Quick travel over long distances is a significant challenge in Warhammer 40,000, especially for humans. The only way for them is through the realm of Chaos. However, an invention protects humans: the Gellar field. But how could they have invented this when all previous travel must have ended in death?
Almost all sci-fi worlds have different methods for traveling at faster-than-light speeds. In Warhammer 40,000, there are several options: either people use the Webway of the Aeldari, or they enter the Warp like humans do.
The Warp is the realm of Chaos, where demons and dark gods reside; nothing is even remotely “normal,” and anyone who spends time here will inevitably go insane at some point.
Fortunately, humans have Gellar fields to protect themselves from the influence of the Warp. These fields create a bubble of realspace around the ship, allowing it to (more or less) safely traverse the Warp.
However, a question has recently occupied some fans on Reddit: How did humanity even come to these fields when all those who could report on the Warp must have died beforehand? The discussion engages dozens of interested parties.
In the role-playing game Rogue Trader, you explore the galaxy yourself:
“Just because the crew is dead doesn’t mean the ship itself disappears”
Humans are inherently psychic beings; that means they have a presence in the Warp. Their souls are like beacons in the world of Chaos, attracting demons who want to devour them.
If a ship with several thousand humans disappears into the Warp, such a quantity of power is naturally tempting for any demon. The ship would be attacked immediately, demons would invade and obliterate all life inside – or worse.
Now, one user asks: If everyone is dead, how could research on the Gellar field be conducted? The top answer: Just because the crew is dead doesn’t mean the ship must be destroyed. Data from the flight could still be retrieved, and the last messages from the crew could surely be found somewhere.
This must have certainly been a decades-long process that involved many attempts and failures, the discussing fans agree. Some even suspect that the Emperor himself had a hand in the ideas.
“Stick a monkey in and see what comes out”
There is no official answer to the question, but users have plenty of plausible explanations at hand. After humanity discovered Warp travel, they likely just started conducting experiments.
Either they quickly realized that humans were dying and thus only sent computers through the Warp – after all, they had to calculate jumps in advance without Navigators anyway.
Or they simply put a monkey in and saw what happened: “You know … like we’ve always done for scientific discoveries. Space flights? Monkeys. Vaccinations? Monkeys. Golden humans? AI monkeys.”
Another user notes that humanity itself had suitable guinea pigs: the “stone humans.” There are even more rumors surrounding them that fit very well into the theory of space exploration and Warp jumps.
Stone humans, or humans made of stone, are beings created by the “Golden Humans.” The Golden Humans themselves are a sect that emerged sometime between our present time and the year 17,000 in the Imperium.
The stone humans are described as “physically weaker,” meaning: small. However, they are said to be excellent craftsmen and engineers – and not susceptible to the corruption of the Warp.
Stone humans for the vastness of space – Are they back today?
These stone humans allegedly played a crucial role in the development of Warp drives, voidships, and more, and are – so the suspicion goes – also those who could safely endure the flights. The parallels to a faction that has recently returned to Warhammer 40,000 are interesting: the conglomerates of Votann:
- the conglomerates of Votann are basically space dwarfs with much technical knowledge, being smaller and more robust than humans in the rest of the Imperium – like the stone humans
- Stone humans were confirmed to be sent out to explore the vastness of the galaxy; the conglomerates are supposedly a remnant of a forgotten expedition
- the Squats or Kin, the members of the conglomerates, are all created clones, and in their creation story, there are ancestors and tales of creators who are often revered as gold
- both peoples are virtually immune to the Warp
One of the possibly greatest and most important commonalities is living together with sentient machines. The stone humans created the iron men, living machines.
Among the Kin of the conglomerates of Votann live the “Ironkin,” also sentient machines with an AI that is actually forbidden in the Imperium. How closely the two peoples are related will hopefully be revealed soon as the story continues.
As for the creation and even targeted breeding of humans, Warhammer and especially the Imperium have a rather questionable history. Lobotomized human-robots and genetically modified supersoldiers are an everyday occurrence here, and have been for some time: Warhammer 40,000 had created superhumans even before the Space Marines, but they were too problematic
