Lost: The Formula for Folding Space
Over the past couple of months I’ve been reading about an elegant solution to the problem of space travel; especially travelling through vast distances in space.
The method is known as “Folding Space” or “Fold Space” and if you’re a Dune fan, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. From what I’ve been able to gather, its an even better solution to “warp speed”.
As I’m not a NASA watcher, I’m not sure if they’ve been working on either ideas but it seems to me that either one of them would provide some pretty significant in-roads into space. They must be as this is not a new idea.
In any event, there’s a couple of reasons why I’ve been thinking about this lately. Firstly, as I mentioned, I’ve been reading the entire Dune novel series and folding space is the way things are done in order to travel anywhere in space. And secondly, I keep on coming across that old argument that in order for extraterrestials to arrive on Earth they’d have to travel some pretty long distances that would take decades to traverse.
So my thought has been, that perhaps they have mastered the science of folding space. In which case, depending on where they were coming from, it may only take a matter of hours or days. Folding Space actually is instantaneous, however if the transport ships are taking other passengers to other destinations then any extraterrestial’s coming to earth may be delayed by their co-passengers. 
The method of going through fold space is accomplished by ships, (usually heighliners that carry smaller ships) that are piloted by navigators with prescient abilities, which enables them to plot safe courses through space. The ships are outfitted with Holtzman engines that are somehow based on a simple mathematical formula and as I recall a titch of belief that the whole process will actually work.
The problem that has been making me go mad, is that I could swear that one of the books I recently read, actually had the formula. Think I can find the darn thing? Nope, I’ve been looking for a week now. Perhaps I read the formula and then when I closed the book it simply disapeared… Maddening!
When I started to write this post, it occurred to me that perhaps Wikipedia has something on all of this. As it happens they do have an interesting article on the Holtzman effect. They say that absurdly complex mathematics are involved. I thought it was the other way around.
In any event, I suspect that when the problem of traveling through the vast reaches of space is finally solved, the first word to come out of the inventor’s mouth won’t be “Eureka!”, it’ll be, “DOH!”.
