Another Way Around FTL Travel
There is one other way of traveling across the stars without necessarily breaking the known laws of physics. But this one may require technology and an understanding of physics that we are not even capable of fully understanding just yet. The “Einstein Rosen Bridge” is one of the more controversial concepts in physics today, and if you get to know it, you will understand why.
The Einstein Rosen Bridge is a theoretical mode of travel that ultimately does not propel the traveler faster than the speed of light, but rather bends the connection of two points in the universe, opening a hole at two different points that would otherwise be considered very far away from one another. These holes would then open up in a way that would allow a craft to pass through one and out the other without actually accelerating faster than the speed of light, but ending up several thousand light years away from its original point.
To better understand the Einstein Rosen Bridge, it may be useful to compare it in a 2 dimensional model. Imagine that all space is simply a flat plane, like a map of the stars on a piece of paper. You wish to get from point A to point B, but the travel time across the piece of paper would take you years. If you folded the piece of paper, you could overlap the points A and B and push a hole through them to allow passage of your two dimensional craft through to the other side.
There are theories, however, that such a concept could actually be used to travel not only through space, but through time as well. If you recall our explanation of relativity, you’ll understand that objects that are accelerated close to the speed of light experience time far differently than those who are going much slower. As a result, objects moving at close to the speed of light age much slower than the rest of the world as their time is slowed down so they do not break the laws of physics. It is theorized that if the Einstein Rosen Bridge is accelerated somehow to speeds close to the speed of light, but the other bridge remains still, this could result in time travel.
The problem with the Einstein Rosen Bridge, or Wormhole as it’s more traditionally called, is it would require more energy than we are currently capable of creating. In science fiction films and movies wormholes are opened casually by smaller ships, but our current understanding would require that they use a lot of energy. Some theorists suggest it would require more than an entire sun going supernova. There are those who say a binary star system collapsing in on itself or even a Gamma ray burst could be enough to create a natural Einstein Rosen bridge, but it’s unknown how such a natural phenomena would open up a hole from one point in the universe to another. Such a bridge could simply be a direction-less rip in the space-time continuum and require human or alien intervention to be connected to a destination point.
