Damn my inquisitive ways!

Wikipedia may just prove to be my undoing. I normally am proud of the vast amount of subjects I have a passing knowledge of, even if they knowledge is somewhat shallow (jack of all trades, master of none and all that), but now it's starting to infect my writing. I never realised how hard it would be to write a science fiction story involving space travel over vast distances when I actually know something about relativity. Sure, I can't call up the equations involved at a moments notice, and I don't have a complete understanding of all that it pertains to, but I've got the basics. Unfortunately, those basics say that not only is FTL travel impossible, but that the ramifications of speeds anywhere near light are pretty bad. For one (simplified) example, there's the twin paradox. The twin paradox is used to illustrate the principle that time slows when near large masses or traveling at exceptionally fast (relative) speeds. In other words, imagine that there are 2 identical twins; one of the twins is an astronaut and the other is an office worker. When the astronaut returns from a long trip having traveled at speeds near light, he will have aged less than the office worker. (For more information on this and some actual calculations, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox )

Anyways, because of me knowing all this, I just spent over 2 hours trying to figure out ways around this. Even after coming up with possible plot devices that would excuse the time difference, there was still the small matter of the nearest system being 4.45 light years away. That means that even if we could somehow travel at 99.99% speed of light (which is impossible, and even if it weren't would require such a large amount of energy that it would still be unfeasible) , it would still take 8.89 YEARS to make the trip there and back, and that's assuming max speed could be achieved instantly (also impossible). 2 hours I spent trying to figure out how I could make it work when I finally realised that this was science FICTION, not science FACT I'm writing. Even the hardest sci-fi throws this shit under the carpet, and I've already played pretty damn loose with just about every natural law.

In other words: Fuck it; we're going into hyperspace.