Long before the Empire struck back, before the United Federation of Planets federated, Isaac Asimov created Foundation, the epic tale of the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire. Asimov’s Empire comprised 25 million planets, knit together by sleek spaceships hurtling through the galaxy.
And how did these spaceships cross the vast gulf between the stars? By jumping through hyperspace, of course, as Asimov himself explains in Foundation: “Travel through ordinary space could proceed at no rate more rapid than that of ordinary light… and that would have meant years of travel between even the nearest of inhabited systems. Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time.”
What the heck is Asimov talking about? Did he know something about a secret theory of faster-than-light travel? Hardly. Asimov was participating in a grand science fiction tradition: when confronted with an immovable obstacle to your story, make something up.
You Can’t Beat the Speed of Light
The problem is that as far as we know, faster-than-light travel is impossible, making galactic empires, federations, confederacies and any other cross-galaxy civilizations impossible. But that’s so inconvenient. To evade the cosmic speed limit science fiction has created “warp-drives,” “hyperspace,” “subspace,” and other tricks that have become so ingrained, fans of science fiction don’t give them a second thought.
Everyone knows what the Enterprise is doing when it does this:
Or when the Millennium Falcon does this:
Or when the Jupiter 2… actually the Robinson family tried to get to Alpha Centauri without any special effects:
