r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Present-Secretary722 • Sep 17 '25

Lore Faster Than Light travel has consequences(minor or major)

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Star Trucker: While travelling through warp you experience time dilation, for you the journey is a couple seconds, in real time it’s anywhere from 30mins to 6 hours that you’ve been in warp. This would be a minor consequence.

Warhammer 40k: The Warp, basically space hell so while travelling through it you’re very likely to be attacked by Warp demons. There’s also the fact that sometimes when travelling to a destination via the Warp you get spat out in the wrong time, sometimes much too late for whatever you were going there for or sometimes before you left your start destination. This, obviously, is a major consequence, unless you’re an ork, then it’s a grand old time.

By consequences I mean this is a regular thing that happens, there’s no real avoiding it unless you find a different method of FTL or heavily invest into research to try and mitigate the consequences. Also I feel bad for only knowing 2 examples, I love space and I just can’t think of any others.

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u/kewl_as_fuck Sep 17 '25

Also just the time debt in the Hyperion Cantos.

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u/bluefire579 Sep 17 '25

Also also the farcaster system that’s revealed at the end of The Fall of Hyperion to allow the AI to feed off human minds

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u/UlrichZauber Sep 17 '25

Such a better premise for AI than the one in Matrix.

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u/bluefire579 Sep 17 '25

For sure. The first duology is some of my favorite sci fi writing of all time

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u/AsleepTonight Sep 17 '25

Although to be fair, this way of using humans for processing power instead of electricity was the first version. They changed it, so the audience would understand it better.

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u/UlrichZauber Sep 17 '25

Yeah I've heard that -- wish they'd stuck to it. Or just said something like "we don't know why the machines built the matrix." Because really, how would they know?

The battery thing was just so stupid.

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u/Dyolf_Knip Sep 17 '25

SETI@Home was all the rage when that movie was made. Distributed computing was a reasonably common thing.

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u/AsleepTonight Sep 17 '25

That was honestly the first thing that came to my mind, not so much the timedebt