Why Sci-Fi is an Unreliable Guide to the Future

Pity sci-fi writers: they’ve got to come up with yet another Cowboys In Space movie or TV series. This means that all the things we take for granted in our daily lives have to be transferred into whizzy spaceships crossing vast distances without incurring any of the real-world problems that would render the script unworkable.

So script writers create deus ex machina solutions: wormholes, faster-than-light travel, subspace communications, perhaps even a species of docile super-unicorns that can violate all the laws of physics in order to ensure the protagonists can get home in time for dinner.

The problem is, most people don’t bother to acquaint themselves with physics. They read about wormholes in a sci-fi novel or see a CGI wormhole in their favorite space costume drama and assume the script writers (who’ve likely not even mastered basic calculus) know what they’re talking about.

Unfortunately, reality is far less willing to accommodate the needs of lazy scriptwriters than most people seem to assume.

Let’s start with faster-than-light travel, otherwise known by the acronym FTL (as in “activate the FTL drive, lieutenant!”).

This is basically a non-starter. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which resolved the fundamental discrepancy in Maxwell’s equations of electro-magnetism, showed clearly that (i) only things with zero rest mass can travel at the speed of light; and (ii) nothing at all can travel faster than the speed…