Dear BioWare,
Be honest with me. You knew this was coming. You had to have. You’re the developer behind
the quintessential modern AAA science fiction space opera Mass Effect. I’ve written to
you before about some shit you better not do in Mass Effect Andromeda, and I still mean
it. But I’ve changed my format to fit the brand of being annoyingly pedantic about video
game science, and you know what? I have to commend you. You’ve spent more time thinking
about your science than most game franchises have. We don’t get a lot of science fiction
these days. We get a LOT of Science Fantasy. Which is fine. Science Fantasy is great. You
get laser swords, and midichlorians, and it’s awesome. As long as they don’t try to explain
their fantastic space technology using meaningless and heartburn-inducing technobabble
I’m sad to say that, while your Mass Effect technology is
significantly more well-thought-out than most franchises, the closer I examine it, the more
worried I get, because while you seem to know that certain things like Special Relativity
and Time Dilation exist, your methods of dealing with them leave something to be desired.
I hate to say this, sing it with me now: BioWare, your Faster-than-Light technology
makes no god damn sense.
Almost all the technology in the Mass Effect universe centers around one thing: element
zero. Element zero is created from materials that are within the effective range of stars
that go supernova. And, again, before I rip you down, I have to commend you, BioWare,
because, honestly, this is how a lot of elements get created. Gold, Iron, and all sorts of
heavy metals that exist right here on our very planet didn’t exist when the big bang
happened, and were rather forged under the extreme pressures and heat created when stars
die.
Element Zero is capable of creating “mass effect fields” which can lower or raise
the mass of whatever is within its circle of influence. And that’s basically it. From
there, you get raising and lowering mass to create things like artificial gravity, high-efficiency
weaponry, and faster-than-light travel.
Which is where things start to get a little sticky.
Let’s talk about mass for a second. We tend to think of mass as the “substantiveness”
of things. Like, I have mass, because I am a thing that exists, and things that exist
have mass. And this holds true for most things we’ll observe in our everyday lives--however,
thinking about mass as “stuffness” is the trap that gets people pulled into thinking
that light has mass merely because it’s made of particles.
But “thingness” isn’t the defining characteristic of mass--instead, mass is an object’s resistance
to changes in its state of motion. Or, more simply, a measurement of how hard it is to
move something. In our day-to-day lives, mass remains more or less constant for just about
everything, because relative to one another, we’re not moving a whole lot. But once you
start factoring in the speed of light and speeds near the speed of light, or even faster,
mass starts to take on a whole different definition.
I used to not understand why accelerating to the speed of light is impossible--I really
didn’t. It’s complicated, and from my every-day experiences with life and newtonian
physics, I knew that in order to go fast, all you have to do is apply more force. Want
to drive faster, step on the gas. Of course, as you get faster and faster and faster, it
actually takes more energy to accelerate you the same amount of speed. Say you’re floating
through space at 100,000 miles per hour, right? It takes more energy to accelerate you to
100,001 miles per hour than it does to accelerate you from, say, 55 miles per hour to 56 miles
per hour. This is the guiding principle behind the speed of light speed limit our universe
has for massive objects. As you get closer and closer to the speed of light, it takes
exponentially more energy to accelerate you even faster. You can reduce the energy requirements
a lot if you have an object with less mass, but if it has any mass at all, it will always
require an infinite amount of energy to get to the speed of light.
Another way to look at it is that c (for those of you who were paying attention during my
Halo video last week: c is the shorthand for the speed of light) uh, c is the speed that
things with no mass go.
Another somewhat-strange thing to keep in mind is that the faster you move relative
to something else, the slower time moves for you. This doesn’t really matter in most
of our day-to-day activities, as the time dilation experienced while driving to the
store isn’t really significant--but it’s not just a theoretical concept. Time in the
International Space Station, which travels at 4.76 miles PER SECOND, or over 17,000 miles-per-hour,
Time there runs at point zero zero zero zero zero, eh the point, 14% slower
then it does just hanging here on earth. And GPS satellites in orbit
have to be specifically calibrated to compensate for distortions in spacetime.
Traveling fast does really fucking wonky things to time and space. So how does this tie into
FTL drives in the mass effect universe? Well, let’s just...say for a second that you buy
that a magical space rock called element zero can magically reduce mass to fractions of
nothing, or even nothing at all. The Mass Effect codex posits that Element Zero can
reduce the mass of an object, meaning it takes less energy to accelerate. Makes sense. But
as we already know from earlier, if an object has ANY MASS AT ALL, it cannot reach light
speed without infinite energy, even if it weighs as little as a pea. Should the ship
reach zero mass, and somehow manages to not burst into a million photons, it would presumably
be able to reach light speed almost immediately--but faster-than-light? No.
Interestingly there are theoretical concepts in relativity regarding negative mass which
are surprisingly plausible as a faster-than-light propulsion mechanism, and, well, you know.
Could feasibly work given the nature of Mass Effect technology.
Unfortunately, here’s where things start to get fucked up.
Y’see, BioWare, I noticed
you want to have your cake and eat it too. You guys want to pretend like you know about
relativity and mention stuff about spacetime distortion and the speed of light, but I’m
onto you. Your codex entries specifically say that FLT drives “effectively raise the
speed of light within the mass effect field, allowing high speed travel with negligible
relativistic time dilation effects.” Excuse me, WHAT. Okay, no, you and I need to have
a fucking talk, BioWare, this is, I can’t, I CAN’T. Dropping relativistic time dilation
in there like you know a fuck I swear I will--okay. Calm down, Austin.
Light speed is constant. We’re trained to think of speed like Isaac Newton told us.
Like if you’re on a moving ship and fire a bullet at someone in front of you, the bullet
is traveling at the same speed as the ship in question PLUS the speed of the bullet.
Light, however, doesn’t operate this way. Light always, always, always travels at the
same speed. It is capable of changing direction, however, which is why we occasionally perceived
light as traveling more slowly. Distortions in local spacetime, which are caused by anything
with mass like a person, a spaceship, or a black hole can refract light like a lens,
but it’s not actually changing its speed.
I see you there, BioWare, trying to front like a science fiction, but you’re full
of shit. Time dilation and spacetime distortion aren’t ignorable. The only way to not create
spacetime distortions is to not have mass, and the only way to avoid time dilation is
to not move. So, what, you’re saying that the spaceships in Mass Effect are massless
hunks of spacerock sitting at zero kelvin? No?
We’ve theorized possible ways to circumvent limitations on the speed of light with things
like the Alcubierre actually take advantage of the distortion of spacetime in order to
try to push themselves forward by expanding it behind the ship and compressing it in front
of the ship--this would theoretically make it possible for the ship to move without actually
accelerating. It’s...complicated, and most aren’t entirely sure that it can work, but
even it, with its weird physics-hacky principles isn’t immune to the effects of time dilation.
So what happens if you were to go faster than the speed of light? What would happen if you
were to, say travel from Earth to the Citadel using a Mass Relay? Well, if you approximate
the travel distance as being 20,000 light years, and the trip taking approximately 5
minutes more or less, it gives you an absurdly large speed in meters-per-second. And for
now I’m done saying big numbers, but this is many, MANY times faster than the speed
of light. Anyway. So you enter the Mass Relay and experience five minutes of travel. Cool.
So to find out what the rest of the world experiences, you have to just plug these numbers
in, hit enter and--oh. Fuck. Uh, just a second. Plug these numbers in, hit enter, and...get
a really big numbers. Okay. That’s in seconds. 436,000,000 seconds. What’s that in years?
13.8 years.
So as you approach the speed of light, time outside the vessel moves more slowly, until
you, in theory, reach the speed of light, in which case, when you follow this formula,
you get 0. Which means if you're travel 10 light minutes of distance, you experience no time of travel
and instantly teleport to your location but the world around you will be 10 minutes in the future.
When you go FASTER than the speed of light,
external time goes the other direction--in theory. So every time you use the Mass Relay
to get from, say, Earth to the Citadel, you’d be arriving there 13.8 years IN THE PAST.
And that’s not to mention what would happen to the local habitat when the massive distortive
ripples in spacetime arrive with you--considering the ship in question presumably has a negative
mass which allowed it to reach speeds past c to begin with, giving it a negative gravity
pressure--and probably a large one, since it has to amass enough energy to travel 4
million times the speed of light. Things with positive mass, like, say, the sun attract
things to it--negative mass arriving at 4 million times the speed of light would likely
have utterly catastrophic effects at anything nearby, sending huge pulses of disruptive
anti-gravity waves, pushing satellites out of orbit, and possibly disrupting entire moons,
sending them hurling into space, or possibly into their parenting planet. This is NOT the
kind of technology you want to mess around with.
So, BioWare, I take it back. You’re not science fiction. You’re science fantasy.
Sure, you bandy about words like relativity, spacetime, distortion, and time dilation,
but let’s be honest--you don’t know what any of them mean. And why would you need to?
You just want to tell an epic story that spans an epic stage without hassle. And who knows,
maybe some day we’ll finally crack the code of faster-than-light travel that doesn’t
break my calculator and send it screaming. I really look forward to
that day. If not, I’ll just have to live in a world where my pizza arrives at my door
before I even ordered it.
Sincerely, Austin
Thank you to everyone that watched my video on Mass Effect FTL drives.
I think I did it right. Honestly, this is very theoretical. And there's not a lot of easy math
to figure out if it would work.
We are probably never going to crack the case of going faster than the speed of light or even the speed of light
in my lifetime, so it's not something you really have to worry about. If you like this video,
be sure to like and subscribe to our channel and share it with your friends.
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