Sixth months ago, no one would have believed that we would see interstellar travel in our lifetimes. We're all believers now. The Alpha One mission has returned from their 14-day voyage to Alpha Centauri safe and sound, there and back again, and on the first try, no less. We all stand in shock. Even the satire outlets showed respect by doing little more than note that the six brave cosmonauts returned intact, with no body parts scrambled; even they recognize the gravity of what our species has accomplished. Between this, DCF thruster technology, and the so-called Magic Box, interstellar colonization will be a reality in our lifetimes, and likely within the decade.

 

Aggregate Displacement as a means of hopping star systems was never a foregone conclusion. According to their press release, the team at Hunter General began with one wild idea: displace everything. Everything but the origin vessel, that is. The notion doesn’t merely defy our assumptions about perception and reality, it chops them into little bits, burns them, and then grinds them into the dust under its heel. Think I’m being too lurid? Consider what the Smithsonian’s Dr. Carter Samuels explained last month: “the focus is no longer on ‘making a passage’ between two points; with Aggregate Displacement, you aren’t brought to the other end of the galaxy, but rather it is brought to you.”

 

I’ll spare you the physics of politely asking the universe to hop a few light years to the left, and not just because I can’t make heads or tails of them. The frustrating part is that the designers of what they call the “Static Shift Drive,” (SSD) or “hopper,” are so vague about how it all works (the exact mechanism is classified), which is why the rest of us had to turn for answers to unconnected figures like Dr. Samuels, or Astrophysicist Dr. Pablo Corbould, who suggested that the process was obscure because the designers themselves don’t really understand it. He said, “I’d expect the quantum calculations are being done in another universe, or at least a layer of our own that we are unable to observe. And since they’re unable to actually observe the process, they can’t scientifically prove that it is happening at all. Frankly, this was always where quantum physics was headed: repeatable results without observable proof. Because human beings are limited in what they can actually perceive, and thus cannot conceive of an instrument to do that perceiving for them”

 

This raises all kinds of mad questions about perception. Did you notice anything November 31st, when the crew of Alpha One made their hop to Centauri? Or on January 1st when they hopped back? I sure didn’t. Unless you count my coffee maker failing to brew at its set time, nothing in my sphere changed at all. If human beings are capable of affecting the fabric of our entire universe on such a vast scale without anyone noticing, then what, dear readers, remains impossible? Could we shift all humanity to perceive a world in which there is no war? Or man-made climate change? Or God?

 

Dr. Sandeep Schmidt at the University of Berlin was quick to dispel that notion. “While the possibilities are beyond exciting, I cannot yet see this as the sort of potential mind control that some are warning about. It is not unlike the fears of push-button “terraforming bombs” from two decades ago. Whatever the mechanism, this is simply transportation we are talking about here. It is a highly secret project; all this talk of altering perception is meant to throw the public off track. Given what we know now, the Hunter General SSD is almost certainly an offshoot of quantum tunneling: in essence, the SSD and the vessel that contains it exist simultaneously in every part of the universe for a brief moment before settling in its destination point.”

 

Senior MIT Fellow Dr. Eve Johnston was more blunt. “I was on the project in 2154, and our whole basis was momentarily changing the mass state of the object in order to pass through energy barriers—which I’m 99% sure is what they’re still working from. The real trick was to be able to use the SSD as its own sender and use the low level matter in another part of space–since space is only nearly vacuum and not absolute–as the receiver beacon, all without being distorted by any nearby gravity, waves, or other matter. It is a quantum tunneling device, which in itself is such an enormous achievement. They encourage this paranormal nonsense in order to stymie competition by riling up advocacy groups and lawmakers, and media is just running with it, no questions at all. All this will do is create whole new brands of superstition.”

 

However the mechanism, we can be sure of one thing: with the entire universe now before us for the taking, humanity will never be the same again.