Credible FTL

While faster than light travel is a standard trope of science fiction, traditionally it is not treated charitably by aficionados of real science. Much has changed and now there are some credible means, hypothetically, that can be used to explain superluminal travel. We will have to assume the engineering at some points, but the science is real enough that we can quantify the effects.

The most credible is the traversable wormhole. The engineering of how to grab and then hold open a pair of wormhole mouths is confusing enough, that will be the 'assume the engineering' point, and we will work from there.

Start with a planck scale pair of wormhole mouths, which is 21.8 micrograms. While it is held open, pass about 2 Coulombs of charge thru the two mouths with a 20-microampere electron beam passing through the wormhole for about 6 days. The result is that the wormhole mouth will now have the same charge-to-mass ratio as protons and will behave like a proton in the electric and magnetic fields of a particle accelerator. With the same charge to mass ratio of protons, each of the wormhole mouths can be easily moved around.

Transport the "traveling wormhole mouth" and place into a 80,000-Gauss 27.5-kilometer circumference Large Hadronic Collider (LHC). The other wormhole mouth can remains safely in the Temporal Analysis Retrocausality Differential Integrated Sciences (T.A.R.D.I.S.) laboratory, along with stabilizing and steering equipment. The Large Hadronic Collider at full design capacity is able to accelerate each of its colliding proton beams to 7.0 TeV (7.0*10^12 electron volts). The LHC accelerates the wormhole mouth to the same energy per unit rest mass as a 7-TeV proton, extract the containment beam, point it at the destination star, then launch it.

A proton with a total energy of 7.0 TeV has a Lorentz gamma factor (Gamma = [1-( V/C)^2]^.5 = E/M) of 7,455; the accelerated wormhole mouth will have the same Lorentz factor. This is the factor by which the total mass-energy E of the proton moving at this high velocity V exceeds its rest mass M. It is also the factor by which time dilates, i.e., by which the clock of a hypothetical observer riding on the proton would slow down. The wormhole is traveling at a velocity that is only a tiny fraction less than the speed of light, so it travels a distance of one light-year in just slightly one year. To an observer looking inside the wormhole mouth, because of relativistic time dilation the distance of one light-year would be covered in only 1/7,455 of a year or 70.5 minutes.

Looking through the wormhole mouth that is at rest in the T.A.R.D.I.S. laboratory, the views is from the perspective of an observer riding on the traveling wormhole mouth. In 70.5 minutes after its launch from the Large Hadronic Collider (LHC), through the wormhole the view is from one light-year away. In 11.7 hours, the view the surroundings is 10 light-years away. In 4.9 days, the view of the surroundings 100 light-years away.

This is the only form of superluminal phenomena that is consistent with science. Physicists are not comfortable with it, but the laws of physics we know at the moment says it’s plausible. Most of the arguments are about the engineering, which we handwaved off at the beginning.

The key here is that the OUTSIDE of the wormhole is travelling IN SPACE at a velocity just a fraction less than the speed of light, but INSIDE of the wormhole is travelling IN TIME such that it is travelling at 7455 times the speed of light.

Further acceleration, braking and steering are accomplished using "back reaction". Wormholes must preserve the amount of conserved quantities like mass-energy, electric charge, and momentum in the local space region around the wormhole mouths. If an electric charge disappears into a wormhole mouth, the entry mouth acquires the quantity of electric charge that passed through it. If a mass goes through, the entry mouth becomes more massive. And if a high momentum particle goes through, the entry mouth is pushed forward with that momentum. In this way, the local mass-energy, charge, and momentum in the vicinity of the wormhole mass do not change. No mass-energy, charge, or momentum can magically appear or disappear; all must be conserved and balanced.

If a positive electric charge emerges from the exit wormhole mouth, the mouth acquires an equal and opposite charge, so that the net charge in the region does not change. An emerging massive particle causes the exit mouth to lose mass-energy, and an emerging high-momentum particle gives the exit mouth a recoil momentum in the opposite direction. This is called back reaction. Sadly, back-reaction is why wormholes can’t be used to refuel spaceships, but it could be used to trade equal masses of cargo, passengers or other payload for fuel.

Momentum back-reaction can be used to steer the traveling wormhole mouth. The direction of travel as viewed through the wormhole can be monitored. Course corrections are made by directing a high-intensity light beam through the laboratory-based wormhole mouth at right angles to the direction of travel. The exit mouth will lose a bit of mass-energy in this process, but it will also be gaining some mass-energy as interstellar gas passes through to compensate. Density and type of interstellar material is a major consideration in steering. In terms of momentum change vs. mass gain of the wormhole mouth, the use of light for steering is preferable to high-energy particles, even though the momentum carried by light is only its energy divided by the speed of light.

The traveling exit mouth can be steered to make passes through the upper atmospheres of planets or to have grazing collisions with atmosphere of the star itself, until the initial velocity has been dissipated. In this process, considerable mass passes through the traveling exit mouth and into the laboratory which can be stored for scientific purposes. The wormhole gains mass-energy thru this back reaction. Thru this method, the travelling wormhole mouth can tour the star system, propelled by high-momentum particle jets incident on the stay-at-home mouth in the laboratory. Such steering will reduce the mass of the wormhole, compensating for the mass-gain it received in decelerating, and used for sampling planetary atmospheres.

The mass transfer needs to maintain a careful balance, if not enough comes thru the wormhole to compensate for the momentum only particles, then the travelling mount of wormhole pair will reduce below a critical amount and will cause the entire wormhole pair to evaporate in an explosion of hawkings radiation. Imagine the total mass of the wormhole system as an antimatter explosion.

Once the wormhole mouth has arrived at the destination star system, a survey of the planets can begin. The laboratory can control the diameter of the wormhole mouth by send thru low velocity mass, and that it can be enlarged to a diameter that is convenient for sampling. If a habitable planet is found, the wormhole mouth can be brought to its surface, and samples can be extracted through the wormhole and analyzed, sending compensating mass back in the other direction to keep the wormhole mouth masses in balance.

When the survey is complete, the wormhole can be expanded, permitting robot precursors, explorers, colonists, and freight to move through. The mass of the wormhole mouths would have to be managed, moving equal masses in the two directions during wormhole transits. If the amount of mass travelling thru in one direction exceeds the other by the equivalent of the mass of the wormhole pairs, it will explosively evaporate in a flash of Hawkings Radiation. The minimum sized wormhole pair will explode with the equivalent of 250 kilograms of TNT.

By monitoring Centauro Events, Interstellar wormhole transport from some technologically advanced civilizations can be detected. Cosmic ray observatories occasionally observe super-energetic cosmic ray detection anomalies, called Centauro Events. Centauro Events are cosmic ray particles with incredibly high energies that, when striking the planet’s upper atmosphere, produce a large shower of particles that contains too many gamma rays and too few mu-leptons, as compared to more normal cosmic ray shower events. There are no explanation for a natural occurring origin for Centauro Events. Like the Centauro Events, an accelerated wormhole mouth with a large electric charge would have a large gamma-ray to mu-lepton production ratio in such collisions, since it would have large electromagnetic interactions but no strong or weak interactions with the matter with which it collided.

Unfortunately, that minimum size wormhole mouth is 10.9 micrograms, about 21,800 times the mass that a standard 80,000-Gauss 27.5-kilometer circumference Large Hadron Collider (LHC) normally accelerates. This creates increased energy requirement issues. To accelerate a 10.9 microgram mass to .99997 times the speed of light would require the energy equivalent of about 606 grams of antimatter, or about 97 kilograms of fusionable deuterium, or about 380 kilograms of reactor grade uranium, or about 1.2 megatons of Petrol. Doable.

There are 3 methods that can be done to increase the velocity: Build a larger particle accelerator, create better accelerator magnets or build more powerful lasers to accelerate the wormhole after launch.

Larger scale hadron accelerator/colliders such as the Long Intersecting Storage Accelerator (LISA) is about 300 kilometers circumference. That would get us an 11 fold boost in top speed, 82,000c. This would require the energy equivalent of about 73.33 kilograms of antimatter, or about 11.75 tons of fusionable deuterium, or about 46 tons of reactor grade uranium, or about 145 megatons of petrol.

The largest feasible planet bound hadronic accelerator/colliders are about 6000 kilometers, which cover a good portion of a continent. A 220 fold increase in speed, 1.64 million times the speed of light equivalent. This would require the energy equivalent of about 29.33 tons of antimatter, or about 4.7 kilo tons of fusionable deuterium, or about 18.4 kilotons of reactor grade uranium, or about 58 gigatons of petrol.

Building more powerful magnetic fields for the accelerators is limited Class 5 (early 21st century) capabilities. The standard 80,000 Gauss accelerator magnets are stable under Class 5 conditions, but require substantial support infrastructure and maintenance. Class 5 (early 21st century) capabilities extends up to 450 kilo-Gauss accelerator magnets, which by itself is a 5.625 fold boost in the top speed to 42,000c. This would require the energy equivalent of about 3.4 kilograms of antimatter, or about 546 kilograms of fusionable deuterium, or about 2.2 tons of reactor grade uranium, or about 6.75 megatons of petrol.

There is an additional boost that still allows the usage of technology accessible with Class 5 capabilities (early 21st century). Momentum can be added to the travelling wormhole mouth by firing photons thru it. Photons are massless, so they won’t enlarge the wormhole thus slowing it down, but they do have momentum which would be added to the speed of the travelling wormhole mouth. Thus, after wormhole mouth is launched, shoot high intensity lasers thru it to speed it up.

Once the wormhole is accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and launched it at its intended target , then a sustained output laser fires thru it to add momentum. The highest sustained output laser under Class 5 (early 21st century) capabilities is about 1.2 gigawatts, creating a net acceleration of 1.1 LY/s^1.5. Class 11 capabilities expand that to 105 gigawatts. Class 11 capabilities has power outputs in the terawatt and even petawatt range, but for this application, it is limited to the amount of photons that can be fired thru a 2 Planck diameter wormhole mouth (1.7x10^-35 meters).

Any boost in the magnets also results in a boost in the acceleration for the boosting laser. 5.625x for Class 5 (early 21st century) capabilities to 6.75 gigawatts, creating a net acceleration of 8400 LY/yr^1.5. 87.5x for modern (Class 11) ultraconducting magnets to 105 gigawatts, creating a net acceleration of 131,250 LY/yr^1.5.

The methods can be combined, upgrading the lasers, upgrade the magnets used in the collider and making a larger collider.

While emplacing the wormhole took a finite amount of time, once set up, it takes no actual time to traverse. For example, while it might take 2 days for the wormhole to travel the 40 light-years from 34 Tauri to Earth, once it is at Earth, it takes no time for the traveller to walk thru.

Now the bad news.

You can’t actually pass thru a nanoscopic planck scale wormhole. Enlarging it is easy enough, but the energy cost of keeping it open becomes prohibitively expensive.

The energy cost to hold open a 1 Planck mass pair of wormhole mouth is about 3 milligrams of antimatter or half a kilogram of fusionable deuterium per second.

The other problem is the gravitational shear when you make it large enough for a man-sized person to walk thru.

The solution: quantum teleportation.

Quantum Teleportation using entangled particles is the lowest energy solution. The mico-wormhole mouth stays the modest 10.9 micrograms and we just put the entanglement receiver thru then teleport thru.

The big limitation to quantum teleportation is that in order to get around the no-measurement and the no-cloning restrictions of quantum mechanics, you destroy the original. Depending on how you feel about the soul, this may or may not be a big deal to you.

Federationalists are inconsistent about how they speak about their teleporter technology, they use a lot of quantum teleportation terminology but insist that they are transporting your actual atoms. The energy cost to transmit the actual atoms is more in line with the energy costs they give for transporting an individual. Federationalist teleporters use about 450 kilograms of fusionable deuterium to teleport a 100 kilogram individual, or about 720 grams of antimatter. It is an energy intensive process. These energy costs are consistent with the short range slower than light teleportation of actual particles instead of the quantum states.

Three physics concepts are required to make it doable:

1 Quantum teleportation, which is bona fide laboratory verified real world physics.

2. Quantum entanglement signalling, a hotly contested physics concept that the 1998 Dopfer experiment showed that it might be possible, testing is still in process.

3. A traversable wormhole, real physics, but beyond Class 5 technology to build.

Quantum teleportation is a quantum mechanically valid solution to the problem of how to make a precise duplicate copy of a quantum state at another location.

According to the rules of quantum mechanics, you cannot just measure a quantum system and use the measurement results to reconstruct the system somewhere else, because

(a) The act of measurement changes the system measured,

And

(b) The uncertainty principle prevents simultaneous measurement of “conjugate quantities” like position and momentum that would be needed for such reconstruction.

Another quantum rule prevents you from “cloning” multiple copies of a quantum system, so any duplication requires destruction of the original.

Amazingly, we can still work with the limitations imposed by no-quantum-measurement and no-quantum-cloning requirements.

Quantum teleportation requires the following steps:

(a) Create a pair of “blank” quantum systems that are “entangled”, i.e., separated but linked through some conservation law;

(b) Intermingle the “teleportee” with one of these entangled states and make a number of measurements on the mixed system;

(c) Transmit the measurement results by a normal communication channel to the location of the entangled twin system;

(d) Perform a set of transformations on the entangled twin system based on the received measurement results.

If this procedure is carried out correctly, you should have produced an exact duplicate of the original quantum state in the new location. Note that the mixing and measuring have destroyed the original system.

Using Nature’s private entanglement channel to send most of the information needed to reproduce the original system. The number of measurements needed for such teleportation is the logarithm of the degree of system complexity, which keeps the needed number of measurements fairly small. For example, to teleport a quantum system consisting of 10,000 moles of atoms (approximately one person equivalent) to an identical state somewhere else, you would need to do only about 195 measurements on the mixed system, totally doable.

In order to get around the no-quantum-measurement and no-quantum-cloning requirements, the original is destroyed in the process. How you feel about the nature of the soul is a major consideration. If you subscribe to the quantum mind and quantum soul theory, then no problem. I personally would not be so quick to volunteer.

The entangled transmitter and receiver must move at slower than or equal to the speed of light and so must the signal, although relative to the teleportee, no time will have passed. There are two ways around this slower than light issue. Using either wormholes or quantum entanglement signalling.

Quantum Entanglement Signalling possibly allows information that is entangled to be able to be transmitted faster than light. Experimental evidence (not proof yet) that this could even be a possibility has only existed since the Dopfer Experiment at Innsbrook (Not Innsmouth) University in 1998.

The problem is that you still have to figure out a way to get the Quantum Teleport Receiver to the intended destination in a convenient amount of time. The solution, traversable wormholes. Refer to previous notes about how to build and launch a stargate wormhole mouth.

The receiver end of the Quantum Teleportation setup can be moved thru the wormhole mouths, solving the slower the light signalling issue. From there to the next point, you would be slower than light or would need more wormholes. The advantage is that once beyond the wormhole, you can use the quantum teleporter thru the wormhole using the quantum teleporter without having any mass-energy requirements.

In 1935 Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen discovered that the formalism of general relativity (our current standard model for gravity) has solutions involving “teacup handle” curved space objects that could connect one region of space-time to a completely separate region. They suggested that fundamental particles (electrons, protons, etc.) might actually be such objects, with lines of electric flux threaded through them to give them electric charges. At the time, these objects were called “Einstein-Rosen Bridges”, but they are now called “wormholes”.

In 1962, Wheeler and Fuller showed that such wormholes were much too massive to be fundamental particles, and were so unstable that if one happened to pop out of the vacuum, it would close up before even a single photon could be shot through it. In 1988, Kip Thorne and his student Mike Morris showed that wormholes could be stabilized and that, using relativistic time dilation, they could be converted into time machines, “time holes” that connect one time to another in the same place.

The two mouths of Thorne-Morris wormholes are subject to a phenomenon called “back reaction”, a manifestation of conservation laws. If an object of mass m passes through, the entrance mouth must gain its mass-energy (E=mc2) and the exit mouth must lose the same energy. The same is true of other conserved quantities: momentum, angular momentum, and electric charge. The simplest solution to this problem is to send “ballast object” with the same mass, etc., simultaneously through the wormhole in the opposite direction.

The problem with creating a wormhole and passing through it to another location without anything going in the opposite direction. Back reaction would seem to create great problems for this scenario, because, unless the mass-energy at the wormhole entrance was somehow contained, the wormhole mouth would explode like an H-bomb depending on its mass.

The wormhole can be used as a standalone means to teleport, but it is very cumbersome and amazingly energy intensive. It does have the huge advantage that the teleportee is not destroyed in the process.

Combining the quantum entanglement teleporter and you can have a more flexible system.

You cannot shoot a wormhole thru a wormhole, but you can put the quantum entanglement receiver thru.

This Teleportation processor mixes entangled transmitter atoms with the atoms of the object to be teleported, does the measurements and then poof, thru to the receiver.

Except for the detail that now you’re dead and some duplicate of yours is running around living your life. Federationalists and Orions accept this every day, so maybe it is no big deal.

Jump Gates, Slipsteam, Jump Drive, Hyperspace, etc, all basically use the same principles. The difference is only in the hardware. Slipsteam, Jump Drive and Hyperspace are both contained within the ship and launch a single use wormhole which the ship travels thru. It saves on the containment of the wormholes themselves, disposed of after use. Jump Gates are fixes wormholes, which either you travel thru whole or you teleport thru using the Quantum Entanglement Teleport methodology. The Quantum Entanglement Teleport methodology has the advantage that you don’t have the balancing masses backdraft issue, but you will have to make serious decisions about the nature of the soul.

There are two theories about how Federationalist zone warp drive works. One is the actual warping of space-time, implied strongly by the name. The other is the idea of some wholly contiguous sub-dimension of space which allows travel faster than in normal space, which is strongly implies by the dialog.

In 1919 German physicist and mathematician Theodor Kaluza noticed that when he solved Einstein's equations for general relativity using five dimensions instead of four, Maxwell's electromagnetic equations popped right out. The extra dimension added the electromagnetic force to the standard theory of gravity. In 1926, Oskar Klein pointed out that if this dimension was “rolled up” connected back on itself on a beyond nanoscopic scale, it would be invisible, yet could provide electromagnetism. This Klein-Kaluza notion of hidden dimensions “rolled up” connected back on itself on a beyond nanoscopic scale has more recently been used by string theorist to describe not only the electromagnetic force, but also the strong and weak forces and attempts to describes all particles, forces, and interactions in the same framework.

One “side effect” of such hidden dimensions is the possibility of shadow matter (sometimes called mirror matter), an additional type of matter that would interact normally with its own matter-type but would “ignore” ordinary matter, interacting with it only through the gravitational interaction. Such extra “hidden” dimensions may allow the existence of parallel universes to which one can “teleport”. Changing normal matter to shadow matter looks like teleportation between parallel universes. Extra physical dimensions are one physics-based way of accomplishing teleportation.

Subspace and hyperspace would be such parallel dimensions are the key to making slipstream a workable (real physics wise) system while maintaining the flexibility they desire.

Modern physics has caught up on the subject of slip stream, even to the point that we can calculate the energy costs.

The Large Hadron Collider at Cern is planning an experiment which they think will try to show that there are parallel dimensions. The experiment is relatively simple, they collide particles at super high speeds and then observe the results, calculating the energy content before and after. If the energy content is less after than before the collision, that means that the energy would have shunted into another dimension.

That lost energy goes to the 'nearest convenient parallel dimension'; scientists refer to this as hyperspace or the 'bulk'.

It is expected that at the lowest level of this would result in boosting gravity effects. Larger amounts would penetrate the ‘brane’ and be able to affect things in these parallel dimensions.

The flux capacitor efficiently forces energy to penetrate the ‘brane’ so that it is able to affect things in these parallel dimensions known as hyperspace. Thus reducing the amount of power required to be that of some reactor grade plutonium or a Mr. Fusion reactor instead of a 9 kilometre diameter particle collider. A nice 1.2 gigawatt burst of energy. That is the energy equivalent of 360 liters of gasoline, but Marty and Professor Smith needed it in one big burst.

Some modern variants of string theory describe our universe as a 3+1-dimensional space-time "brane", essentially a thin 4-dimensional membrane embedded in a higher-dimensional space. Almost all of the known particles (electrons, quarks, photons) are restricted to this 4-brane and can move only within it. The three strongest forces (strong, weak, and electromagnetic) are allowed to act only within the brane. For most purposes the 3+1 dimensional brane is the only relevant universe, since almost nothing can go outside it.

According to some models, the force of gravity gets special treatment in extra dimensions. Gravity is free to leave the brane and spread out into the large extra dimensions in which the brane is embedded. This provides an explanation of why the force of gravity is so weak compared to the other forces: the lines of force for gravity can spread out into the other dimensions, leaving fewer force lines and reduced force strength on the brane itself.

Building on this basic scenario, theoretical physicists H. Päs and S. Pakvasa of the University of Hawaii, and T. J. Weiler of Vanderbilt University (PPW for short) constructed a scheme for using the 'brane' for superluminal communication. The starting point of their scheme is to examine the relativistic 'enforcement rules' that normally prevent superluminal communication. These rules are the Lorentz transformations, devised by Albert Einstein to describe how space and time behave when the observer or the object observed is moving near the speed of light. Within these rules, there is no possibility of superluminal communication.

PPW demonstrate that it is relatively easy to describe an extended universe in which the Lorentz transformations are strictly observed on the ‘brane‘, but not in the outside “bulk” occupied by the extra dimensions. The ‘bulk’ is also known as ‘hyperspace’. In particular, within the hyperspace’ volume of the extra dimensions the limiting speed (i.e., the speed of light) is different from its value on the brane. The space-time metric in the off-brane limiting speed is superluminal and grows quadratically with distance from the brane. This “asymmetrically warped brane universe” is rather like an onion, with each “onion layer” in the bulk having its own limiting speed and its own Lorentz transformations. In such a universe, trajectories that cut across such onion layers are not “Lorentz invariant,” i.e., they can break the local speed limits. This was the earliest description of how Federationalist Warp Speed worked, each

‘onion layer’ was a distinct layer of subspace.

Having found a space-time metric to describe a plausible ‘brane‘ universe, PPW consider a path that leaves the ‘brane‘, travels some distance in the extra-dimensional hyperspace outside, and then re-enters the ‘brane‘. They show that such a path, while it may facilitate moving from one point in space to another at the equivalent of a faster-than-light speed, would not in itself represent backwards-in-time signalling (referred to as a “closed timelike curve”).

General relativists (not a military rank) have devised several ways of evaluating the merit of calculations of this kind. Such evaluations are based on how well a calculation satisfies various energy conditions that have been suggested as possible “rules of the game” for what our universe will allow. The PPW scheme for producing a timelike loop does well with these energy conditions, satisfying the null, weak, and dominant energy conditions on the brane and violating only the strong energy condition. Note that the strong energy condition is violated by some well-known quantum processes.

The key points to remember are:

1. We can penetrate the bulk directly by a certain concentration of energy.

2. The flux capacitor allows us to do this more efficiently than using giant particle accelerators.

3. We know that the speed of light becomes variable quadratically with the distance from brane.

Let’s examine number 3. Let’s take our 10.9 microgram stargate wormhole-mouth and shunt that using the flux capacitor. Instead of relativisitically equivalent speeds of 7500 times the speed of light, it is now 7500 times 7500 = 56,250,000 times the speed of light for the same energy costs. What we are doing in this case is shunting the wormhole mouth thru hyperspace.

Now we’ve moved our 10.9 microgram stargate wormhole-mouth to where we need it. There are two options here. One is to make it large enough to move thru or make it so we can move thru such a tiny opening.

It takes the energy equivalent of about 3 milligrams of antimatter to hold open the mouth of a 21.8 microgram wormhole. This is about the consumption of half a kilogram of deuterium per second.

A stargate sized (5 meter diameter) event horizon requires 12 million times more energy consumption than the 10.9 microgram wormhole. That is 35 kilograms of antimatter PER SECOND or 5.65 tons of fusionable deuterium per second. The USS Enterprise could withstand that for about 3.75 hours before they used up all of their fuel.

A heighliner scale (256 meter diameter) wormhole requires 43 million times more energy consumption than the 10.9 microgram wormhole. That is 127 kilograms of antimatter per second or 12.25 tons of fusionable deuterium per second. The USS Enterprise could withstand that for about 1 hour.

The energy cost to launch the microwormhole to the Milky Way within 3 days is the same energy cost per second to maintain a 175 meter diameter event horizon. 87 kilograms of antimatter or nearly 14 tons of fusionable deuterium.

Doable, but a lot of energy.

Quantum Teleportation using entangled particles is the lowest energy solution. The mico-wormhole mouth stays the modest 10.9 micrograms and we just put the entanglement receiver thru then teleport thru. You consume 3 milligrams of antimatter or half a kilogram of fusionable deuterium per second, but that’s it.

The big limitation to quantum teleportation is that in order to get around the no-measurement and the no-cloning restrictions of quantum mechanics, you destroy the original. Depending on how you feel about the soul, this may or may not be a big deal to you.

Federationalists are inconsistent about how they speak about their teleporter technology, they use a lot of quantum teleportation terminology but insist that they are transporting your actual atoms. The energy cost to transmit the actual atoms is more in line with the energy costs they give for transporting an individual. Federationalist teleporters use about 450 kilograms of fusionable deuterium to teleport a 100 kilogram individual, or about 720 grams of antimatter. It is an energy intensive process. These energy costs are consistent with the short range slower than light teleportation of actual particles instead of the quantum states.

A recent advancement has created the means to make a more compact linear particle accelerator (LINAC). Using terahertz radiation, they can increase the power output of a linear accelerator 1000 fold. The most powerful LINAC right now is about 3.1 kilometers long and produces about 50 GeV. Which is way below the 7 TeV power output of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Using the new terahertz radiation, a 256 meter long LINAC can have the same power output as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

One of the problems of using the slipstream (which was my original in writing this) is that navigation would be horrific. Unlike the wormhole and the wormhole quantum teleporter gate, using slipstream, you only get to feel gravitational effects. Navigation is extremely difficult using only gravitational effects. Firstly, you will only be able to detect really massive objects, and any nearby massive objects would draw you in, but you might not be able to notice before you collide. This is also happening at speeds of tens of millions of times the speed of light.

Perhaps the slipstream method is only used for the placement of really far away gates, like neighbouring galaxies or on the other side of the galaxy. Once the gate is placed, there is no time needed to travel.

If one wanted to use the space warping FTL travel, the methodology and the energy costs are the same as for the wormhole or slipstream. The only difference is that the fixed wormhole mouth stays with the ship. The energy cost is higher because you are using a more massive wormhole, but you don’t have to pay the energy cost to hold it open.