TALARIA

The ways people have proposed to beat light, real and invented, catalogued and scored against the physics that says you can't.

Thirty-seven real proposals and sixty-eight fictional drives, each sorted by the loophole it uses and scored line by line against a register of twenty-nine no-go results. The two halves join on the loophole: pick a drive from a story and see what its real cousin would cost.

01

The atlas

Both scoring matrices, filterable, with the join between physics and fiction and the full register.

open → 02

The antitelephone

Send a faster-than-light message to a moving friend. Watch the reply arrive before you sent it.

open → 03

The register

Twenty-nine results that put a price on beating light, each with what it forbids, the escape hatches and who it bites.

open → 04

Lineage

Who was reading whom: Sagan to Thorne, Star Trek to Alcubierre, the word hyperspace, the paper fold.

open → 05

The timeline

Every entry on one strip from 1905 to now, physics above the line and fiction below, with who was reading whom drawn between them.

open → 06

Report cards

One shareable card per fictional drive: its loophole, how well the story handles the physics and whether it raises the time-travel bill.

open → 07

The Alcubierre bubble

Expansion, contraction, the negative-energy shells and the bill in kilograms.

open → 08

The wormhole

A throat you can walk through, and what happens when one mouth takes a trip.

open → 09

Pick a drive, pick a frame

Any drive from the catalogue, any observer. The jump becomes a message to the past.

open → 10

The honest rocket

Ship time against home time to the nearby stars at one g.

open → 11

No signalling

Entangled pairs, any measurement you like, and nothing gets through.

open →

The idea

Every faster-than-light scheme leans on one of six moves.

  1. L1 · Faster in the same space. The ship itself outruns light. Tachyons, the inertialess drive, ludicrous speed.
  2. L2 · Move the space. Spacetime carries the ship and nothing exceeds light locally. Warp bubbles.
  3. L3 · Take a shortcut. Two distant points joined by a tunnel, a fold, a gate or a jump. Wormholes.
  4. L4 · Leave the manifold. Step into some other space with laxer rules and come back. Hyperspace, subspace, the Warp.
  5. L5 · Send the message. Information beats light even if matter cannot. The ansible, entanglement radio.
  6. L6 · Not FTL at all. Filed here by habit: time dilation, hibernation, the sublight epic.

Against those sits the register: the theorems, inequalities and instabilities that put a price on each move. Three of them do most of the work. Any signal faster than light is a message to somebody's past unless something breaks Lorentz invariance. Any geometric shortcut needs negative energy. And the negative energy has to be laid along the route in advance, at sublight speed, which makes a warp drive a railway rather than a car.

Real proposals are stated in their strongest form and then scored: satisfies, violates, dodges or silent, against every entry. Fiction cannot violate a theorem, so it is graded on what it does with the physics it chose to invoke: does the story engage with the cost, follow a rule that happens to answer it or never notice? The join between the two is the point.

Method: the grading scheme · how to read the register · every dossier and source: the repository