Sometimes it's hard to do comedy because any joke you make gets matched by reality. Well, I never expected a joke of mine to be vindicated by physics.
My friend Stude Dude just brought something to my attention which is both cool and weird. Not weird because it's strange, but weird because it relates to a comic book I wrote about twenty years ago.
My first big professional sale in comics was a script for a three-issue limited series titled CELESTIAL MECHANICS. It was an outer space caper story an a major plot device it it was something I called the Semantic Loopohole Spacedrive. It worked on the following principle:
(1) Nothing can travel faster than light.
(2) A Vacuum is essentially Nothing.
(3) Therefore, accellerate the Vacuum.
Under the Semantic Loophole Spacedrive, the spaceship remains stationary within a bubble of space and it is the surrounding space which is accellerated to superluminal velocity.
No, I did not take it very seriously, and I emphasized in the story that the inventor of the spacedrive was insane. (He built the drive, it was said, out of rubber bands and ukulele picks). The fact that the spacedrive violated the Laws of Physics was my excuse to explain how no one had ever independently discovered the secret of the spacedrive.
Well, Stude Dude saw this article from Space.com (Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Scientists Say) about the Alcubierre Drive, a theoretical warp drive suggested by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.
I'd heard of the Alcubierre Drive before, but didn't know much about it until I read the article. This passage jumped out at me; (emphasis mine):
An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.
Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn't being warped at all.
"Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light," explained Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit group of scientists and engineers devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight. "But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light."
Which is pretty much how I envisioned the Loophole Drive working.
I wonder if Miguel Alcubierre ever read any comic books.