History of Interstellar travel (short version)

Travel is one of the pillars of modern humanity. It is undoubtedly the main reason humans still exist.

We won't detail everything here and we are aware that we did some consequent approximations. The result is that it should remain understandable by anyone.

The theory and its adaptation are indeed due to a sum of random events.

Everything begins with a single man whose name has been long forgotten. He considered that "dark matter is not matter stricto sensu, but is a result of interactions between our universe and another one or with some antimatter." It did not matter for him, since "antimatter presumably created a parallel universe." It also justified the disappearance of all antimatter from our universe. His ideas were remarkable furthermore when you considered that at his time, multiverse existence was neither proved, nor accepted by a vast majority of scientists.

The second thing is the discovery of the multiverse that gave credit to this idea and opened the way to new research branch: multiverse studies.

The second person who contributed to the Interstellar travel technology was a scientist, whose name was also forgotten. He worked on a way to access other universes by colliding two flows of highly energetic photons or by making two neutrinos collide. That was almost impossible to do at this time. Instead he ended up creating some antimatter and a huge amount of energy, in addition of what was produced with the disintegration of the antimatter.

Nowadays we have determined that he created a microscopic wormhole to another universe through a complex series of reactions.

He saw the destructive potential of this technology and chose to study secretly his discovery rather than selling it, even if it had almost killed him. He did not wanted to be the creator of a new level of mass destruction weapon. His aim was to study antimatter. In fact, he went way deeper in the subject. Sadly he died before his studies gave a result or something interesting enough for his peers.

Some scientists tried to pursue his research but they never managed to progress. Things changed with the creation of a space laboratory - way bigger than the old ISS - and the venue of a new genius. He showed that the incredible amount of energy produced by the disintegration of antimatter did not came only from the antimatter.

The hard part was to determine the origin of this excessive energy. Using multiverse theory and the experiments explained above, he proved that the antimatter was not created but ‘attracted’ from another universe. Latter experiments showed that it was originally the same universe as ours (but made from antimatter) but it evolved completely differently after a few million years.

A huge amount of theories followed. One of them was that it should be possible to travel faster than light speed - in fact, completely independently - by creating portals between universes. The basic scheme was that we could pass through another universe to get from one point of our universe to another one.

This would have been impossible if interactions between universes were linear, but it is not the case. Another scientist, during the same period, proved that inter-universe interactions are extremely complex and intricate, thus submitted to the butterfly effect. He still managed to reduce parameters to the amount of energy to create the wormhole (or quantic bridge since only the size differs) and the location. This extreme simplification came to the cost of a huge lack of precision. In fact, travelers neither knew where they would have arrived, nor if they would come back. Most often the pilgrims were transported in the aimed solar system or close to it but it happened that some vessels were found up to one light year to their supposed arrival point or even lost in another universe.

Some times and experiences after, some men modified the equation to a more complex, yet way more effective one. Factly, above a certain amount of energy, most of the parameters became negligible. By using this equation and knowing the entrance point, the pulse frequency of the energy shot and the distance from the machine to the entrance point, it was easy to determine a precise arrival point. As a safety measure, only the scientists who took part in these experiments were aware of their existence. Public was kept away.

Then came the first human travel to another universe. It took some time because a huge amount of energy was required to open a hole of a human size, and scientists did not wanted to risk human lives.

The story behind this first travel is that a man said "Fuck it, I'm going in." and jumped through the wormhole wearing a space suit with a cable to get back to our universe. Apparently, the wormhole was leading to an exoplanet of another universe which had similar physical laws. His jump lasted 5 minutes and 38 seconds.

At his return, he described "a world pretty close to ours by the way it seems to work, but far less developed. Vegetation was huge and able to defend itself. Animals were - on the contrary - really small and their diet consisted in the remains of dead plants. Also, animals were hiding from plants. They seemed to be aware of the danger. And the colors and the shapes were... Incredible… I was really in another world, in another universe. You can't believe it exists if you haven't seen it."

After this first jump, many others tried to follow the path, either for the sake of discovery or some glory. Most of them never came back. The stories of the others could have been hallucinations from a crazy person, but it was - almost always - the truth.

Theories were soon confirmed. Every single possibility is contained within a particular universe, and physical laws can completely change. The smallest change could give a universe in which no human could ever go. And these changes affected from the smallest atom to the complete universe.

Entering some universes meant instant death by many ways (mainly the unviability of our molecular structures in the other universe), or simply imprisonment (in many universes, physical laws prevented any return). Even if legislation was created fastly after the relative democratization of these "universe jumps", some people seem to have exiled themselves in other universes for a reason or another. As a reminder, these laws states that a man must not stay in another universe. One might use other universes as part of interstellar travel; scientists might travel to other universes but only a short amount of time and only to complete their studies.

A specific law was created to put limits on interstellar travel: a traveler must only use interstellar travel to move, not to go in the past or in the future. In other words, time travel was forbidden. It came with the new technologies that gave access to interstellar travel to everyone and with a great precision. Yet the law was tolerant, since the minimal time precision authorized was at half a day. This means you could get half a day in the past or the future during your jump.

After the fall of human civilization on earth, gigantic vessels were sent on space to save humanity and discover new worlds to inhabit. All of them had an interstellar travel system but a few of them had a state of the art system to discover, explore and list livable planets. Some colonized planets almost immediately; others explored the universe for a long time. The last bit of the fleet became travelers that wandered at the end of the universe (using the advanced recycling and regulated closed ecosystems technologies to live indefinitely on their own).

After some time, stellar portals were constructed to link colonies one to another. Once the future of humanity was safe and many planets colonized, vessels were reused for a big part as goods and humans transports. The rest became exploration vessels. The travelers never stopped wandering, and restlessly travel throughout the universe, bringing incredible knowledge and extremely rare materials to colonies they visit.

So, here is the long story of interstellar travel from its beginning to our times summed up in a few words.

Please keep in mind that the aim here was to explain interstellar travel and its history as simply as possible. It also implies some simplifications and approximations.

THE END