The Switch Drive

Blog Post Number 37 Written on: 06-20-2021 Uploaded 11-18-2022

(I know I have been talking about some personal stuff, so let me get back to the cool quantum entanglement science stuff.) I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t or couldn’t work as I describe, but the switch drive is one of my older ideas and one of my favorites. I made a strong attempt to make every different race within my universe unique, starting with everyone having a different method of FTL. The Switch drive was a thing I developed in high school for one of the non-human technologically advanced races.

Part of my effort to make every race unique, part of that inspired from the races are alien, and every race would have very different development, both technologically and perhaps more importantly evolved different biologically, which would, in turn, would drive the technological development in an even more unrecognizable direction.

While I was in high school, I was very taken with string theory. I had an algebra teacher who had a migraine or something and rather than teach us math that one day, she showed us a documentary about the development of string theory before it had been so thoroughly disproven as it has now.

So we already know that the Switch drive most certainly won’t work. Anyway, to explain such a device…

String theory… well…  Atoms are made of Protons, Neutrons, and electrons. Those have in turn smaller parts called quarks. And Quarks are made of something smaller right? That’s where string theory comes in. The quarks inside of atoms are made with strings, tiny little vibrating rings of energy. 

Those vibrations have a frequency, right? So what if someone had the technology to isolate and tune into those vibrations. A single ring of vibrating energy inside a quark inside an electron inside an atom inside some random object. Say, for example, a big fancy warship.

They have a machine to do this, A giant orbital ring-shaped space station, you follow? A space station that can tune and isolate a single string of energy inside of that ship, that is flying through that ring. The Ring machine can then remotely tune into another object somewhere, anywhere say a meteor out in orbit. Then because the two objects are both tuned, all you have to do is find two strings inside those two objects that are the same frequency. Then through the magic of advanced alien technology, inspired by quantum entanglement, those two objects, in our example, the spaceship and the meteor instantaneously switch places. So now, they have space ship in orbit somewhere else and a fresh meteor. They can then either meltdown this meteor, giving them resources like iron and ice, or they can hold it and later instantaneously switch these two objects, still tuned to each other back the ‘right’ way around again.

Sounds pretty cool right? Imagine the possibilities with such a system. To instantly move ships, material, and whatever else you like anywhere in the galaxy. While Also taking something else. You could steal the earth’s moon and ruin her ecosystem, and have a warship, the size of the moon in orbit. Boom instant win. Could steal a man’s brain and replace it with the same mass of your favorite flavor of acid, boom solve all your political problems. Sounds scary and dangerous, which rightly so, if they could conjure enough mass to equal it in size, they could literally pluck stars out of their solar system. Imagine what would happen if the sun was gone? And all that gravity wasn’t there to keep us in orbit and the heat was gone. How long would it take for humanity to die? Days? For the planet to become devoid of life? Weeks? Months?

There are a few limitations to this. If the ring machine is located and destroyed, they’re kinda SOL. And on top of that, because of this awesome technology their ships are not individually FTL capable. So Without their ring, the ships are going to be trapped where ever they are. That not the only crazy, advanced technology that particular race of aliens have, but we’re not here to talk about them, because of spoilers. We’ll talk about the technology, the ideas, the science behind them.

I know that kind of transportation device isn’t possible, but that’s what high school Chace came up with, and I’m sticking with it because I thought it was cool and brutal, and possible or not, will make for excellent story telling, and is based on science just enough that the people will dig it too.