Science and Science Fiction

    As a science fiction writer I'm constantly in a balancing act of making my book as scientifically accurate as possible but also making it fast paced and entertaining. On one hand you want the story to sound plausible for the future and on the other there are so many, many reasons why sci-fi concepts wouldn't work or wouldn't work with any rational degree of efficiency. 

    I do a lot of research for my book. Terraforming Mars is a big part of it; in my story humans fast track the lengthy process of terraforming, which would take thousands of years, by harvesting the atmosphere from another life supporting planet. The obvious catch with this is transporting the massive amount of resources across megaparsecs dividing Mars and the theoretical planet would be even less efficient. So I took some artistic licenses and came up with currents in space which work with the curvature of spacetime. If I can come up with yet undiscovered alien concepts I have more believable freedom to do such things.

    Of course scientists in the field will always be able to argue otherwise; it is science fiction after all. I've been reading an excellent book "The Physics of Star Trek" by Lawrence M. Krauss that goes over concepts in the popular television series and explains what it would take to make them work. Oftentimes this means an absurd amount of energy. It's substantially helped me anchor my far out ideas with reality and I strongly recommend reading it for sci-fi writers.