Worldbuilding With Speculative Technology

In this longer blog post, I hope to take you through a journey of thinking about alternative applications for the speculative technologies in your sci-fi worldbuilding.

There are already a lot of articles out there on the internet about the different types of faster-than-light (FTL) drive tech that have been used throughout science fiction. It’s a deep well you can draw from. There’s your warp drives, wormholes, hyperdrives, jump drives, even infinite improbability drives! And all of these have different flavours—such as the Federation’s dilithium-based matter/antimatter engine vs the Romulan singularity-based one in Star Trek… or others such as jump-gates, stargates, slipstream, and frame-shift drives—the list goes on and on. Each one also comes with differing levels of believability attached, based on how well they position themselves around our current understanding of physics.

But this article isn’t going to be about that.

Rather, I’ll be looking at how we can, as writers, give our worldbuilding better verisimilitude regardless of the type of speculative technologies we introduce into our sci-fi worlds, by going beyond the obvious use-case. Of course, this also applies to fantasy worldbuilding as well, and any other kind of story featuring fictional things, really (how many times have we had stories with secret magical underworlds existing alongside ordinary human civilisations, and how rarely is the societal impact taken to its fullest potential?)

In this article, I will be using the concept of the warp drive—the Alcubierre flavour, in particular—as the example, because it’s broadly the type of FTL drive I’m working with in my Augment Saga universe.

IT’S A GRAVITY DRIVE

The basic premise of a warp drive is that it warps, or distorts, something in order to facilitate motion. What is this something? Spacetime. The idea is that, like a surfer riding a wave, a spacecraft uses the distortion of a bubble of spacetime to propel itself in a given direction while remaining locally at rest. The huge problem with faster-than-light travel is that nothing with mass can go that fast. In fact, nothing with mass can ever reach the speed of light at all. This is because it takes energy to move mass. And because mass and energy are the same thing (thanks Einstein), the faster you go, the more energy (and therefore mass) you have, and so it takes even more energy to keep on accelerating. Eventually you get to a speed where the object you’re accelerating becomes infinitely heavy, and would therefore require infinite energy to push it any faster. And, sadly, the universe does not possess infinite energy.

That speed is the speed of light in a vacuum: exactly 299,792,458m/s… or c.

But massless particles such as light, can only travel at c. They can’t actually go any slower than that. The reduction of the speed of light through different mediums isn’t due to the particles themselves slowing down, but because of interactions with the matter through which they’re passing.

So the end result is that there’s no matter in the universe that can exceed c locally. But what about spacetime itself? That has no mass but it’s also not a particle. It is, however, subject to curvature in the presence of mass, which in turn affects the acceleration of matter around it. It is also expanding. In fact, in some places in the universe, galaxies are moving away from each other faster than the speed of light because of the rate of spacetime expansion between them. Space, it seems, can travel faster than light.

That’s where the warp drives come in as a method of FTL travel. They utilise this inherent ability of spacetime to allow for two objects to be displaced from one another faster than c without needing to expend the energy to accelerate the mass directly. And they do this by warping spacetime—or curving it to the extreme.

There’s a name for the curvature of spacetime already, and it happens all over the universe everywhere mass is present: Gravity. In that sense, warp drives are really gravity drives. So if the characters in your universe have the technology to warp spacetime in a controllable way, they basically have control over gravity.

Now, when mass curves spacetime to create a gravity well, there is a gradient to its influence which technically stretches the entire length and breadth of the universe, but more practically has an effect on objects more strongly the closer they are to its centre. For instance, our own Sun’s gravitational influence is strong enough to keep all the planets, dwarf planets, asteroids, comets, and Teslas in orbit around it, and this influence stretches out nearly all the way to Proxima Centauri. Black holes, by comparison have extremely steep gradients within their event horizons owing to their density, but their influence beyond that is subject to their mass the same as a similarly heavy star.

All this to say that spacetime curvature gradients can be as steep or shallow as they need to be. So it’s not a stretch (pun intended) to imagine that a civilisation that has developed a warp drive is creating an extreme amount of curvature in one place, but with an extremely shallow gradient beyond it. Otherwise, every ship using one to travel even at significant sub-light speeds would have the gravitational influence of a star, and wreck entire solar systems! It’s really quite high-tech stuff.

Here’s the good news: In General Relativity, this type of propulsion is technically allowable. And as a sci-fi worldbuilder who tends towards the harder side of the genre, “technically allowable” is good enough for me!

TECHNICALLY ALLOWABLE

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
—Frederik Pohl

As worldbuilders and writers, we have a vast opporunity to think beyond the obvious, and the more we are able to do this, the better integrated our ideas become within the worlds we create. Within “hard” science fiction, there’s this tendency to think about how we can extrapolate existing technologies in a reasonably believable manner and project them into our future settings. This is a great thought exercise, but if we’re not careful it can trap us and prevent us from allowing ourselves to consider much more speculative stuff. In the past, the masters of “hard” sci-fi made copious use of speculative technologies even if they weren’t necessarily technically allowable in physics. In Foundation, for instance, Asimov’s Galactic Empire makes use of jump drive technology to traverse space, and similarly in I, Robot, there is a story where a robot makes a spacecraft capable of FTL travel by taking itself through hell. That’s… not entirely scientific, to put it lightly. But it’s still heralded as “hard” science fiction mainly because it’s focused on the robots (positronic brains are pretty speculative as well, mind you). We should not be afraid of speculation as long as we can give it a reasonable scientific backing.

I would say that part of the heart of hard sci-fi is in the example given in the Frederik Pohl quote above - thinking around other plausible applications for and the societal impacts of the speculative technologies we create. Not to shy away from them, but to make something that seems cool on the surface and then maybe examine why it might be a Really Bad Thing. It’s about thinking scientifically about unscientific things. Delve deeper into the implications for your world. For instance, the internal combustion engine was a great invention which led to the car, but cars aren’t the only ways in which we use that technology. The very presence of new, successful technology changes the world. It impacts societies in different ways. Our speculative tech should do this as well.

BEYOND THE OBVIOUS

Your fictional society has the technology to control spacetime and traverse the stars. Much like the internal combustion engine, are there any other ways in which this incredible technology could be used, beyond the obvious use for travel? It all depends on the system’s capability for miniaturisation, and so we need to be careful to not go overboard with use-cases and push our worlds into self-parody. After all, we don’t use the internal combustion engine to operate ballpoint pens! In this vein, I would personally stick to industrial applications. Warp drive technology is complex and potentially hazardous, and likely unsuited to frivolous implementations. A good warning against this comes once again from Asimov’s Foundation in which he took the idea of “atomics”—a new and exciting technology in his day—into absurdity. He had atomic dresses, atomic home appliances, jewellery and fashion accessories. With 10,000 years of innovation, surely there are no limits to miniaturisation! Let’s not go there…

Inertia-Less Drives

So, I’ll start with what is perhaps the least obvious of the most obvious use for a warp drive: sub-light travel and inertia-less drives. That’s right! Just because you have an FTL drive, it doesn’t mean you have to go faster than light all the time. Star Trek is a bit of an offender here; there’s the warp drive for going faster than light, and then for sublight speeds they have the “impulse” drive, which is never fully explained. But why can’t they just use the warp drive all the time?* In fact, this might be the most realistic use for such a drive system!

Even if it turns out we can build a warp drive, there’s still no guarantee that we could actually use it to exceed the light barrier. Does it cease to be useful, then? Not at all. Since by its very nature, a warp drive takes no account of the mass it has to move, it essentially becomes an inertia-less propulsion system that would allow us to get to the edge of the solar system within hours. Free space flight! Newtonian motion, orbital mechanics, the locations of the planets in their orbits all become lesser considerations if we’re not concerned with the movement of mass. A warp drive, therefore, remains extremely useful even in the absence of FTL travel.

In my Augment Saga universe, the Austinium Drive is the FTL propulsion system in use by human spacecraft. I have established that it can go slower than light, because it accelerates up to and beyond c, but for the humans it is a brand new technology, and not all the other possibilities for it have yet been explored. I have to admit, even when I established the worldbuilding of the Maldaccian Empire in The Re-Emergence I hadn’t fully considered that their quantum field propulsion system might allow more freedom of movement than conventional engines. But they do utilise the technology in other ways…

*I know there’s lore surrounding this—not using the warp drive inside star systems etc…

Real “Artificial” Gravity

Remember how I said above that a warp drive is really a gravity drive? Like that meme where all the Spider-Men are pointing at each other. Well, if you have the ability to manipulate the local geometry of spacetime, then the next most obvious use-case for this is to supply gravity to your spaceships. In that sense, it ceases to be “artificial" gravity anymore, but actual, honest-to-goodness gravity.

It’s not gravity unless it’s from the Gravité region of France. Otherwise, it’s just sparkling spacetime geometry.
—Me

This is one use-case I explore in The Re-Emergence. The Imperial Cruiser Qesh’kal uses the warp drive to generate a gravitational field within the ship while in “normal” space. There’s a good reason for this. Bodies that have evolved in the presence of a strong gravitational influence aren’t well suited to the environment of space. Wounds don’t heal properly, organs don’t work right, bone density diminishes, muscles atrophy etc… And also it’s hard to adjust to that environment mentally. So having the ability to take gravity with you into space has practical benefits. The limitation to this is that the ship can’t handle both the FTL drive and the gravity generator to be on at the same time. So sometimes they float, and sometimes they don’t, and it’s potentially harmful, as Imperator Da’kora Corasar discovered.

Shielding

JWST Deep Field - NIRCam Image (NASA, STScl)

Have you ever looked at a snippet from the Hubble Deep Field, or some of JWST’s amazing images of distant galaxies? You’ll notice something about them. There are weird curved smears in some areas, usually quite faint and red as well. Sometimes if you’re lucky you’ll see a picture of a galaxy with a full smeared ring around it. These are called Einstein Rings, and they are the product of the immense mass of a foreground galaxy curving spacetime so much that the light from another galaxy behind it gets bent into a ring, or reflected into two or more different places as the light comes to us from different places around the foreground galaxy. This is gravitational lensing. Gravity is really good at bending and deflecting light. Not just visible light either—but the entire electromagnetic spectrum. In fact, gravity is good at deflecting a lot of things. When we say something is in orbit around something else, really it’s travelling in a straight line. Spacetime is curved so much, however, that the straight line path of the orbiting object gets turned into an ellipse. When we throw a ball away from us, as far as the ball is concerned it’s going in a straight line, but the Earth rises up to intercept it.

So, if your civilisation can already warp spacetime to such an extent that it travels faster than light, it should also be able to use that same technology as a deflector shield, and like a black hole perhaps even spaghettify incoming weapons-fire. Again, taking an example from The Re-Emergence, I didn’t make their shields that strong. I didn’t want the ship to be completely god-moded, because that would be boring. So it wasn’t strong enough to spaghettify kinetic projectiles, but the Qesh’kal’s spacetime shielding could block directed energy weapons. It’s totally up to you how far you take this use-case, and how advanced your civilisation is. Iain M Banks’ Culture has total mastery over spacetime (called “The Grid”), for instance—even using it as a weapon…

Weaponisation

From this list so far, you might think I’m trying to justify all the Rule of Cool soft sci-fi tech by making it all based on warp drive technology. What’s next? Energy weapons using a beam of spaghettifying spacetime? Or am I going to talk about the aforementioned Grid weapons from the Culture?

Neither.

Instead, I’m going to talk about something a bit scarier. One of the main problems I came across when researching for my series and how I would integrate FTL travel into a realistic universe was the fact that no one would be able to see where they’re going. Remember those distant galaxies from JWST? They’re mostly redshifted, which means they’re moving away from us, and are so far away that their light has been stretched from the visible wavelengths into the near and mid infrared, which means the light reaching us has much less energy. The opposite is possible, too. The light from M32, the Andromeda galaxy, is very slightly blueshifted to us, because it’s moving towards us. This means that the light reaching us is of a slightly higher wavelength, and therefore more energetic. What happens, then, when you travel at close to the speed of light? All the energy from the entire universe directly in front of you is shifted into a much higher wavelength. Infra-red light sources suddenly become visible. Visible galaxies suddenly shift into the ultraviolet. Ultraviolet light sources become deadly x-rays and gamma rays. And all of that hits you unless you have proper shielding (see previous section). With a warp drive, all that high-energy radiation (not just from light, but also Alpha and Beta particles) accumulates on the front of the warp bubble, and when you stop—BANG. It all flies forwards and ruins someone’s day, somewhere in the universe.

“Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space … Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going 'till it hits something! That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime!"
—Drill Sergeant Nasty, Mass Effect 2

And just like that, you have an incredibly deadly weapon on your hands. We already have to deal with gamma-ray bursts from the other end of the universe. If one went off closer to us—within this galaxy, even—that’s a really good way to sterilise an entire planet. Imagine doing that with a warp drive. This means that not only do you have the potential for a planet-killing weapon (hopefully of last-resort) built into your spacecraft by design, but you’ll also need to consider safety measures. In both The Re-Emergence and The Flight of the Aurora the characters have a system to drop the ship from FTL safely in such a way that prevents a planet from being blanketed in radiation every time they stop. I am also exploring this potential in a major scene in my upcoming The Shadow of Arcadia.

Megastructures and Industry

Let’s move away from spaceships now and talk about more industrial applications for warp technology. There’s a lot of potential here. If you’re no longer concerned with mass, it facilitates the building of megastructures out in space. It will influence the design of space stations. It will enable easier access to asteroid mining, and so much more.

Asteroid mining is an interesting thing. The really annoying thing about them is that they’re all the way out there. We can get to them, we can land on them, we can bring back samples from them, and we can even smash into them to change their orbital paths. All these things have been done in the real world. Asteroids are so rich in resources that we could use them almost indefinitely. The real pain in the arse is not just taking mining equipment to them, but bringing significant amounts of material back. Wouldn’t it be better to just… bring the whole asteroid here? In that sense, warp tech opens up the idea of a post-scarcity civilisation through easy access to asteroid mining.

Back to megastructures, even if we can’t travel faster-than-light with a warp engine, there are other ways to explore the galaxy that don’t require groups of humans to even leave the solar system. I’m talking about stellar engines. No, I’m not saying stick a warp drive to the sun, but there are options for siphoning the energy of the sun using collectors which would then feed into a huge rocket engine and push the entire solar system around the galaxy slowly. That’s beneficial for potentially moving a solar system out of the way of an errant brown dwarf or star threatening the system’s orbital stability. Warp tech could facilitate the building of these kinds of structures.

Even on Earth, would this technology see use in the construction industry? Can it be used for anti-gravity? If so, how about cloud cities, or air cars? How far does it go, and how small can it be made? Here we must be careful like I said above, or we risk applying the tech inappropriately and making it silly.

Problems or Opportunities?

I’ve given a bunch of beneficial alternative uses for the technology above, but what about the problems? How will society be affected negatively by the advent of such a technology? Obviously weaponisation is potentially disastrous, but what about other ways? Currently we have a system called LIGO which helps astrophysicists with their research into the universe by detecting gravitational waves caused by merging black holes and neutron stars. These laser interferometers are incredibly sensitive and absolutely huge, requiring several kilometres of land, and to be underground. They’re easily put out by earthquakes anywhere on the planet, and susceptible to interference from the tiniest of local vibrations, so they’re very well shielded. What happens to that valuable research when you suddenly have a bunch of spaceships flying around using warp drives? At least, in the short term. Astronomers are already upset about SpaceX’s Starlink satellite swarm getting in the way of our view of the night sky. Arguably, Starlink is a beneficial technology to provide internet coverage around the world, but it creates a multitude of problems by just getting in the way of telescopes. I reckon copious use of a warp drive within our solar system would see projects like LIGO face extra challenges in the short-term because of gravitational interference.

On the other hand, in the longer term, the ability to warp spacetime could see massive advances in the next generations of gravitational wave detectors. They’d probably need to be moved off-world, even to the edge of the solar system, but that really is the preference for these kinds of things (think space telescopes), and we would be able to filter out the noise of those FTL engines much more effectively by simply having a better understanding of what we’re dealing with. A good analogy for this is active noise reduction in headphones, which cancels out incoming sound waves with destructive interference by producing an opposing sound wave which is 180° out-of-phase.

I mentioned massive advances for the next generation of detectors; the LIGO system is really the first of its kind, and so in the grand scheme of things, will turn out to be fairly primitive as technology improves. Black hole or neutron star mergers are the loudest producers of gravitational waves in the entire universe, and we can only just about detect them. But there are other, quieter sources we can’t detect yet. If the aforementioned mergers are like shouting into a megaphone, then the others are barely a whisper. We might be able to use our warp technology to amplify the softer gravitational waves to the point where we could, for instance, detect the ripples created by Io orbiting Jupiter. In that sense, it could help us create much better detectors.

The implementation of one type of technology in your world can be used to make problems for, or improvements to, other related technologies depending on how new your technology is. Is your world set in the time period where the tech is causing teething pains, or has the tech you’re writing about had time to settle and given everything else a chance to catch up to it?

In The Flight of the Aurora I have a mention of LIGO being used to try to detect the gravitational waves from the Aurora as it activated its FTL drive. In From the Grave of the Gods, a gravitational wave was detected when one of the two mysterious extrasolar objects left the solar system exceeding the speed of light. Gravitational waves as part of the operation of FTL tech is also present in The Re-Emergence, as Seventeen detects the telltale signature of an enemy vessel.

There are other problems to consider as well, such as how well would it work within an atmosphere, and does it pose a danger? I am actually exploring this possibility in The Shadow of Arcadia. And how would it change our infrastructure and legal systems? We would need a robust set of rules and laws to regulate the use of this technology and prevent disasters from occurring. It may all arise quickly, and imperfectly.

There’s a lot of things to consider here. We like to think of post-scarcity societies as a good thing, but given the capitalist world we currently live in, would sudden access to limitless resources cause societal problems in the short to medium term as the few take control and inequality utterly balloons? Hyperinflation, supply far outweighing demand etc…

Then there’s the establishment of new societies elsewhere in the solar system. One of the biggest hurdles to putting a settlement on another planet is getting there safely. Warp tech opens things up in that regard significantly. The Expanse is great in how it shows inequality and discontent between not just the different societies of Earth, Mars and the Belt, but also on Earth itself where so many live in squalor despite such huge technological advances. And that’s without throwing an FTL drive system into the mix. Though, perhaps the ubiquity of such technology might have alleviated some of the Belt’s difficulties.

CONCLUSION

So, there we go. What other kinds of applications or problems can you think of for the technology to manipulate spacetime? I’d love to hear your comments!

This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list by any means, as long as this blog post has been… I know it’s been a lot longer than my usual ones. But you can apply this kind of thinking to any technology or concept that you’re writing about. Have a good think around how else these things could be used—especially if they’re a technology or concept that’s well established in the society. A propulsion system is never just a propulsion system. A magical society can’t just be plopped next to ours secretly without major changes. Some things are extremely pervasive, and taking the time to sprinkle in a few of those things, or use them as part of your themes to explore, will strengthen your worldbuilding. Heck, Arthur C Clarke took a singular technological concept and wrote Rendezvous with Rama by asking the question, “now what would that look like and how would it work?”

Think scientifically about unscientific things.

“Because this is the science of fiction, and that’s what we do—speculate over the unreality.”
—Carla Ra, sci-fi author.

From the blog post: This is Why a Time Traveller Would Not Appear In Space

I would like to take a minute to thank Carla Ra for her valuable science input into this article, which included corrections to the section on LIGO and introducing me to ways in which it could benefit from warp technology. Go follow her on Twitter, read her books and keep an eye on her blog.