A Story about Warp Drives

Long, long ago, there existed a pre-spacefaring civilization. Upon this planet, there were many wise and clever creatures called stubbleys. But the wisest of the stubbleys was a creature named Ikel’umph Hggttt, who we will call Ike. They were short, fat creatures with green skin and two hand like appendages sticking out of their foreheads that would grasp the hand like appendages of others such creatures during conversation. In fact, these hands were an evolutionary advantage that helped them grasp very advanced concepts, and avoid being eaten by the gorilla like monsters, called jockles, that found stubbleys to be delicious. Now the stubbleys were of course very annoyed by the jockles and wanted to build a spaceship with warp drive capability to get as far from the jockles as possible. They didn’t know how to build a spaceship, so they searched everywhere in the land. Many of the wisest stubbleys believed that it would take too much energy to fly a spaceship at warp speed, anyway; they would mutter about black holes and how heavy were to carry around.

Anyway, Ike was pondering the mathematics of superstrings, with tensors in one hand and wiggling strings in the other. He picked up his magnifying glass and looked very closely at the wiggling superstring. He noticed that there was a tiny electrical outlet on the string. He wondered why would someone put an electrical outlet here? Then, he thought: it’s such a tiny string, there can’t be any useful energy here. So he picked up his volt meter and attempted to measure it. When he put the probes of the volt meter into the socket, the volt meter exploded!!! Ike thought, holy cow, that’s a lot of energy! He picked up another superstring and looked at it with his magnifying glass, and saw another electrical outlet, then another, they all had them. This gave Ike an idea.

Ike went down to the local atom smasher where scientist stubbleys would slam atoms together and watch the sparks. While some complained that these scientists were just closet pyromaniacs, the scientists would insist that their work was important and would be useful in keeping the jockels from eating them. Now ike told them that he found electrical outlets on the superstrings and showed them with his magnifying glass. He told them there was enough energy to power a warp drive and that they should build one immediately. The scientists said they needed to run tests on their atom smasher first; they needed to harness the energy for their experiments. One of the scientists was overheard to have said, “Smash!!! Bang!!! Kablooey!! This is so cool!!!! I love particle physics!!!”

About a week later, Ike and the scientists were standing around the ENGAGE button on the atom smasher. The plug was pulled out of the wall and plugged into a superstring outlet using a Power Transducer device. Ike read a short speech, “For the betterment of stubbley kind and to save us from the hungry jockels. Turn it on!” One of the scientist pressed the ENGAGE button. The atomsmasher began to fire atoms faster and hit harder than any of them had ever seen. The atoms would slam into each other so hard, that space itself started to look bloated and disfigured. The scientists giggled excitedly. Some of them even drew pictures. They watched all day and night while the space bubble became bloated and took on peculiar shapes.

All of the sudden, someone yelled, “Everyone, come outside! Holy cow! Look!!!” There were three flying saucers hovering outside of the atom smasher building. Their high beams were on. One could say that the flying saucers appeared to be annoyed about something. At least that was the conclusion that the scientists reached when one of the flying saucers fired a laser through the building into the Power Transducer device, destroying it. After that, two of the flying saucers flew away in an effort to lower hostilities. The scientists likewise attempted to lower hostilities by running away, screaming, “AAHHH!!!" But Ike stayed because he knew why they were here.

The remaining flying saucer landed, and a door slid open. Out emerged a Space Alien; it said, “qww tkck qwkeekql ekwokgjkf kfgjkfod!!!” Ike stared at it blankly. The creature paused and calmly said, “I’m sorry, I do speak Stubblyish. But Jiminy Cricket!!! What gives you the right to build a bla bla bla to steal our qebkbk energy and waste it with bla bla blab la blab space-time anomalies causing bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla!!! Do you know how much that’s gonna cost us!!! Do you think energy is free? That is the worst Quasi -hyperbolic blab la blab la!! What are you trying to do? Create a hyper-dimensional flatulence bag?” For thirty minutes, Ike had to listen to the alien yelling at him, cursing at him in an alien language and ridiculing his version of mechanical machines that he had no concept of. Then, for the next thirty minutes, he listened while the alien yelled at him about how he can’t just steal warp drive energy, there are treaties and licenses with intergalactic governments and sharing/contributing energy and negative entropy.

Then, the alien paused, and smiled. “Hello my fellow traveler upon the journey of life in the vastness of infinite space and time. I am Achelic’qualitdi diwhe’ Cchuck. You can call me Chuck. Welcome to the Multi-verse Confederacy. I am a representative from the Chartered civilization of Quovou, an alliance of thirteen hundred worlds spanning two hundred galaxies and five space-times.” Then, the alien Chuck paused to let Ike speak.

Ike said, “Hi, I’m Ike. You owe me a volt meter.”