Humans have long dreamed of exploring other worlds, whether that’s the planets in the solar
system or whole other star systems and galaxies far, far away. But everything in outer space is
almost insurmountably distant, kept out of our reach by the cosmic speed limit of lightspeed.
But what if there was some way to get around the speed of light,
and to go wherever we wanted almost instantly? This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the
extraordinary question; what if humanity had a mass relay?
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Mass relays are the most important part of the lore of BioWare’s long-running, wildly popular
video game series, “Mass Effect”, which began in 2007. In the world of “Mass Effect”, the Milky Way
is home to a dozen different, intelligent races, some organic and some synthetic,
all of which collaborate to form a galactic society. There’s a council of the most prominent
figures and aliens at the heart of it all, which determines and enforces galactic law…
but the mass relays are ultimately the main reason that such a space-faring society is possible.
They’re found in all the most important star systems, and indeed discovering a mass relay is
what any species needs to do in order to fully join the galactic community. In the game, mass
relays are the only real method by which any given group can escape the confines of its home system
without having to use tedious, time-consuming FTL drives. They’re mechanisms which enable their
users to jump instantaneously around the galaxy, to anywhere else where there’s another mass relay
ready to receive them. Importantly, in the world of the game, the mass relays aren’t actually built
by the galactic races that they benefit, but by a race of sentient machines known as the Reapers,
instead. And, unfortunately, one of the things the Reapers want to do is to periodically wipe
out all intelligent life… but, for this video, we’ll leave that part of the story out.
We’re not today imagining that we live in a galaxy secretly controlled by giant, monstrous
AIs… but we are asking; would it be possible for humankind to build its own mass relays?
And what would life be like with this spectacular sci-fi device at our disposal?
Like all good science-fiction, there is some basis in reality for the technology at play here.
And it serves to solve some real problems in physics that really do hinder interstellar
and intergalactic travel. What a mass relay actually does, according to the lore, is alter
the mass effect field of an object – usually a spacecraft – which changes how much mass it has,
enabling it to achieve impossible speeds without having to worry about an infinite fuel supply.
And the fuel required for FTL travel is usually about where most plans fall apart.
Traditionally, for far-future-thinking scientists, this is where exotic matter comes in, though.
Exotic matter is a hypothesized, new type of matter with different properties to normal, or
baryonic, matter, meaning it can therefore be used as the fuel we’d need to fly FTL. It’s one reason
why we so often see dark matter used as fuel in other science-fiction, but in “Mass Effect” it’s
called “Element Zero” - a strange substance with all kinds of unconventional properties
including allowing for mass relays to work. For humanity to build its own mass relay,
then, we would need exotic matter, too – whether that’s dark matter, Element Zero,
or something else entirely. And what’s exciting is that we are already trying to find it,
especially since exotic matter is a major part of probably the most famous, proposed
FTL travel model to date, the Alcubierre Drive – a warp drive that is theoretically possible.
Check out our previous videos on lightspeed technology for more about the Alcubierre!
But, for now, let’s imagine that the resources - whatever they are - do exist in the universe,
mass relays can actually be built, and humans are actually building them. What then?
One potential problem is that, without a god-like band of all-seeing AI to freely populate the
universe with them, building part of a mass relay might be easy… but building a full here-and-there
connection could still be extremely difficult. Mass relays are called relays because they need to
relay between a point A and point B. Both points need to have them in use, then, before one of
them can work. This is disappointing, but it still doesn’t quite make the prospect impossible. Again,
as many of the same things needed for mass relays are also needed to make other, hypothetical types
of FTL drive work… we’d just have to initially employ alternative lightspeed options, until
our network of mass relays is constructed. In fact, in one game in the franchise, “Mass Effect:
Andromeda”, because there are no mass relays in the Andromeda Galaxy… characters board an
advanced ark and put themselves into cryosleep for 600 years to get there. It’s not instant travel as
per a mass relay… but seeing as Andromeda is some 2.5 million lightyears away from us in real time,
600 years would represent quite the shortcut. And, if we did have the technology to reach Andromeda
in that time, even without a relay, then we’d also be able to cross the comparatively small
100,000 lightyears of the Milky Way within just twenty-five years, too. We’d still need generation
ships, but now only for onegeneration at a time. So, clearly, for humankind to have mass relays,
we’ll have to have also developed a much higher and more capable technological baseline in
general. There are many steps between what we are now and what we could be then - not least
the discovery of an exotic matter to power it all - but the development of even just a
single FTL travel method would be absolutely key. There’s no doubt that we have made some impressive
progress in real world space travel over the last few decades, but even one of the fastest
interplanetary probes we’ve launched so far, the Voyager 1, isn’t scheduled to break out of
even the Oort Cloud - the outer region of just the solar system - for about another thirty thousand
years. And, of course, the Voyager 1 is far, far too small to have carried a crew with it, anyway.
So, with all of that said, although you would still need to find travellers willing to enter
into cryosleep for a quarter of a century to turn “Mass Effect”-style relays into a reality,
the trade-offs would be pretty phenomenal. For one, they wouldn’t have to worry about a long
return journey, because they’ll have been sent to their destination to build a relay to beam
them straight back again. Easy. But, more than that, they’d be the pioneers of a new age. And,
in many ways, the building of mass relays would only mirror various technological advancements
we have already achieved - particularly with travel, and especially with ships and planes.
For example, the early aviators didn’t build a plane capable of circumnavigating the globe
first, and then start building the airports. The airports and runways were built in tandem with the
development of aircraft until, eventually, you have the far-reaching and incredibly
fast airplanes of today. Something similar would happen with mass relays powered by exotic matter,
it’s just that instead of bridging the vastness of oceans we’d now be
bridging the vastness of the vacuum of space. One thing’s for sure, a working mass relay network
would comfortably be proof enough that we’d made it to Type Three and beyond on the Kardashev
Scale. We’d be an advanced civilization, totally untethered to anything besides the universe
itself. And totally at one with how the universe works. We’d know how many other intelligent
creatures (if any) there were, where all the best planets to sustain human life could be found,
and how to get to them along the fastest possible routes. With a working mass relay you could visit
that friend who lives on the furthest side of the Milky Way, thousands of lightyears away from home,
and still be back in time for dinner. It would be a technological breakthrough
of truly unprecedented proportions and an almost unimaginable scale, transcending humanity to a
higher role in the cosmos. For now, it stands as a really cool video game concept, only…
but in the future, you just never know! And that’s what would happen if humanity had a mass relay.
What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
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