Faster-than-Light Travel is Impossible (Revised 2nd Edition)
303 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Atlascore;32298949]He said faster than light, I said something that can move at the speed of light.
We can't 100% say something is impossible if we have no way to test it.
Also get some reading comprehension, that wasn't what I said at all.[/QUOTE]
The energy required to accelerate an object with any amount of mass approaches infinity as speed approaches c.
Photons are massless.
[QUOTE=Cone;32298966]The thing is, we'll never know if it's truly impossible. If the smartest man in the universe said it was impossible, then I'd say he wasn't the smartest man in the universe.The closest thing to something impossible I have is something I haven't got around to yet.[/QUOTE] I feel like it's going to be a lot like absolute zero; we get really close, but never quite get there.
[QUOTE=ZestyLemons;32299137]I feel like it's going to be a lot like absolute zero; we get really close, but never quite get there.[/QUOTE]
Maybe. But we'll never know quite what's around the corner, so we'll never know if there's some new ground-breaking technology that might come in and make it possible.
Optimistic, perhaps, but saying there's no hope at all is just foolish - unless you can tell the future, of course.
lol do you know that as an object approaches the speed of light its mass also increases
so no we will never hit the speed of light because it would require an impulse of infinite magnitude
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_momentum#Momentum_in_relativistic_mechanics[/url]
[QUOTE=elevator13;32299388]lol do you know that as an object approaches the speed of light its mass also increasesso no we will never hit the speed of light because it would require an impulse of infinite magnitude[/QUOTE] Infinite doesn't actually exist though; it's more a placeholder until we can understand the sort of figures we're dealing with.I thought it was common knowledge that every value has to end somewhere (or maybe even loop?), we just don't know where.
[QUOTE=ZestyLemons;32299423]Infinite doesn't actually exist though; it's more a placeholder until we can understand the sort of figures we're dealing with.I thought it was common knowledge that every value has to end somewhere (or maybe even loop?), we just don't know where.[/QUOTE]
as the velocity of an object approaches light speed, its momentum approaches infinity (implying that its mass is also approaching infinity)
except we will never know till we try it
don't knock it till you try it!
According to stephen hawkings the speed of light is the top speed in the universe. The closer you get to it the slower time will go inside the train/spaceship. This is why it's impossible to walk faster than light by moving forward in a train moving near speed of light.
[QUOTE=Atlascore;32298949]He said faster than light, I said something that can move at the speed of light.
We can't 100% say something is impossible if we have no way to test it.
Also get some reading comprehension, that wasn't what I said at all.[/QUOTE]
You'll have to excuse me, I'm a little tired.
[QUOTE=fenwick;32299584]You'll have to excuse me, I'm a little tired.[/QUOTE]
Take a nap, bro. Must be, like, four in the morning for you. It's probably not good to try and figure out how to break thermodynamics when you're so tired!
Thanks a lot
So what you are saying is that you are the person who decides if FTL travel is possible?
I'm sorry but no.
You can't just go 'well you cant do it'
It's possible. It just is. I'm not being ignorant here. We don't even know if the laws of physics are entirely correct, since we made them. Nobody has discovered anything that moves faster than light because nobody has made anything that has tried to move faster than it.
[QUOTE=Sleepy Head;32298650]from what iʻve heard, i gathered that if one somehow had the ability to travel at the speed of light, time would not exist...is this correct?[/QUOTE]
No you would break causality. Well you would break it if you were to travel faster. Essentially the moment you get into supralight speed time as well as mass go negative. Which means you could arrive in a place before you actually left.
While causality is a bitch, we don't know if it can be broken like this or not. As getting into supralight speed is the main problem. As to reach light speed you would require infinite energy to go against infinite mass in the first place.
Of course that's traditional space travel so to speak.
Wormholes, quantun leaps and similar are essentially ways to circumvent this problem by reducing the actual space needed to travel to close to zero.
It's far nicer for logic as it doesn't actually break causality either and the energy needed for the traveling object is not infinite either.
Hell some very basic wormhole experiments are already underway.
[QUOTE=wraithcat;32301681]No you would break causality. Well you would break it if you were to travel faster. Essentially the moment you get into supralight speed time as well as mass go negative. Which means you could arrive in a place before you actually left.
While causality is a bitch, we don't know if it can be broken like this or not. As getting into supralight speed is the main problem. As to reach light speed you would require infinite energy to go against infinite mass in the first place.
Of course that's traditional space travel so to speak.
Wormholes, quantun leaps and similar are essentially ways to circumvent this problem by reducing the actual space needed to travel to close to zero.
It's far nicer for logic as it doesn't actually break causality either and the energy needed for the traveling object is not infinite either.
Hell some very basic wormhole experiments are already underway.[/QUOTE]
Wait, really? I didn't think we were so close to something like that.
Let's hope it doesn't turn out like Event Horizon, shall we? Though the mass-stabbings and satanic orgies [I]do[/I] sound like fun.
[QUOTE=wraithcat;32301681]Wormholes, quantun leaps and similar are essentially ways to circumvent this problem by reducing the actual space needed to travel to close to zero.
It's far nicer for logic as it doesn't actually break causality either and the energy needed for the traveling object is not infinite either.
Hell some very basic wormhole experiments are already underway.[/QUOTE]
Wormhole travel doesn't break causality? News to me. I thought that exiting the wormhole and covering a significant distance might create a frame of reference where the ship exited the wormhole before it entered.
But maybe I'm just a pessimist who doesn't know anything.
It is possible going more then the speed of light.
Light moves at a normal, but very fast speed it's still possible to beat it.
However we still need to do A LOT of research to even go the speed of light let alone go even faster.
Just wait till protoss come and lend us their warp prisms.
That's a bad justification since as far as we know, time travel is allowable under general relativity through closed timelike curves.
[img]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_TvLNm8YAUcE/SYEjefhQ1oI/AAAAAAAAACk/3SREaFf_gXI/s400/farnsworth.jpg[/img]
Good news everybody, scientists raised the speed of light so we could travel at the old speed of light!
Why does time go slower the closer you're to the speed of light? I'm not good at science and that concept fucks up with my mind beyond comprehension. Wouldn't it be impossible because the closer you're to the speed of light your mass starts fucking up or something like that?
I'm a man of humanistics
The human body cannot survive travel beyond 60 miles per hour.
Scientific fact from the past.
[QUOTE=Falchion;32302783]The human body cannot survive travel beyond 60 miles per hour.
Scientific fact from the past.[/QUOTE]
We already have Space Ships that go faster then that soooo.....
No.
couldn't we just attach a ship to the end of a giant laser pointer and then when we press the laser pointer button, the laser light moves at the speed of light and thus the ship moves at the speed of light
??
We can't prove if it's impossible or not, we have never tested something like this, but it probably will take a pretty long time to discover how to build a FTL ship. Anti-Tritium or anti-quatrium could be used, but until we find a way to maufacture lots of it, we can't do much, or zero-point energy.
Im making light travel faster than regular light by throwing a flashlight.
problems?
Even if we won't have FTL for a long time, we'll have fun making rockets with speeds even near the speed of light.
It's unlikely we can physically travel faster than light, but we could potentially warp space-time around a craft so that it 'skips' over folds in space or something like that.
Saw it on TV.
[QUOTE=nERVEcenter;32301835]Wormhole travel doesn't break causality? News to me. I thought that exiting the wormhole and covering a significant distance might create a frame of reference where the ship exited the wormhole before it entered.
But maybe I'm just a pessimist who doesn't know anything.[/QUOTE]
As far as I understand it, it more or less depends on your frame of reference. Wormholes don't change this and as a result you essentially don't have temporal shift in either direction.
I think a similar thing was postulated in the alcubierre drives. Since the object itself does not leave it's frame of reference and from a physical sense does not move, but is uh "displaced?" It remains more or less the same for an outside observer.
As to the energy requirements for Alcu drives being impossible - that's actually not a given as there's a bunch of mathematical models that range from the needs of more than the universe to a few miligrams.
Very roughly as far as I know there's essentially two proposed methods of FTL travel that should be possible under current laws.
a) A sort of a bubble drive where space ahead is folded and the ship itself exists in a safe "realspace" bubble, which pushes the ship onwards. - you stay in your frame of reference and alter the surrounding one
b) Wormhole and similar means in which you skip over to a different frame of reference and leave yours untouched.
Essentially both methods do not allow you to travel faster than light. As you are still slower than light using the same means.
We fucking knew this already.
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