Faster-than-light Travel

Faster-than-light travel is the concept of accelerating to speeds even beyond that of light, making inter-stellar travel possible.

Basic Concept
Travel through space would be incredibly difficult without a way to accelarate faster than the speed of light (about 300,000 km/s), thought worldwide to be the universal "speed limit" for all energy and matter. The speed of light means that even if a supernova occurs in our night sky, we may well be viewing it millenia after it actually took place. However, there are currently multiple theories of ways to exceed the speed of light.

Early Ideas
In ancient times, Euclid proposed that the shortest path between two points was always a straight line. However, modern theories have different ideas concerning the nature of space-time.

"A Winkle in Time"
In her novel, "A Wrinkle In Time", Madeline Le'Engle proposed travel over vast distances with the use of tesseracts. In short, this could be explained as folding space, as if it was a sheet, bringing two points of the universe together for a split second. The book went on to recieve a Newberry Medal.

Wormholes and other theories go on to explain similar concepts of instantaneous transportation.

Faster-than-light Travel in Sci-fi
During the second half of the twentieth century, a number of sci-fi television series and movies gave plausibe (if vague) examples of faster-than-light travel. The record-breaking "Star Wars" featured spaceships that traveled vast distances with the use of "hyperdrives", entering an alternate dimension known as hyperspace. Star Trek, the television series, feautured a "warp drive". Arthur Clarke's highly successful "2001: A Space Odyssey" (which was later made into a movie) told of Star gates that connected distant points of space and time. To go by names, Star Trek was the closest to what scientists are proposing today. Devices called "warp drives".

Miguel Alcubierre
In 1994, mexican scientist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a device that would literally control the expansion and contraction of space itself. The device would create a warp bubble that would expand space-time in the back and contract it in the front, proppeling a spaceship forward. He never believed this could actually be done in the near future, however, as his paper mas solely theoretical.