engines let ships travel interplanetary distances readily. For example, Starfleet Academy cadets use impulse engines when flying from Earth to Saturn and back. Unlike the warp engines, impulse engines work on principles used in today's rocketry, throwing mass out the back as fast as possible to drive the ship forward.
Superluminal communication is a hypothetical process in which information is sent at faster-than-light (FTL) speeds. The current scientific consensus is that faster-than-light communication is not possible, and to date it has not been achieved in any experiment.
The Alcubierre drive, Alcubierre warp drive, or Alcubierre metric is a speculative idea based on a solution of Einstein's field equations in general relativity as proposed by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, by which a spacecraft could achieve apparent faster-than-light travel if a configurable energy-density field lower than that of vacuum could be created.
A warp drive is a theoretical superluminal spacecraft propulsion system in many science fiction works, most notably Star Trek and much of Isaac Asimov's work. A spacecraft equipped with a warp drive may travel at speeds greater than that of light by many orders of magnitude. In contrast to some other fictitious Faster-than-light technologies such as a jump drive, the warp drive does not permit instantaneous travel between two points, but rather involves a measurable passage of time which is pertinent to the concept. In contrast to hyperdrive, spacecraft at warp velocity would continue to interact with objects in "normal space." The general concept of "warp drive" was introduced by John W. Campbell in his 1931 novel Islands of Space.
A starship, starcraft or interstellar spacecraft is a theoretical spacecraft designed for traveling between planetary systems.
A sleeper ship is a hypothetical type of crewed spacecraft in which most or all of the crew spends the journey in some form of hibernation or suspended animation. The only known technology that allows long-term suspended animation of humans is the freezing of early-stage human embryos through embryo cryopreservation, which is behind the concept of embryo space colonization.
Hyperspace is a notion from science fiction of a superluminal method of travel. It is typically described as an alternative "sub-region" of space co-existing with our own universe which may be entered using an energy field or other device. In most fiction, hyperspace is described as a physical place that can be entered and exited. Once in hyperspace, the laws of general and special relativity do not behave in the same way when compared to normal outer space, allowing travelers though hyperspace to go great distances without being physically present in normal space and taking less time, measured from normal outer space, to travel said distance. "Through hyper-space, that unimagineable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time." Hyperspace is a part of the universe where time can be traveled just like normal space's distance. This allows faster-than-light travel which is necessary to have practical outer space travel.
"Slipstream" is a science fiction term for a fictional method of faster-than-light space travel, similar to hyperspace travel, warp drive, or "transfer points" from David Brin's Uplift series.
In science fiction, ultrawaves are transmissions or signals that may propagate faster than light through either normal space, or alternate space, such as hyperspace or subspace.
An Einstein–Rosen bridge, or wormhole, is a postulated method, within the general theory of relativity, of moving from one point in space to another without crossing the space between. Wormholes are a popular feature of science fiction as they allow faster-than-light interstellar travel within human timescales.
Jump is a fictional technology used by spacecraft in science fiction author C. J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe to travel faster-than-light (FTL). Jump can also be a verb, and is the act of travelling FTL using jump technology.
Mundane science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction; usually hard science fiction which is characterized by its setting on Earth or within the Solar System, and a lack of interstellar travel, intergalactic travel or human contact with extraterrestrials.
The hypothetical particles tachyons have inspired many occurrences of in fiction. The use of the word in science fiction dates back at least to 1970 when James Blish's Star Trek novel Spock Must Die! incorporated tachyons into an ill-fated transporter experiment.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Star Trek:
Negative energy is a concept used in physics to explain the nature of certain fields, including the gravitational field and various quantum field effects.
A detailed timeline of the BattleTech fictional setting stretching from the late 20th century to the mid-32nd describes humanity's technological, social and political development and spread through space both in broad historical terms and through accounts of the lives of individuals who experienced and shaped that history, with an emphasis on (initially) the year 3025 and creating an ongoing storyline from there. Generally, BattleTech assumes that its history is identical to real-world history up to until approximately 1984, when the reported histories begin to diverge; in particular, the game designers did not foresee the fall of the Soviet Union, which plays a major role past 1990 in the fictional BattleTech history. Individual lifestyles remain largely unchanged from those of modern times, due in part to stretches of protracted interplanetary warfare during which technological progress slowed or even reversed. Cultural, political and social conventions vary considerably between worlds, but feudalism is widespread, with many states ruled by hereditary lords and other nobility, below which are numerous social classes.
Space folding is a fictional method of instant space travel whereby the space folds so that the start and end points of the trip coincide/touch, and the travel takes no time.