Hi all, Ric here peering into the fabric of a fictional reality to discern just what the
hell is happening. Star Trek technobabble is famous for sidestepping and skirting the
finer points of its science and pseudoscience in order to focus more on constructing a story.
This is fine, but sometimes it’s fun to try to peer deeper into these premises and
try to figure them out. One phenomenon is very familiar to Starfleet,
and every interstellar power for that matter; Subspace is utilised almost every time of
Faster than Light anything is needed in the Star Trek universe. While a very confusing
and expansive topic, Starfleet understands Subspace collectively rather well teaching
Subspace Mechanics as a standard part of Starship operation. Despite its frequent use, not much
is actually described as to its properties or even what exactly it is, so I thought we
could do some theorising on trying to unravel its mysteries akin to the speculation on Fluidic
and Interphasic Space I’ve already done. So first off, what is it used in? As mentioned,
almost every instance where faster than light is required, things often interact with Subspace.
Looking at how Trek communications work is a fairly straightforward starting point. Whether
it is from planet side communicators to ships in orbit, or across a quadrant, Subspace provides
a rapid near-instantaneous way to communicate. Once subspace was discovered, pre-warp wavelengths
were often disregarded as no one would be using communications that would take eight
minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth. Even subspace communication however has its
limits. Such correspondence requires a network of relays and communications hubs to manage
these signals. Areas that lack these sorts of refresher setups generally will be much
hard to contact with subspace signals, showing that such messages do have a range. This could
be seen most in the series, Voyager where the ship was a galaxy’s length away in completely
uncharted space. There were no Starfleet setups to enable them to send a powerful enough message
across the quadrants, however when they managed to commandeer a Hirogen subspace relay network,
they were able to establish limited contact with the Federation. So while waves can travel
further and faster through subspace than regular space, they still have a limit.
After this, the pathfinder project was established to communicate more frequently with one of
the most powerful arrays and the help of a class B pulsar. The Mutara Interdimensional
Deep-space Array System actually used a form of Hyper-Subspace to complete this amazing
feat. Signals through Hyper-Subspace in fact moved faster than the maximum warp speeds
and this is partly as it was able to produce a micro-wormhole through which a signal was
sent. However, over such great distances, the latency was huge and real-time communication
was a further struggle still until they brought Black Holes into the equation.
So already we know it is a “realm” of sorts where regular physics doesn’t apply
as it should and electromagnetic waves are not limited to the speed of light. What gets
strange however, is Subspace’s involvement in warp drives. When a warp drive is engaged,
no matter what its power source, a warp field is generated which distorts space time. However
it is classified as a type of subspace deformation too, not only bending space-time but exerting
an effect in subspace too. Other warps in the fabric of the universe can be categorised
as subspace deformations, whether or not they move at warp speeds. These deformations, including
the artificial warp fields are measured in Cochranes, named after the inventor of the
human warp drive, Zephram Cochrane who was likely one of the first individuals to truly
grasp subspace mechanics. Ships that are travelling at, or have recently
passed through at warp speeds leave such distortions in their wake, making for a way to track such
vessels when combined with a ship’s ion trail. Even cloaked vessels, when moving FTL,
have difficulty masking their subspace presence and more than one stalking Warbird or Klingon
vessel’s has tipped its presence to an observant enemy, although such detection is unlikely
to result in the direct location of the cloaked vessel.
Some vessels, such as the Xindi’s craft were capable of forming a tunnel through subspace
known as Vortices. Such travel was even harder to detect than conventional warp dive as the
ship was practically immersed in subspace at this stage.
We even have the existence of subspace pockets such as the Tertiary Subspace Manifold that
contained the Solanogen based lifeforms that abducted members of the Enterprise D in 2369.
These beings were sentient and seemingly native to subspace, opening rifts into our plane
of existence after detecting sensor sweeps from a warp-powered array that La Forge was
experimenting with. They were freely able to transfer people and objects from current
space-time to their subspace realm with no ill effects. The ill-effects came afterward
when they replaced all your blood with plastic or sawed your arm of and stuck it back on.
So on top of Subspace’s faster than light properties, it very much is another realm
into which matter can pass, like another dimension or alternate universe, but no such actual
dimensional hopping is undertaken. In fact, from how subspace is described, and even named,
it seems to be a layer of our universe itself. And all others. Always present, but apart
from the perceived dimension. It’s described as also consisting of an infinite number of
domains, and Geordi La Forge described it as a honeycomb of such pockets. These would
be the subspace layers. So it’s not another universe and not quite
another dimension. It’s more like hidden levels of this one that we cannot perceive,
like the quantum level of existence. I like to think of it this way, you have universe
1, that’s normal Trek and universe 2, can be any of them, let’s go with the Mirror
Universe. When you hop dimensions, you pass through an interphase from 1 to 2, right?
But in between 1 and 2 is infinity of a sort, 1 point 1. 1 point 2. 1 point 2-one, 1 point
two-one-one-recurring for ever. An infinite band of layers, but also not.
Ships at warp not only form a subspace bubble and trail through it like water; subspace
can exert stress on a travelling ship and is one of the limiting factors in warp speeds,
just as matter can affect subspace, we see the inverse is true too. There are even particles
of matter found only in subspace that can be utilised in normal space. Tetryon particles
for example are formed in subspace but can be harness for short times for a variety of
purposes. This drag may be caused by such particles present in subspace, or some other
property of the realm itself. In beta canon, countering such drag is the explanation given
to the sleeker profiles of newer Federation vessels, it’s all about that warp dynamics.
Occasionally, what’s called an interfold layer can form, which is kind of like when
you get air trapped beneath wallpaper. Whereas subspace and space are meant to adjacent,
in a metaphysical level, an interfold layer can pop into existence in-between which causes
all sorts of spatial distortions and dangerous astral eddies.
Repeated flexing and intense bending of space-time can result in damage to this “layer of separation”
and when this occurs, ruptures, sinkholes and tears can breach the dividing veil and
create areas where the two realms bleed into one another. It was discovered in 2370 that
warp drive could cause such issues over prolonged periods and that a radical reengineering of
such drives would be needed to avoid further damage. Such apertures into subspace often
exhibited strong gravitational and temporal effects as they too warped space. What is
also apparent is that when subspace is twisted in such a fashion, it makes navigation at
warp a hazard and can cause interference in communications running through subspace. And
then there’s the Omega Molecule. Omega molecules when destabilised not only
detonate, they destroy subspace itself. In such sectors of damaged space, warp dive becomes
impossible and subspace communications cannot pass as there is no longer a Faster-Than-Light
medium for things to pass through. All of this proves that subspace is an integral
part of warp travel and in some way; a warp engine interacts with this realm directly.
However a ship travelling at warp does not enter completely into subspace, as it still
maintains a physical presence in the universe and can hit and be hit in return. Otherwise
ships wouldn’t need a deflector array to push aside space debris when travelling at
warp speeds. Subspace are the layers of the perceived universe
that remain hidden, the infinite loadstones that prop up space-time. Manipulating that
scaffolding lets you bend space for warp travel, or send communications faster than light.
In areas where subspace is damaged or absent, space-time is inert and faster than light
impossible. One theory I came across while researching
this explained FTL technology in Star Trek as not the manipulation of space-time directly,
but the control over its foundations. Subspace is linked to regular space and much easier
to manipulate as it does not adhere to the same laws of physics, therefore when you activate
a warp drive, it bends subspace, which in turn forces regular space-time to conform
to the warp bubble effect and away you go. So a thank you to coder and writer, Brent
Royal-Gordon for making me think about it from that angle.
Another intriguing idea pops up when you look at a variety of subspace phenomena. Most subspace
layers are generally habitable, for at least a time providing there’s an appropriate
environment as seen by ships that have been pulled into subspace. But also, there are
layers where thought alone begins to shape reality, such as when Beverly Crusher was
trapped in a collapsing warp bubble and the entire contents of this micro-reality had
been created from her thoughts and memories at the moment she was trapped. On top of this,
there was the Nacene entity known as Suspiria which originated from the Subspace realm she
called Exosia. A realm described by the Ocampa as a place of “pure thought, pure energy-
a place of the mind”. Realms where simple thought has dominance
have been encountered before, such as when the USS Enterprise D was accelerated well
beyond the M33 galaxy to an area Data suspects is the edge of the universe as we know it.
In this strange existence, thoughts are given life. So my theory is that subspace is effectively
what existed before the known universe and its physical laws came to be. In a way, it
is what our universe is expanding into, what persisted before the Big Bang, a realm where
thought and energy shaped reality. This sort of approach ties into things like the Traveler’s
mysterious abilities and maybe even stranger beings. Hell, in Star Trek lore, people suspect
Omega Molecules as the origin for the Big Bang which could help why this mystical thought-space
is being pushed back as Omega destroys it, replacing it with normal space-time. Further
omega explosions in normal space time is a double does that completely removes all traces
of Subspace and binding the universe to a relativistic ruleset.
Frankly speaking, every fictional universe has its one technology to hand-wave away a
lot of unknown advancements and for Star Trek, more so than Warp drive or transporters, I
think it’s the idea of subspace. The closest comparison I can think of is quantum mechanics
mixed with a bit of alternate dimensions, but subspace is neither of these but the concept
is a hybrid of both. So there we go. Star Trek does draw on real
scientific principles whenever it likes to create and play with cool ideas but when it
comes to faster than light travel they went their own way and created subspace. Because
of this, we only ever get vagaries and technobabble when describing subspace, which brings me
full circle, in that it’s very well understood by Starfleet and that is all you need to know.
Thanks for watching this video on Subspace. I’ve been Ric and until next time, goodbye!