The Science of Battlestar Galactica

by Di Justo, Patrick

  Clearly, if our brave men and women aboard Galactica are ever to make planetfall again in their lifetimes, we’re going to have to pick up the pace a bit. We know we can’t just slap a gargantuan rocket engine and huge fuel tanks onto Galactica and gain more thrust that way. In chapter 11, “Special Relativity,” we examined how parameters like the length of a spaceship and the passage of time on board are velocity-dependent. It turns out that Special Relativity has another nasty trick up its sleeve: as an object accelerates to relativistic speeds, it behaves as if it has more and more mass. The faster your spaceship travels, the harder it is to increase its speed still further. You get far less bang for the buck out of your fuel supply

  What about forms of propulsion like nuclear propulsion? Antimatter pulse-detonation propulsion? Exotic propulsion systems like these may get a spacecraft up to relativistic speeds, in which case our crew will have the opportunity to visit, perhaps, a handful of star systems in a lifetime. So from a dramatic standpoint, we’re going to have to travel at faster-than-light speeds, and there’s no two ways around it. How might we plausibly do that in an “Oh wow!,” not an “Oh please!,” fashion?

  Nothing we manufacture can travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. But here’s a funny little trick: although an object can never travel at exactly the speed of light, the equations of Special Relativity do not prevent an object from moving faster than the speed of light. If there is a way to travel from our slower-than-light realm into the faster-than-light realm without ever actually traveling at exactly the speed of light at some point—a way to “tunnel” through light speed—perhaps superluminal speeds are attainable.

  Tachyons are theoretical subatomic particles that live in the FTL realm; their lower speed limit is the speed of light, and it is impossible for them to travel any slower. As you might guess, this quality has made tachyons a staple of science fiction ever since they were first described in 1967. In real life, the unfortunate thing about tachyons is their annoying habit of disappearing before their detection, since the equations of Special Relativity also say that anything traveling faster than light would also travel backward in time. Therefore, any reasonable description of the function of Galactica’s FTL drive would have to account for, or ignore, Special Relativity. Since the show uses a relativistic effect as a plot device, it would be highly inconsistent, not to mention a bit hypocritical, to use or discard relativity at a “dramatic whim.”

  In his online blog posting of January 30, 2005, the Battlestar Galactica executive producer Ronald D. Moore gave a few hints about Galactica’s FTL drive:An FTL Jump is nearly instantaneous, essentially moving a ship from point A to point B without traveling through the normal space-time continuum, presumably by bending space around the ship in some way. The analogy I used during production was to imagine three dimensional space as a flat piece of two dimensional paper. To get from one side to the other, you can travel in a straight line across the page, or you can gently bend the sheet in half and cross from edge to edge virtually instantly. How this is accomplished and what is the basis of this technology outstrips my technical brainpower.

  In fact, I feel faint just coming up with that explanation.

  In the series bible, Ron also provided another constraint:The speed of light is a law and there will be no moving violations.

  So, in summary, we have to describe a system that will transport the mass equivalent of a small asteroid across the cosmos, from point A to point B, without traversing the space in between. We must have functional speeds faster than light while never actually breaking the speed of light in the process. Hence the “jump drive.”

  In Galactica’s case, we are looking at flinging a quantity of mass on the order of 120 teragrams (120 billion kilograms, or about 132 million tons) across the cosmos. Is that even remotely possible, to send something approaching the mass of a thousand Nimitz class aircraft carriers several light-years away? Or is this where the First Law of BSG comes into play? Obviously, no human alive knows exactly how an FTL drive works. Nevertheless, we can ponder some of the relevant physics that may one day lead us to FTL travel, and will yield a drama-driven plot element based upon known physics. The constraints are now in place.

  Teleportation

  Can we teleport the mass? The idea of a Star Trek-like transporter is to convert matter to energy, send that energy to a specific place, and then reconvert that energy back into matter. If Galactica’s FTL drive works like a Star Trek transporter, its problem is to convert 120,000,000 kgs of battlestar completely into energy. We’ve already established that there is an enormous amount of energy stored in even the smallest amount of matter; with Galactica’s mass, we’re talking a significant amount of juice.

  Yes, that’s a problem.

  In the first atomic explosion in the New Mexico desert in 1945, the bomb held a little more than 6 kilograms of plutonium. When the fallout and ground contamination from the explosion were examined, Manhattan Project scientists estimated that perhaps 1 kilogram of that plutonium had actually been involved in nuclear fission, and that almost precisely 1g of mass had been transformed into energy. If the purpose of the FTL drive is to convert the entire mass of Galactica—all 120 trillion grams of it—to energy instantaneously, the release of energy would be the largest explosion seen in this part of the galaxy since the supernova that ultimately led to the creation of our Sun. Explosions like this, at varying magnitudes, would happen every time any ship in the Fleet jumped anywhere. Under the category of “potential jump drive physics,” we can rule this out.

  Hyperspace

  What about hyperspace? A common device used in science fiction and science fantasy depends upon the existence of an alternate realm where space is “denser” and the speed of light is not a speed limit, or perhaps there is no speed limit at all—hyperspace. A spacecraft enters hyperspace through its own or by external means (by using a jump gate versus a jump point in Babylon 5 terminology), it travels rapidly to the destination, and reenters “normal” space. Such a dimension has been called hyperspace (Babylon 5, Star Wars, and others), subspace (Star Trek, though the plot device is used for superluminal communications only), or slipspace (Star Trek: Voyager, Andromeda, Doctor Who, and the Halo series of video games). When the concept of hyperspatial travel initially appeared in 1930s science fiction, there was no corresponding science to explain it. It was a dramatic conceit. Comparatively recent models of the structure of our universe may provide a dramatically satisfying post hoc explanation for hyperspace.

  The notion that there may be parallel universes coexisting simultaneously has been a frequently used device in science fiction, though the concept of multiple universes and/or multiple realities goes back much further and can even be found in ancient Hindu writings. Parallel universes have been generally depicted two different ways in science fiction. In one case, a parallel universe is a universe that is almost exactly like ours, but where some small deviations in history have propagated to create dramatic differences. In other cases a parallel universe is a distinct universe that exists adjoining to our own—like E Space and N Space in Doctor Who, or fluidic space in Star Trek: Voyager. Hyperspace relies on the second type.

  Branes in the multiverse.

  Recent advances in superstring theory, specifically a concept called brane cosmology, hint at the existence of hyperspace. The fundamental premise of brane cosmology is that our four-dimensional space-time may be one of many (normally) disconnected universes separated by some sort of membrane, or “brane.” In other words, our four-dimensional universe is one of many that coexist simultaneously within a five-dimensional space known as the Bulk. Scientists have proposed cosmological brane models that suggest that interactions with neighboring branes may explain the weakness of gravity (compared to other fundamental forces). One scenario, called the ekpyrotic universe, is based upon the hypothesis that our observable universe came into being when two branes collided. Together, all the parallel universes along with the Bulk form what has been called th
e multiverse.

  The reason the Bulk has proved seductively attractive to SF writers is that there is no guarantee that the physical laws that prevail in our universe are the same in the Bulk between universes. Want to travel beyond the speed of light without the hassles of Special Relativity? It just may be possible in the Bulk.

  Think of the multiverse as a huge apartment/condo/co-op building. Our own universe, and every other universe, would be like individual apartments in that larger structure. Suppose we live in universe 4D and we want to go from the bedroom to the kitchen. The house physics rules for our particular unit say that we can’t travel any faster than the speed of light within our universe. But there’s nothing saying that we can’t go outside the apartment—into the empty hallway between the universes, where the speed limit would not apply—and get to the kitchen that way. The Bulk—the empty hallway between universes—just represents a region through which we may be able to travel. It fits the concept of hyperspace.

  Of course, there are no guarantees that the rules of the Bulk would allow faster-than-light travel. But we do now suspect that there is a realm that has some of the properties that we attribute to hyperspace—outside our own universe, difficult (or impossible) to access, with different rules and limits. For a science fiction writer, taking a plausible but hazy scientific concept and giving it the attributes you need for your story is vastly preferable to just making up something like “hyperspace.”

  Wormholes

  Like hyperspace, another science fiction FTL concept is the use of wormholes. Wormholes are shortcuts through space-time that allow travel from point A to point B at a functional speed greater than c. The object traveling through the wormhole never exceeds c; it just has such a shortened path between the two points that it’s as if it traveled faster than light in normal space. Unlike hyperspace, which started out solely as a child of science fiction, the concept of wormholes arises from honest-to-goodness real mathematical solutions to Einstein’s General Relativity equations.

  Although the concept of shortcuts through space-time dates back to 1921, the term “wormhole” was first coined in 1957 by the physicist John Wheeler—using the analogy that a worm chewing through an apple between two points travels a shorter distance than a worm crawling across its surface. Although several types of wormholes have been mathematically discovered over the years, it was not until 1988 that researchers described wormholes that could be both stable enough and large enough for a spacecraft to travel into. Since then, wormholes have been discovered that not only connect distant points within this universe, but points within adjoining universes. Perhaps inter-brane wormhole travel would make a great future science fiction series!

  The geometry of a wormhole.

  While wormholes and related cosmological structures are excellent fodder for science fiction FTL travel, they don’t quite explain the operation of Galactica’s FTL drive. Travel through a wormhole can be functionally FTL, but as has been depicted in series like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Stargate: SG-1, there is still a certain amount of travel time involved, and this is not what we’ve seen on Battlestar Galactica.

  Space Warp

  Both theory and observations of General Relativity make it clear that space-time can be curved, warped, perhaps even folded or compressed. One of the more famous FTL plot devices in science fiction is Star Trek’s warp drive, a propulsion system that continuously compresses, or warps, space ahead of a starship. It was one of those ideas that was “in the air” in 1960s science fiction. Just prior to the original Star Trek series, in his 1965 novel Dune, the author Frank Herbert wrote that the Guild Heighliners moved at superluminal speeds by using a phenomenon called the Holtzmann Effect to travel through foldspace, a similar concept.

  Imagine an ant crawling on a blanket. If the ant could somehow scrunch up the blanket in front of it and “unscrunch” the blanket behind it, it could make its way across the blanket much more quickly than if the blanket were flat. The USS Enterprise and the Heighliners work the same way. In both cases the spacecraft do not actually exceed the speed of light locally; they merely create denser regions of space through which they can pass and effectively travel superluminally.

  In a strange twist of “science imitates art,” nearly 30 years after Dune and the original Star Trek, the physicist Miguel Alcubierre described a mechanism by which a spacecraft could travel within a “warp bubble,” creating a compression of space-time ahead of the craft and a spreading-out of it behind. Although there are serious technical hurdles that confine the Alcubierre Drive to the realm of the theoretical—chief of which is the paradox that you need to have a functional Alcubierre Drive before you can create one—this is the direction we have pursued in explaining the function of Galactica’s jump drive.

  Actually . . .

  One of us was tasked with determining how the jump drive on Galactica works for the season two episode “The Captain’s Hand.” Page 221 is a transcription of the technical notes submitted to the production staff.

  Most similar to the Heighliners from Dune, Galactica generates a field that warps/folds space ahead of it, not just locally like a warp drive, but over the trajectory of the entire jump. It passes the warp over itself, “attaches” itself to the other side of the fold, and switches off the field. Voilà, a space-time jump! Keep in mind that this is an explanation within the world of science fiction, and is never intended to be practically attainable. Nevertheless, work is under way on this very front.

  From 1996 to 2002, NASA sponsored a program at the Glenn Spaceflight Center near Cleveland called the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program. This was an effort designed to investigate new areas of physics that could literally lead to quantum leaps in our ability to travel the cosmos rapidly. The goal of the program was not to develop technology for traveling faster, but rather to explore and understand the physical principles that can be exploited by future technology to make significant advances in propulsion. Although the program found no breakthroughs to take us to the stars soon, it did generate sixteen peer-reviewed articles that may shed light on future research directions. Perhaps, 30 years hence, a brilliant young physicist will find a theoretical basis for the jump drive the way Alcubierre has done for warp drive. If we’re particularly fortunate, maybe some clever engineer will find a practical way to implement the Holy Grail of space flight and literally open the galaxy to human exploration. That would be the ultimate “Oh, WOW!” moment.

  The Captain’s Hand

  BLUE Production Draft

  TECH Calculations/Comments/Observations

  Kevin R. Grazier

  5 October 2005

  General Comments on FTL Travel and the FTL Drive How does an FTL jump work? We’ve established that the Colonials are far ahead of present-day Earth in some technologies, but because they have turned their back in some cases (computers), fairly equal in other technologies.

  Let us assume that Colonial science has done one thing we’ve not: they’ve unified the electromagnetic force with gravity—in other words the two forces are, at some level, different manifestations of one single force. The Colonials understand how and why.

  If scientific understanding of this has led to technological application, then perhaps the generation of an extremely intense electromagnetic field can be the equivalent of an intense gravitational field. One implication of general relativity is that the presence of matter bends/warps space. That’s what gravity is—warped space. So perhaps an FTL drive creates an intense EM/gravimetric field that either creates a region of dramatically warped space ahead of a vessel—or a rip in the fabric of spacetime which the ship uses to enter into hyperspace.

  I’ll think about this more later, right now we have a show to get out . . .

  So to do this we would need a field generator. The intense EM/gravimetric field needed for FTL travel would likely do awful things to biological systems (that is, people) who were exposed to it, unfortunately. So let’s assume that an FTL drive consists of multiple fiel
d generators—that way no single generator creates a biologically harmful field. Through the process of constructive/destructive interference, the generators are “tuned” to create a “jump point” directly in front of the ship. Then, either the main drive propels the ship into the jump point, or the field is modulated to “pull” the jump point across the ship—the latter description better describing the visual effects we’ve seen to date.

  So let’s assume that Galactica has at least four field generators (two starboard/two port; two up; two down). I assume that the energy required to create the initial warp in space is far greater than that necessary to maintain travel through it.

  Also, if one generator goes offline, we don’t jump (or, perhaps, we jump somewhere into BFA—bumfrak Aerilon).

  I also assume that the “spinner” portion of the FTL drive refers to a power source that generates a colossal amount of power in a very short amount of time—a huge pulse to the field generators. The generation of such an intense energy field, and the generation of the power necessary to create such a field, is likely to generate a lot of heat as a by-product. Dissipating this heat would be the function of one of the major subsystems of a jump drive.

  Also, as the field generators fire up, they would likely create local phenomena, which explains the warping effect we saw in the miniseries.

  I also assume that at some level, the artificial gravity on board our ships is a different application of the same technology.