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Faster Than Light: the Dream of Interstellar Flight

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Review: A True-Life Journey Into Interstellar Space in ‘The Farthest’

By Andy Webster

• Aug. 10, 2017

For any believer in humankind’s instinct to transcend boundaries, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes , and the NASA team that produced them, inspire awe. “ The Farthest ,” a dazzling documentary written and directed by Emer Reynolds, illustrates why.

Consider: In 1977, the pair were launched (two, to increase the odds of success); in 1979 Voyager 1 began relaying information from Jupiter , and in 1980 approached Saturn and its moon Titan, nearly a billion miles from Earth. In 1986, Voyager 2 reached Uranus, and three years later Neptune. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first man-made object to exit our solar system and enter interstellar space, from which it still sends signals. (Voyager 2 is en route.)

The accounts of scientists, whose enthusiasm still glows, is as wondrous as the technology seen here. Linda Morabito, a navigation engineer, recalls discovering gas plumes on Jupiter’s moon Io. “I had the first evidence of active volcanism beyond Earth,” she says, beaming. Time-lapse Voyager-eye views of planets as they get nearer convey a sense of the epiphanies experienced in mission control.

And there is catnip for dreamers, in the form of the so-called golden record enclosed on both vessels. “A message in a bottle into the ocean,” says Jim Bell , author of “The Interstellar Age” — and to alien life-forms that might find it. Each disc (complete with instructions) includes, among other things, photos; diagrams; greetings in 53 languages; 27 pieces of music from different cultures, including “Johnny B. Goode”; and the song of a humpback whale.

“We did something really, really great,” Brad Smith, an imaging specialist, says of the 40-year adventure. Yes, and NASA, and Ms. Reynolds, deserve to take a very deep bow.

The Farthest Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute.

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From solar sails to hyperspace: Here’s the future of interstellar travel

Will it ever be possible to zip around the cosmos like Baby Yoda and co in The Mandalorian ? A physicist explains.

Stephen Kelly

Hyperspace travel – the ability for spaceships to travel as fast as the speed of light – is an integral part of the Star Wars universe.

The new series of The Mandalorian , for instance, would be quite a different show if Mando and Grogu had to wait 6,000 years to fly from one planet to the next.

But it does raise the question of just how feasible such technology is. Will we ever attain the ability to travel vast distances across space without having to burn through generations of astronauts? Or are we just marooned in our corner of the Galaxy?

To answer that, Prof Patrick Johnson , author of The Physics Of Star Wars , needs to be clear on what, exactly, hyperspace travel is.

“If we’re talking about the idea that spaceships in Star Wars accelerate forward as fast, or faster than, the speed of light, then that is not plausible,” he says.

“The speed of light is the speed limit of the Universe. Once you travel faster than light, cause and effect begin to break down. You could feasibly view an event happening five light-years away, travel faster than the speed of light towards it and get there before it happens. It’s basically time travel.”

A more realistic option, says Johnson, is that instead of ships in Star Wars accelerating at the speed of light, hyperdrive technology enables them to create a wormhole in order to travel from one point in space to another.

“It would be like folding a piece of paper and punching a hole through it so an ant can get to the other side,” he says.

It would also explain why, in certain hyperspace sequences in Star Wars , the ships look like they’re travelling through a blue tunnel. (Although, of course, there are also other scenes, such as Vice-Admiral Holdo flying a ship at light speed through another ship in The Last Jedi , that lend strength to the accelerating theory).

The problem with creating a wormhole, says Johnson, is that no one knows how to do it; it’s more theoretical than practical. “It would perhaps be easier to find a pre-existing wormhole and just hope it leads to somewhere you want to go,” he says.

“As for creating one, that would take decades’ worth of human energy. And that’s before we figure out how to target a particular location.”

Johnson also insists that any wormhole created would have to be far away from Earth.

“Going back to the paper analogy, it’s not going to end well for the ant if it happens to be in the spot where the pencil bursts through. You would need an empty, unoccupied part of space, along with incredibly complex calculations and some sort of up-to-date star map, to ensure that the planet you’re going to is in the right place.”

At this stage, both options seem as unlikely as each other, which means that we are stuck in our Solar System for the foreseeable future.

But Johnson lives in hope that, even if we can’t accelerate at light speed, we can develop ways to travel long distances across the Galaxy.

“Without hyperdrives, I’d say our best bet for getting far, far away in a reasonable amount of time is solar sail technology,” he says. “These would operate like wind sails, but instead use the light from a star to push the ship forward and essentially give it an unlimited supply of fuel. The acceleration would be small at first, but after 10 years you could get up to around 20 per cent of the speed of light, which is very good.”

Promising – but we wouldn’t book that holiday to Tatooine just yet.

About our expert

Patrick Johnson is an associate teaching professor at Georgetown University’s department of physics, and author of The Physics Of Star Wars . Earning his PhD at Washington University in St Louis, Johnson’s work on quantum mechanics has been published in Physical Review journal.

• Tardigrades could be the first interstellar space travellers
• What would faster-than-light (hyperspace) travel look like?

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Is Interstellar Travel Really Possible?

Interstellar flight is a real pain in the neck.

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University , host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio , and author of " Your Place in the Universe. " Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights . 

Interstellar space travel . Fantasy of every five-year-old kid within us. Staple of science fiction serials. Boldly going where nobody has gone before in a really fantastic way. As we grow ever more advanced with our rockets and space probes, the question arises: could we ever hope to colonize the stars? Or, barring that far-flung dream, can we at least send space probes to alien planets, letting them tell us what they see?

The truth is that interstellar travel and exploration is technically possible . There's no law of physics that outright forbids it. But that doesn't necessarily make it easy, and it certainly doesn't mean we'll achieve it in our lifetimes, let alone this century. Interstellar space travel is a real pain in the neck. 

Related: Gallery: Visions of Interstellar Starship Travel

Voyage outward

If you're sufficiently patient, then we've already achieved interstellar exploration status. We have several spacecraft on escape trajectories, meaning they're leaving the solar system and they are never coming back. NASA's Pioneer missions, the Voyager missions , and most recently New Horizons have all started their long outward journeys. The Voyagers especially are now considered outside the solar system, as defined as the region where the solar wind emanating from the sun gives way to general galactic background particles and dust.

So, great; we have interstellar space probes currently in operation. Except the problem is that they're going nowhere really fast. Each one of these intrepid interstellar explorers is traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour, which sounds pretty fast. They're not headed in the direction of any particular star, because their missions were designed to explore planets inside the solar system. But if any of these spacecraft were headed to our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri , just barely 4 light-years away, they would reach it in about 80,000 years.

I don't know about you, but I don't think NASA budgets for those kinds of timelines. Also, by the time these probes reach anywhere halfway interesting, their nuclear batteries will be long dead, and just be useless hunks of metal hurtling through the void. Which is a sort of success, if you think about it: It's not like our ancestors were able to accomplish such feats as tossing random junk between the stars, but it's probably also not exactly what you imagined interstellar space travel to be like.

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Related: Superfast Spacecraft Propulsion Concepts (Images)

Speed racer

To make interstellar spaceflight more reasonable, a probe has to go really fast. On the order of at least one-tenth the speed of light. At that speed, spacecraft could reach Proxima Centauri in a handful of decades, and send back pictures a few years later, well within a human lifetime. Is it really so unreasonable to ask that the same person who starts the mission gets to finish it?

Going these speeds requires a tremendous amount of energy. One option is to contain that energy onboard the spacecraft as fuel. But if that's the case, the extra fuel adds mass, which makes it even harder to propel it up to those speeds. There are designs and sketches for nuclear-powered spacecraft that try to accomplish just this, but unless we want to start building thousands upon thousands of nuclear bombs just to put inside a rocket, we need to come up with other ideas.

Perhaps one of the most promising ideas is to keep the energy source of the spacecraft fixed and somehow transport that energy to the spacecraft as it travels. One way to do this is with lasers. Radiation is good at transporting energy from one place to another, especially over the vast distances of space. The spacecraft can then capture this energy and propel itself forward.

This is the basic idea behind the Breakthrough Starshot project , which aims to design a spacecraft capable of reaching the nearest stars in a matter of decades. In the simplest outline of this project, a giant laser on the order of 100 gigawatts shoots at an Earth-orbiting spacecraft. That spacecraft has a large solar sail that is incredibly reflective. The laser bounces off of that sail, giving momentum to the spacecraft. The thing is, a 100-gigawatt laser only has the force of a heavy backpack. You didn't read that incorrectly. If we were to shoot this laser at the spacecraft for about 10 minutes, in order to reach one-tenth the speed of light, the spacecraft can weigh no more than a gram.

That's the mass of a paper clip.

Related: Breakthrough Starshot in Pictures: Laser-Sailing Nanocraft to Study Alien Planets

A spaceship for ants

This is where the rubber meets the interstellar road when it comes to making spacecraft travel the required speeds. The laser itself, at 100 gigawatts, is more powerful than any laser we've ever designed by many orders of magnitude. To give you a sense of scale, 100 gigawatts is the entire capacity of every single nuclear power plant operating in the United States combined.

And the spacecraft, which has to have a mass no more than a paper clip, must include a camera, computer, power source, circuitry, a shell, an antenna for communicating back home and the entire lightsail itself.  

That lightsail must be almost perfectly reflective. If it absorbs even a tiny fraction of that incoming laser radiation it will convert that energy to heat instead of momentum. At 100 gigawatts, that means straight-up melting, which is generally considered not good for spacecraft. 

Once accelerated to one-tenth the speed of light, the real journey begins. For 40 years, this little spacecraft will have to withstand the trials and travails of interstellar space. It will be impacted by dust grains at that enormous velocity. And while the dust is very tiny, at those speeds motes can do incredible damage. Cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles emitted by everything from the sun to distant supernova, can mess with the delicate circuitry inside. The spacecraft will be bombarded by these cosmic rays non-stop as soon as the journey begins.

Is Breakthrough Starshot possible? In principle, yes. Like I said above, there's no law of physics that prevents any of this from becoming reality. But that doesn't make it easy or even probable or plausible or even feasible using our current levels of technology (or reasonable projections into the near future of our technology). Can we really make a spacecraft that small and light? Can we really make a laser that powerful? Can a mission like this actually survive the challenges of deep space?

The answer isn't yes or no. The real question is this: are we willing to spend enough money to find out if it's possible?

• Building Sails for Tiny Interstellar Probes Will Be Tough — But Not Impossible
• 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life
• Interstellar Space Travel: 7 Futuristic Spacecraft to Explore the Cosmos

Learn more by listening to the episode "Is interstellar travel possible?" on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com . Thanks to @infirmus, Amber D., neo, and Alex V. for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter .  

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook . 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Paul received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, and spent three years at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, followed by a research fellowship in Trieste, Italy, His research focuses on many diverse topics, from the emptiest regions of the universe to the earliest moments of the Big Bang to the hunt for the first stars. As an "Agent to the Stars," Paul has passionately engaged the public in science outreach for several years. He is the host of the popular "Ask a Spaceman!" podcast, author of "Your Place in the Universe" and "How to Die in Space" and he frequently appears on TV — including on The Weather Channel, for which he serves as Official Space Specialist.

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'Interstellar' Explained: Timeline, Ending, Themes, and Meaning

Get ready to travel through time and space with christopher nolan..

Interstellar is loud, sentimental, and filled with advanced scientific theories that work for the story, but are mostly theoretical in real life. I'm not one of those people who sit down to pluck apart the scientific plausibility of a screenplay unless I think it takes away from the story. In the case of Interstellar , I think it adds to it.

Interstellar juggles many different timeframes for the story. We cross from what's going on within Earth to the surface level of foreign planets, to the circling ship, and then to a fifth dimension that unites all of them. That's a lot to explain, so we're going to try to do it together.

Today, I want to get into the meaning and explanation for the movie Interstellar and even go over what happens in the movie. We'll talk about Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan working on the movie together and examine its ongoing themes. I'm excited to dive into this one.

So let's get started.

The Interstellar Movie: Explained

Christopher Nolan is one of the most interesting directors out there. He tackles huge concepts and doesn't dumb them down. A lot of times the audience is working to learn along with the characters, and on the edge of our seats as certain plot points jump out. Let's go through the summary of Interstellar and then tackle explaining the movie and the Interstellar premise.

The Interstellar movie characters

• Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a widower and NASA pilot who became a farmer.
• Anne Hathaway as Dr. Amelia Brand, a NASA scientist, and astronaut
• Mackenzie Foy as young Murph
• Ellen Burstyn as old Murph
• John Lithgow as Donald, Cooper's elderly father-in-law
• Michael Caine as Professor John Brand, a high-ranking NASA scientist, ideator of Plan A, former mentor of Cooper, and father of Amelia
• David Gyasi as Romilly, another high-ranking NASA member, and Endurance crew member
• Wes Bentley as Doyle, a high-ranking NASA member, and Endurance crew member
• Timothée Chalamet as young Tom
• Matt Damon as Mann, a NASA astronaut sent to an icy planet during the Lazarus program
• Bill Irwin as TARS (voice and puppetry) and CASE (puppetry)
• Josh Stewart as CASE (voice)
• Topher Grace as Getty, Murph's colleague and love interest
• Leah Cairns as Lois, Tom's wife
• David Oyelowo as School Principal
• Collette Wolfe as Ms. Hanley
• William Devane as Williams, another NASA member
• Elyes Gabel as Administrator
• Jeff Hephner as Doctor
• Russ Fega as Crew Chief

Interstellar plot and summary

The year is 2067, and crop shortages and dust storms have devastated humanity. We meet Cooper, a widower, engineer, and former NASA pilot. Now he’s a mediocre farmer. He and his two kids live with his father-in-law, Donald. His kids are the teenage son, Tom, and his 10-year-old daughter, Murph.

A terrible dust storm leaves a pattern on Murph's bedroom floor. Murph thinks a ghost created them, but the scientific-minded Cooper realizes the patterns were made by gravity variations. After some math, he thinks they represent geographic coordinates in binary code. Cooper and Murph follow the coordinates to a secret NASA facility headed by Professor John Brand, whom Cooper knows from his past life working at NASA.

The NASA scientists fill them in on what’s been going on. Forty-eight years ago, unknown beings placed a wormhole near Saturn, opening a path to a distant galaxy with 12 potentially habitable worlds located near a supermassive black hole named Gargantua. Twelve volunteers traveled through the wormhole to survey the planets, and three—Dr. Mann, Laura Miller, and Wolf Edmunds—reported positive results. The rest are presumed dead.

Brand presents them with two plans to ensure humanity’s survival. Plan A involves developing an antigravitational propulsion theory to propel settlements into space. That is years ahead of the science they have and seems futile. In contrast, Plan B involves launching the Endurance spacecraft carrying 5,000 frozen human embryos to settle on a habitable planet and commence repopulation from there. Then other humans will follow.

Cooper is one of the only pilots left on Earth who can complete a mission like Plan B, so he decides to lead the charge, leaving his family behind. Also going are Dr. Amelia Brand (Prof. Brand's daughter), Dr. Doyle, and Romilly. Before leaving, Cooper gives an upset Murph his watch to track the time for when he returns. She’s so sad she won’t even say goodbye.

What happens on the water planet?

The wormhole takes the crew to Miller's planet. Due to Gargantua's proximity, time is severely dilated. Every hour on the planet equals seven Earth years. Romilly remains aboard Endurance to research Gargantua, while Cooper, Doyle, and Brand descend in a landing craft to investigate the water planet for one hour. The group finds Miller's shipwreck just before a giant wave kills Doyle.

Cooper and Brand barely survive, and their delayed departure results in them reaching Endurance 23 years later in Earth time, though only a few hours for them.

What happens to Cooper’s family?

It’s a brutal blow to start the mission. Back aboard, Cooper is forced to watch videos to catch up on what’s happened in the 23 years he left earth. Seeing his kids grow, his father-in-law die, and even getting some grandkids. His son has become a farmer like his father-in-law. His daughter now works at NASA like him. They're both doing their best to figure out what life is like without a dad.

Cooper and his crew are forced to soldier on. The crew travels to Mann's planet, where they revive him from cryostasis.

Meanwhile, now a NASA scientist herself, Murph has transmitted a message claiming Cooper and Brand knew that Plan A was never viable because it required tech and data from inside the black hole. Cooper intends to return to Earth to be with his daughter, while Brand and Romilly will remain on Mann's planet for permanent habitation. But in a big twist, Mann reveals that he sent falsified data to be rescued—the planet is not fit for human life. He attempts to kill Cooper and then steals a lander and heads for Endurance. Romilly is killed by a booby trap. Brand and Cooper pursue Mann in another lander.

What happens in the docking scene?

Mann is killed during a failed docking operation, severely damaging the ship Endurance.

Mann and Cooper manage to board, but now don’t have enough fuel to reach Edmunds' planet—which is their last hope for finding a place for humanity to relocate. They do some complex math and decide to attempt a slingshot maneuver so close to Gargantua that time dilation adds another 51 years to the already long journey.

The Ending of Interstellar

Cooper and the robot TARS actually jettison from the rocket to shed weight and then propel Endurance so it can reach Edmunds' planet. In turn, Cooper and TARS land inside a massive four-dimensional space called a tesseract.

As he drifts inside, Cooper sees through the bookcases of Murph's old bedroom and weakly interacts with its gravity, realizing he was Murph's "ghost." He sent the coordinates.

The Interstellar bookshelf scene

Cooper theorizes that the tesseract was constructed by humans from the far future who have access to infinite time and space.

He thinks Cooper realizes he and TARS were brought there to relay information to Murph that is critical to the survival of humankind. Cooper uses gravitational waves to encode NASA's coordinates in the dust patterns in Murph's room before manipulating the second hand of Murph's wristwatch using Morse code to transmit all the data that TARS collected from within Gargantua so that Plan A can work.

On Earth, the adult Murph realizes the "ghost" is her father and deciphers the message to solve for Plan A.

The Interstellar ending scene

The tesseract spits Cooper out, and he wakes up on a futuristic space habitat orbiting Saturn, where he reunites with an elderly Murph—who is on her deathbed. Using the quantum data Cooper sent, the younger Murph solved the gravitational theory for Plan A, enabling humanity's exodus from Earth and transformation into a spacefaring civilization.

Murph urges Cooper to return to Brand to have the rest of his life. Her life is now complete. Cooper and TARS take a spacecraft to fly to Edmunds' planet, where Brand prepares a base for Plan B.

Interstellar movie breakdown

Interstellar movie timeline infographic.

To actually understand all the timelines and to explain the movie Interstellar , I thought it might help to see the visuals.

This infographic is the work of Frametale , an entertainment marketing agency with offices in Los Angeles and Istanbul, led by creative director Dogan Can Gundogdu. They have work that's appeared in lots of different films, commercials, and television shows. It explains the time dilation at the center of the story.

The Interstellar meaning and movie explanation

Set in a future where a failing Earth puts humanity on the brink of extinction, it sees a team of NASA scientists, engineers, and pilots attempt to find a new habitable planet via interstellar travel . Of course, the trip has a lot of bumps along the way. And we see humanity suffer as they try to become a multi-planetary species.

At its core, this is a movie about humanity's sacrifices to survive. It's about how pioneers are willing to lay down their own lives so that an entire species might go on.

At the center of this is one family, the Coopers, who dedicate their lives to space travel so that others might live.

What happened to Earth in Interstellar ?

Our pollutants made the earth unstable for human life, so everyone leaves to travel to another planet.

Does Brand die in interstellar ?

The older Dr. Brand does die during the pursuit of Plan A. The younger Dr. Brand is able to get to the Plan B planet and is waiting there for Cooper at the end of the movie.

How long was Cooper in space in Interstellar ?

While we don't know the exact amount of time, you can guess by Murph's age that he's spent almost 100 years looking for planets, but to him, it may have only been a matter of weeks.

The theme of Interstellar and the movie's meaning

For me, I think the themes of this movie lie in the story of family and survival. We're all one humankind, and despite our differences, the ability to survive and move on should trump anything we have against each other.

We need to see past the problems and unite for the much bigger and much more important causes. When it comes to family, love can transcend generations and keep us united although far apart. Sometimes you have to sacrifice to make sure the best happens for you and your offspring.

Summarizing the Interstellar movie, explained

Hopefully, by reading all of these parts, you've gotten your biggest questions about the movie answered. It's a deep journey into humanity and our quest to live amongst the stars. While the journey might be confusing with all the time jumps and multiple planets and plans, I think it just requires rewatching and concentration.

Roger Ebert once called film the ultimate empathy machine . It's a window into all kinds of humanity. A way to see more of the world and to confront what makes us human.

It's hard to find a better example of this sentiment than Nolan's Interstellar . It's a movie about the sacrifices we make to ensure humanity continues to survive, even as the lead character watches his own children die from afar. And somehow, humanity gets better for it, and his grandchildren get to live.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

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All the 2024 Emmy Winners

Shows like shogun and the bear won big tonight..

The 76th Primetime Emmy Awards have come and gone, leaving a trail of glitz, glamour, and golden statuettes in its wake.

This was a very fun show hosted by Eugene Levy and his son, Dan Levy.

And the streamers and premium cable networks won big again, with The Bear, Shogun , and Baby Reindeer winning lots of awards.

Whether you're a die-hard TV fan or simply curious about who took home the top prizes, this article has you covered.

Check out all the winners below.

Outstanding comedy series

WINNER: “Hacks”

“Abbott Elementary”

“Curb Your Enthusiasm”

“Only Murders in the Building”

“Palm Royale”

“Reservation Dogs”

“What We Do in the Shadows”

Outstanding drama series

WINNER: “Shōgun”

“The Crown”

“The Gilded Age”

“The Morning Show”

“Mr. & Mrs. Smith”

“Slow Horses”

“3 Body Problem”

Outstanding lead actress in a drama series

WINNER: Anna Sawai, “Shōgun”

Jennifer Aniston, “The Morning Show”

Carrie Coon, “The Gilded Age”

Maya Erskine, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”

Imelda Staunton, “The Crown”

Reese Witherspoon, “The Morning Show”

Outstanding lead actor in a drama series

WINNER: Hiroyuki Sanada, “Shōgun”

Idris Elba, “Hijack”

Donald Glover, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”

Walton Goggins, “Fallout”

Gary Oldman, “Slow Horses”

Dominic West, “The Crown”

Outstanding limited or anthology series

WINNER: “Baby Reindeer”

“Lessons in Chemistry”

“True Detective: Night Country”

Outstanding lead actress in a limited anthology series or movie

WINNER: Jodie Foster, “True Detective: Night Country”

Brie Larson, “Lessons in Chemistry”

Juno Temple, “Fargo”

Sofia Vergara, “Griselda”

Naomi Watts, “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans”

Outstanding lead actor in a limited anthology series or movie

WINNER: Richard Gadd, “Baby Reindeer”

Matt Bomer, “Fellow Travelers”

Jon Hamm, “Fargo”

Tom Hollander, “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans”

Andrew Scott, “Ripley”

Governors award

WINNER: Greg Berlanti

Best directing for a comedy series

WINNER: Christopher Storer, “The Bear”

Randall Einhorn, “Abbott Elementary”

Ramy Youssef, “The Bear”

Guy Ritchie, “The Gentlemen”

Lucia Aniello, “Hacks”

Mary Lou Belli, “The Ms. Pat Show”

Best writing for a limited series or TV movies

WINNER: Richard Gadd, "Baby Reindeer”

Charlie Brooker, “Black Mirror”

Noah Hawley, “Fargo”

Ron Nyswaner, “Fellow Travelers”

Steven Zaillian, “Ripley”

Issa López, “True Detective: Night Country”

Best writing for a drama series

WINNER: Will Smith, “Slow Horses”

Peter Morgan and Meriel Sheibani-Clare, “The Crown”

Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, “Fallout”

Francesca Sloane and Donald Glover, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

Rachel Kondo, Justin Marks, “Shōgun”

Rachel Kondo, Caillin Puente, “Shōgun”

Supporting actor in a limited or anthology series

WINNER: Lamorne Morris, “Fargo”

Jonathan Bailey, “Fellow Travelers”

Robert Downey Jr., “The Sympathizer”

Tom Goodman-Hill, “Baby Reindeer”

John Hawkes, “True Detective: Night Country”

Lewis Pullman, “Lessons In Chemistry”

Treat Williams, “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”

Best talk series

WINNER: “The Daily Show”

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Writing in a comedy series

WINNER: Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, Jen Statsky, “Hacks”

Quinta Brunson, Abbott Elementary”

Joanna Calo, Christopher Storer, “The Bear”

Meredith Scardino, Sam Means, “Girls5eva”

Chris Kelly, Sarah Schneider, “The Other Two”

Directing limited series or TV movie

WINNER: Steven Zaillian, “Ripley”

Weronika Tofilska, “Baby Reindeer”

Gus Van Sant, “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans“

Millicent Shelton, “Lessons in Chemistry”

Outstanding writing for a variety special

WINNER: Alex Edelman, “Alex Edelman: Just For Us”

Jacqueline Novak, “Jacqueline Novak: Get On Your Knees”

John Early, “John Early: Now More Than Ever”

Mike Birbiglia, “Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man And The Pool”

“The Oscars”

Best scripted variety series

WINNER: "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver"

"Saturday Night Live"

Supporting actress in a limited or anthology series

WINNER: Jessica Gunning, “Baby Reindeer”

Dakota Fanning, “Ripley”

Lily Gladstone, “Under The Bridge”

Aja Naomi King, “Lessons In Chemistry”

Diane Lane, “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”

Nava Mau, “Baby Reindeer”

Kali Reis, “True Detective: Night Country”

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Outstanding reality competition program

WINNER: “The Traitors”

“The Amazing Race”

“RuPaul’s Drag Race”

“The Voice”

Outstanding lead actress in a comedy series

WINNER: Jean Smart, “Hacks”

Quinta Brunson, “Abbott Elementary”

Ayo Edebiri, “The Bear”

Selena Gomez, “Only Murders in the Building”

Maya Rudolph, “Loot”

Kristen Wiig, “Palm Royale”

Supporting actress in a drama series

WINNER: Elizabeth Debicki, “The Crown Netflix”

Christine Baranski, “The Gilded Age”

Nicole Beharie, “The Morning Show”

Greta Lee, “The Morning Show”

Lesley Manville, “The Crown”

Karen Pittman, “The Morning Show”

Holland Taylor, “The Morning Show”

Supporting actress in a comedy series

WINNER: Liza Colón-Zayas, “The Bear”

Carol Burnett, “Palm Royale”

Hannah Einbinder, “Hacks”

Janelle James, “Abbott Elementary”

Sheryl Lee Ralph, “Abbott Elementary”

Meryl Streep, “Only Murders In The Building”

Outstanding lead actor in a comedy series

WINNER: Jeremy Allen White, “The Bear”

Matt Berry, “What We Do in the Shadows”

Larry David, “Curb Your Enthusiasm”

Steve Martin, “Only Murders in the Building”

Martin Short, “Only Murders in the Building”

D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, “Reservation Dogs”

Supporting actor in a drama series

WINNER: Billy Crudup, “The Morning Show”

Tadanobu Asano, “Shōgun”

Mark Duplass, “The Morning Show”

Jon Hamm, “The Morning Show”

Takehiro Hira, “Shōgun”

Jack Lowden, “Slow Horses”

Jonathan Pryce, “The Crown”

Supporting actor in a comedy series

WINNER: Ebon Moss-Bachrach, “The Bear”

Lionel Boyce, “The Bear”

Paul W. Downs, “Hacks”

Paul Rudd, “Only Murders In The Building”

Tyler James Williams, “Abbott Elementary”

Bowen Yang, “Saturday Night Live”

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Interstellar Space Travel

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The U.S.S. Enterprise , depicted here in the 2013 movie Star Trek: Into Darkness , relies on its warp drive to zip across the galaxy.

Inside the Quest for a Real ‘Star Trek’ Warp Drive

It may be a while before starship captains can race across the galaxy, but engineers and physicists have a few ideas for making it so.

Within the Star Trek universe, traveling across the galaxy is a breeze thanks to the famed warp drive . This fictional technology allows humans and other civilizations to zoom between star systems in days rather than centuries.

Such rapid travel times are impossible in the real world, because our best theory for the way the universe works, Einstein’s special relativity , says that nothing moves faster than the speed of light.

While current rocket propulsion systems are bound by this law, plenty of hopeful engineers and physicists are working on concepts that might bring us a step closer to Star Trek ’s vision of racing across the cosmos.

“Currently, even the most advanced ideas behind interstellar travel entail trip times of decades and centuries to even the closest stars, due to the restrictions of special relativity, and our abilities—or lack of—to travel at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light,” says Richard Obousy , director and founder of Icarus Interstellar, a nonprofit dedicated to making progress toward interstellar flight.

“Being able to build starships with the capability to travel faster than the speed of light would open the galaxy for exploration and possible colonization by humans.”

Nuclear Engines

Distances in space are so vast that astronomers usually measure them in light-years, the distance light can travel in a year’s time. A single light-year equals about six trillion miles.

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The closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is 4.23 light-years away, so even traveling at the speed of light, a one-way voyage there would take 4.23 years. That may seem pokey, but it would be a huge improvement over current technology.

Right now, the fastest spacecraft headed away from Earth is Voyager 1, which is puttering along at about 38,600 miles an hour. At that rate, it would take more than 70,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.

Still, various teams have proposed ways to at least reach a fraction of light speed and hasten our exploration of interstellar space.

Back in 1958, researchers at San Diego-based defense contractor General Atomics came up with Project Orion , which involved a spacecraft driven essentially by nuclear bombs. A controlled series of nuclear explosions would propel the ship at high speeds, rapidly carrying a hundred tons of cargo and eight astronauts to places like Mars and even the outer solar system.

Faster propulsion technology would allow us to visit our galactic neighbors, like this satellite of the Milky Way known as the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Blueprints were also created showing how to adapt the technology for interstellar travel. However, all experimentation with this so-called nuclear-pulse propulsion came to a halt with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

Announced earlier this year, the ambitious Breakthrough StarShot initiative represents a less explosive effort to undertake an interstellar mission. Run by a conglomerate of billionaires and big thinkers, including famed physicist Stephen Hawking, the project’s goal is to send a flotilla of postage stamp-size spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, a triple star system that’s 4.3 light-years away. (See “Is the New $100 Million ‘Starshot’ for Real?” )

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The tiny spacecraft would be attached to a thin light sail, a piece of technology that would allow mission managers to propel the probes with lasers shining from Earth’s orbit. The lasers would accelerate the craft to 20 percent the speed of light, and the probes would arrive at their destination in roughly 20 years.

While many of the tiny travelers may never make it to Alpha Centauri, a few of them should survive and may even fly past any planets orbiting the far-off stars , beaming back data about these alien worlds.

“I’m incredibly excited to see private money being used to explore breakthrough ideas that may advance the field of interstellar flight,” Obousy says.

“I hope to see more like this in the future. While there are engineering challenges associated with the Starshot Initiative, none appear insurmountable.”

Warping Reality

Of course, the real breakthrough would be a true warp drive, which requires technology to catch up with our theoretical designs.

In 1994, Trek fans got a glimmer of hope from Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who came up with a radical theory of hyper-fast space propulsion that doesn't break Einstein’s special relativity.

Instead of accelerating the spacecraft itself to light speed, why not bend, or warp, the fabric of space and time around the ship itself? Alcubierre presented calculations that produce a bubble in space-time in which one end is expanding and the other is contracting. A spaceship could, in theory, be carried along with the warp bubble and accelerated to velocities up to 10 times the speed of light.

While that sounds simple on paper, to make it work, we may need to harness exotic forms of matter, like antimatter, that for now are poorly understood. In addition, numerous unsolved issues plague the creation and control of a warp bubble, Obousy says.

“One such problem, for example, is the idea of causal disconnection, which implies that any spacecraft sitting within the bubble would not be able to ‘communicate’ with the exterior of the bubble, suggesting that a ship would not be able to ‘turn off’ the bubble once inside of it,” he notes.

As is often the case in space travel, developing true interstellar travel like what we see in Star Trek will require significant changes in the cost and energy requirements.

“Currently, the amount of energy and money required to entertain the notion of manned interstellar travel is measured in large fractions of global output—specifically, tens of trillions of dollars, and energy measured on the scale of what many large countries use annually,” he says.

Still, he adds, “the finest minds of the 15th century could not have predicted the technological wonders of the 21st century. Similarly, who are we to say what technology the humans of the 27th century will have mastered.”

Andrew Fazekas, the Night Sky Guy, is the author of Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe and host of NG Live! " Mankind to Mars " presentations. Follow him on Twitter , Facebook , and his website .

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