Faster Than Light Travel Many science fiction stories involve Faster Than Light travel, also none as FTL, because its the only way for us to traverse the galaxy in reasonable amount of time.  According to our laws of physics, FTL speeds are impossible due to relativity and the relationship between rest mass, the mass we deal with in everyday life and physics homework problems, and relativistic mass.  Relativistic Mass                                                                 Energy Momentum Relation                                   http://www.quantonics.com/Quantonics%20Site%20GIFs/Relativistic_Mass_Equation.gif                                          https://www.i2u2.org/elab/cms/graphics/Energy-momentum-fig1.gif As an objects velocity approaches the speed of light, the denominator goes to zero causing the relativistic mass to go to infinity.  With an infinite mass, you need an infinite amount of energy to go faster, making it impossible to exceed the speed of light. Mass Effect manages to get around this by using the mass effect fields to reduce the mass of the spaceship.