How Erik Wernquist and Dr. Harold “Sonny” White carry Carl Sagan’s spirit of exploration into the physics of tomorrow.
Directed by Erik Wernquist | Written by Erik Wernquist & Harold “Sonny” White | Narrated by Harold “Sonny” White | Music by Cristian Sandquist
For as long as we’ve had fire and stories, there’s been that one person staring past the edge of the village, wondering what’s out there.
“Go Incredibly Fast” feels like a love letter to that restless few — the wanderers who traded coastlines for continents, continents for worlds, and now, worlds for stars.
The short film, created by digital artist Erik Wernquist for the Limitless Space Institute, is narrated by aerospace engineer and warp-drive tinkerer Dr. Harold “Sonny” White. It’s less than five minutes long, but it plays like a quiet manifesto: a reminder that the open road never ended at the shore.
It just moved… up, way up, into the stars.
It starts with a future that feels strangely ordinary.
We’ve made it to the Moon. To Mars. Maybe there are families in lava-tube suburbs on the lunar far side, kids kicking dust at the edge of a Martian canyon, people commuting between orbital habitats the way we take the bus.
And even there, in that new normal, the old hunger shows up. Children looking up. Adults pretending they’re not doing the same. Horizons have expanded, but the question is unchanged: what’s beyond that?
The film quietly answers: beyond Mars, the distances stop being “far” and start being absurd. Even within our own solar system, the gaps between worlds stretch out like oceans between tiny islands of light. Between stars? It’s not oceans anymore. It’s gulfs.
That’s where Sonny White’s voice comes in — calm, almost matter-of-fact — and he starts walking us through the ways we might cross those gulfs.
First, there’s the “sensible” future: nuclear locomotives (the capsuleer can't help but picture an Occator here).
Not warp bubbles. Not magic. Just nuclear reactors pushing electric propulsion systems — slow, efficient engines that sip propellant and keep firing for months or years. Think of them as deep-space freight trains (yep, that's definitely an Occator!), trading raw thrust for incredible endurance.
With tech like that, we could send humans to every major outpost in the solar system. Visits to icy moons, crewed flybys of dwarf planets, expeditions to the dark rim where comets sleep. It’s all technically within reach.
But point that same system at Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, and the story changes. The ship stops being a mission and becomes a world — a generational ark where hundreds of years tick by between launch and arrival. People live and die under artificial lights, knowing they’ll never see the destination, only the wake.
That’s still exploration.
It’s just exploration at the scale of dynasties instead of lives.
Then the film turns the dial. And things start to get really interesting...
What if, instead of a mere reactor, you put a tiny sun in the engine room? A fusion drive — the same process that powers stars, contained (somehow) at the back of a ship.
White talks about a hypothetical fusion engine that could push a vessel to around 5% the speed of light. At that velocity, Saturn’s orbit becomes a six-month cruise instead of a multi-year slog. Proxima Centauri slides from “thousands of years” to “a bit over a century.”
Still longer than any one human lifetime, but now you’re in the realm of something we at least recognize: generations that could plan around an arrival, record the dream, pass it down like a promise.
And yet… even that still feels like the early chapters, not the climax.
So the film takes one more step — the one that pushes it from “hard SF” into “what if the universe has cheat codes?”
Instead of trying to make the ship go ridiculously fast, you bend the map.
White has spent years poking at the idea first sketched by physicist Miguel Alcubierre: shape spacetime itself so it compresses in front of the ship and expands behind it, creating a “warp bubble” that surfs across the cosmos without breaking Einstein’s speed limit inside the bubble.
In the film, this isn’t treated like guaranteed tech. It’s presented as a possibility — a direction. A ship that can shrink the distance between Mars and Saturn down to minutes. A vessel that could reach Proxima Centauri in less than six months, not by smashing through space faster than light, but by sculpting space so the path is smaller.
Warp drives are still very much in the “beautiful math, harsh reality” category: huge energy requirements, exotic matter we haven’t confirmed, and experiments that live at the edge of what our tools can even measure. But they exist in real physics journals now, not just on starship blueprints in concept art.
And that matters.
Because while this film is sketching wild futures, the present isn’t standing still either.
Today’s spacecraft already use electric propulsion — ion engines that accelerate charged atoms through electromagnetic fields, trading brute force for absurd efficiency. Ion engines, can be up to 90% fuel-efficient, compared to roughly 35% for chemical rockets, and they’ve quietly powered missions like Deep Space 1, Dawn, and Hayabusa across the inner solar system.
It’s not warp. It’s not 5% of light speed. But it’s the same story, just earlier in the book: we keep learning how to go a little farther on a little less, and the distances that used to feel absolute start looking suspiciously negotiable.
In the final moments of the film, we find ourselves on an alien world, under a strange sky.
Someone looks up and tries to find our Sun — a faint, pale dot among many. For the first time in our history, we are the distant mystery in someone else’s sky.
The wanderers have wandered so far that “home” is now something you have to squint to see.
The voice reminds us: this journey doesn’t start centuries from now. It starts today — with the faint crackle of ion thrusters, with weird warp experiments in modest labs, with kids watching videos like this and feeling that itch for things remote.
For me, what hits me hardest about “Go Incredibly Fast” isn’t the warp bubble. It’s the tone. There’s no Marvel-style fanfare, no “Bro, we’re going to the stars!” chest-thumping. It feels more like a quiet campfire story told by someone who actually brought the star charts. More like "The Expanse" taking a leap forward. Hard sci-fi at its best!
White and Wernquist don’t promise us a guaranteed warp future. They don’t need to. They just lay out a simple through-line:
We’ve always had Wanderers.
The scale of the map keeps getting bigger.
The tools have to catch up.
Is warp drive controversial? Absolutely. Is fusion propulsion hard? Oh yeah. Are nuclear space locomotives going to spark debates and think-pieces? For sure.
But buried under the tech is something older and weirder. Just like in Wernquist’s other gem, Wanderers, where Carl Sagan quotes Melville’s “everlasting itch for things remote,” you can feel that same restlessness humming underneath this film too. It’s the glitch in our wiring that pushed a few curious humans off the savannah, into boats, onto rockets — and eventually, maybe, into bubbles of twisted spacetime.
And this film does its job, it doesn’t just make you say “wow.”
It makes you quietly wonder which side of that story you want to stand on: the ones arguing it’s impossible… or the restless few who go anyway.
Fly safe...
Resources
- Erik Wernquist – “GO INCREDIBLY FAST” (official page) | Details on the film’s production, stills, and Wernquist’s notes.
- Aeon – “Mind-bending speed is the only way to reach the stars” | Short write-up and host page for the film, summarizing its three propulsion concepts.
- Limitless Space Institute – Official site | Background on LSI’s mission to research advanced propulsion and inspire interstellar exploration.
- Universe Today – “The Dream of Faster-than-Light (FTL) Travel: Dr. Harold ‘Sonny’ White and Limitless Space” | Deep dive into White’s warp research and how it connects to Alcubierre’s original idea.
- Popular Mechanics – “The Totally Insane, Highly Improbable, But Not At All Impossible Quest to Build a Warp Drive” | Recent overview of modern warp-drive research, key players, and the (big) remaining hurdles.
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