All of us who grew up in the age of the Star Trek TV series, movies, and pop-culture are well versed in the descriptive concepts of Warp Drive. We are also familiar with the concepts of jumps to hyperspace as in the Star Wars Saga. Many of us also recall the wormhole concepts of the TV series, Deep Space Nine. However, despite the significant degree of rational mathematicalization of the above concepts, these concepts have remained elusive and have not a shred of laboratory evidence to back them up. The latter situation may change, but regarding faster than light travel concepts, it seems to be perpetually ill-advised to bet against Einstein. This may be bad news for some folks.
Now, for the good news! Faster-than-light travel is not necessary for meaningful interstellar and intergalactic space travel. This is so because of our good friend, the special relativistic Lorentz transformation factor otherwise known as gamma or more specifically, γ = 1/{1 – [(v/C)2]}1/2.
You see, the closer we approach the speed of light, the higher the gamma factor which asymptotically reaches infinity upon attainment of the speed of light exactly and the slower the passage of time for the crew relative to the background reference frame. Travelers moving inertially at exactly light speed will experience travel of an infinite number of light-years per second in the spacecraft frame and time travel into the future of an infinite number of years in one second ship time. Essentially, we are talking travel at an effectively infinite multiple of the speed of light.
This is all true. But he fails to deal with the 800 pound gorilla in the room: space-time dilation. And then there's all those 400 pound gorillas, like protecting the ship from the enormous friction it will encounter moving through the interstellar medium near the speed of light, along with the intense gama ray exposure to the ships crew, etc. To read more, click here.