Sure, there's intelligent life out there in space, but it'll take centuries to go visit them or vice-versa so why bother? If only there was some kind of warp drive so we could go and visit... oh? You say this guy just invented one? Let's go transmit the blueprints to the whole galaxy so we can go meet up for brunch.
Wait, where'd that fleet of warships come from?
Rapid FTL Proliferation is a plot where a setting that has no or a very limited form of Faster-Than-Light Travel suddenly gains access to Casual Interstellar Travel, and rather than one polity using a monopoly on FTL to lord over the rest, a bunch of different polities obtain it at the same time. This usually results in either a race to grab uninhabited planets for colonization or open warfare between polities, if not both.
These polities might be in the same star system, in different star systems but with limited contact (such as a Subspace Ansible or Portal Network), or even on the same planet. Often these polities will be in a Space Cold War that FTL has the potential to turn very hot, or even enable Mutually Assured Destruction.
Often implied, if not stated outright, in space-based 4X games where multiple factions start colonizing space in roughly the same time period.
This plotline also provides one of the less grim solutions to the Fermi Paradox, unless it turns out later that a Precursor civilization also developed the same FTL method and destroyed themselves with it.
Examples:
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Literature
- Aeon 14: A few decades after the colony ship Intrepid disappeared into a Time Dilation effect after the events of Building Victoria, experiments with gravity generators led to several groups of scientists near-simultaneously discovering the "dark layer", a plane of spacetime where dark matter has physical form, which allowed the invention of Faster-Than-Light Travel. This turned into several thousand years of interstellar warfare as various star systems previously settled by Human Popsicle colony ships tried to turn themselves into empires.
- The Expanse:
- In Abaddon's Gate the Protomolecule builds a gateway at Sol-Uranus Lagrange 3 that provides the Solar system's factions access to over a thousand new star systems that are apparently abandoned. In Cibola Burn Avasarala is Genre Savvy enough to realize how destabilizing this would be and sends Holden to the first exosolar colony in hopes that he'll be his usual Spanner in the Works self and discourage further colonization. It doesn't work.
- An STL example in the backstory, the invention of Epstein drive enabled Mars to become a major power capable of competing with the UN of Earth and allowed both planets to exploit the outer planets' resources.
- First Flight Trilogy, written by Chris Claremont has Earth discover FTL with the advent of the Baumier Drive, which allows rapid travel to Alpha Centauri and points beyond. However, it's not effective in-system, meaning that to make ships with Baumier Drive practical, a mapping mission through our own solar system is necessary to leave marker buoys for safe routes. The Wanderer is attacked by Space Pirates on such a mission, and crippled. Then they make contact with the Halyan't'a, a race of alien Cat Folk who noticed us. We were bumping up against their space with our exploratory missions, and the Halyan't'a had already discovered another, aggressive alien race knocking at their door. Rather than fight on two fronts, the Halyan't'a sent a peace envoy to feel us out. With some minor design differences, Halyan't'a ships operate on the same principle as Earth's Baumier Drive.
- The old Legends Expanded Universe of Star Wars Zig-Zagged this trope. Originally, in pre-Republic times (more than 25 000 years before the Battle of Yavin) one of the few civilizations to have FTL capabilities was the Rakatan Infinite Empire, who were cruel and barbaric and used a particular form of hyperdrive fueled by the Dark Side, which could only travel to planets particularly strong in the Force, like Coruscant, Dantooine, Kashyyyk and Korriban. Many of these planets already had advanced civilizations, some of which even set up colonies via Generation Ships or Sleeper Ships (Corellia and Alderaan were settled this way by Coruscant settlers). After the Infinite Empire collapsed due to various factors (most importantly, the Rakatans losing access to the Force), the slave planets quickly rose up and overwhelmed the now stranded Rakatan garrisons, and scientists on different planets like Corellia and Duros reverse-engineered their Force hyperdrive, stripping out the "Force" bits so that Muggles could use it. Within a few decades the Galactic Republic was established with Coruscant as its capital.
Tabletop Games
- Starfinder: For most of history interstellar travel was rare and difficult, usually requiring high-level magic if not divine intervention. But then in the year 3 A.G., the new goddess Triune invented Drift engines that could be built solely using technology and sent out the specifications in a galaxy-wide Signal that reached most civilizations (with a few exceptions such as the Veskarium.)
- Traveller: Small-scale version with the Islands, a cluster of lost colonies settled with sleeper ships from Terra that managed to avoid notice by the Imperium until a warship misjumped into one of the Island systems and asked the locals for help with repairs. These locals managed to reverse-engineer the Jump drive and started to form a regional power until the Imperial Scout Service followed up and decided to distribute Jump technology to the other systems, resulting in a Space Cold War between the Islands powers.
Video Games
- In the backstory of Galactic Civilizations interstellar travel required massive gates powered by nuclear fission or probes that took tens of thousands of years to reach another inhabited system. But humanity had discovered fusion power by the time the Arceans gave them gate technology, which allowed them to miniaturize the tech enough to fit it on individual ships. They were then naive enough to think that it would be a good idea to give everyone the new "hyperdrive" tech, enabling them to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.
- Homeworld: After the Bentusi found a Precursor hyperspace core they attempted to prevent this by only selling reverse-engineered "Short Jump" hyperdrives to other nations and keeping the core and its Far Jump capabilities to themselves. It only worked for a few centuries before the younger races had enough Short Jump drives to war with each other, and then the Hiigarans found a second core...
- Mass Effect: This trope is Averted, as the Asari are the oldest civilization in this cycle to have discovered element zero and mass effect technology and the mass relays, using technology from the Prothean that they discovered around 580 BCE. The Salarians followed shortly around 520 BCE and the Volus around 300 BCE, with other races independently discovering mass effect technology or being contacted by the Citadel races between 300 BCE and the 22nd century. In fact humanity is the most recent known FTL-capable civilization, having discovered it in 2147 from Prothean ruins on Mars, with the games taking place in 2183.
- Stellaris plays a bit with this trope. In general there are four kinds of empires you can encounter: Fallen Empires, remnants of civilisations that got into the stars with FTL tech long before yours and which now lie languishingly dormant, content to live lives of decadence using their advanced technology, Advanced Empires who got there maybe ten or twenty years earlier than the normal empires like your own, who fit this trope as they all got there at roughly the same time, and pre-FTL empires, some of whom don't even have spaceflight yet and are unconvinced aliens exist. The idea is not so much that there's a single great big boom in FTL capability as per this trope, but that the galaxy is so full of life and so mind-numbingly vast that there are consistently examples of this trope since FTL capacity is an inevitability for any sapient civilisation that doesn't get wiped out before then. There are even hints within the game that in the grand Time Abyss scale of a Galaxy, your empire is just part of the latest batch to figure out FTL, struggle against its neighbours, and potentially dominate the galaxy for a while with some of its contemporaries, before these Galactic Superpowers contract again and become the fallen empires of the next generation.
Web Comics
- Quantum Vibe: The L5 council tries to avert this situation by placing an embargo on Nicole and Murphy's FTL drive, at least until they develop countermeasures to prevent someone from teleporting a nuke into someone else's capital.
- Schlock Mercenary: At the start of the comic interstellar travel is dependent on a network of Wormgates that the Gatekeepers move into new systems at slower-than-light speeds, but then Kevyn invents the Teraport drive that allows the main characters to travel instantly anywhere in the galaxy without a gate (at least until Kevyn also invents Teraport Area Denial systems). A couple of failed assassination attempts by the Gatekeepers later, Kevyn decides to make the Teraport and TAD open-source and spams the specs to half the galaxy, setting off the so-called Teraport Wars. Of course, later it turns out that multiple Recursive Precursors had also developed Teraports, before their destruction, and the Gatekeepers were trying to keep baryonic life safe from dark matter entities that were injured by the micro-wormholes used by Teraporting. Oh well.
