Current Events > Do you think faster than light travel will ever be possible?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I feel like therell be some stupid physics loophole that makes it possible

It was once.

I'm a physicist, so no.

Garioshi posted...

I'm a physicist, so no.

Do you think weve reached the limits to our understanding of physics, though?

In general, or for humans before the dying planet destroys them in particular?

Rotterdammerung posted...

Do you think weve reached the limits to our understanding of physics, though?

Until anything at all indicates FTL travel is remotely possible, I am going to stick with the entirety of physics that says otherwise.

No.

There's no good reason to think so.

I dont know enough and defer to the general no answer that the experts in the field say.

However, the limit always seemed somewhat arbitrary. What is it about light speed that makes it the hard limit? Why not a different limit? Is it just that we havent observed anything faster? If the energy required to get something moving that fast is such an obstacle wouldnt the limit be something less than the speed of light? Why that number?

I don't think so.

I think the trick to far space travel will be in way of teleportation. Like black holes could be a portal to somewhere else, we really don't know.

Even traveling faster than lightspeed, it still takes such a long time to reach somewhere else. Its not practical at all.

If aliens have come here over the years, I doubt they are traveling the whole way back and forth. They must be using some kind of portals.

Garioshi posted...

Until anything at all indicates FTL travel is remotely possible, I am going to stick with the entirety of physics that says otherwise.

Do you think Einstein-Rosen bridges could exist and if so could be made?

If yes, FTL travel would become unnecessary

guess my vote

whitelytning posted...

I dont know enough and defer to the general no answer that the experts in the field say.

However, the limit always seemed somewhat arbitrary. What is it about light speed that makes it the hard limit? Why not a different limit? Is it just that we havent observed anything faster? If the energy required to get something moving that fast is such an obstacle wouldnt the limit be something less than the speed of light? Why that number?

Light has no mass, so in a vacuum it just goes as fast as physically possible, which happens to be the constant we colloquially call "light speed". Other massless particles or phenomena travel at the same speed in a vacuum. Well not that there are any other confirmed massless particles than the photon.

Yes baby 2000 years from now

It already is possible and being used, but we will never have access to it

whitelytning posted...

If the energy required to get something moving that fast is such an obstacle wouldnt the limit be something less than the speed of light? Why that number?

The faster an object is moving at relativistic speeds, the greater its mass, by a factor of (v) = 1/(1-v^2/c^2). The greater an object's mass, the greater the energy needed to accelerate it further. As v approaches c, blows up to infinity. The universe simply does not have infinite energy, so you are stuck at some arbitrary point v < c for any object with mass. This limit is much closer to c for objects that are much less massive, but they are still strictly impossible to overcome. If we were able to hypothetically impart the infinite energy needed to accelerate an object to c, it would have infinite mass. Objects having infinite mass breaks basically every law of physics you can imagine in the same way dividing by 0 breaks math. Given the current state of physics, there is absolutely no reason to believe it is possible in any capacity.

Fire and electricity used to be seen as magical things that were impossible.

I think we still haven't learned everything about everything so as we discover new information, we will come to realize the things we currently think are impossible, may very well be possible, just not in the way we expected.

So I do think some day stuff like galactic space travel and what not will be possible, but just not how we would expect. Remember there was a time when guns did not exist, there was a time when nuclear energy did not exist. Impossible things are only impossible because we haven't arrived at the point in time where we are able to understand them.

I can not explain it because if I could, those unknown things would be known.

No

No. Teleportation is far easier in that it is possible, so that is what we'd use.

ellis123 posted...

No. Teleportation is far easier in that it is possible, so that is what we'd use.

If possible on the macro scale, the data being sent could still only go at or below the speed of light. It's not like you'd be on earth at 8:00:01 AM and on Mars 8:00:02 AM (same time scale).

K181 posted...

If possible on the macro scale, the data being sent could still only go at or below the speed of light. It's not like you'd be on earth at 8:00:01 AM and on Mars 8:00:02 AM (same time scale).

The current form of teleportation that is being pushed (to my knowledge) is quantum teleportation in which qubit entanglement is used. While it has a start-up time cost which is impacted by the speed of light the actual teleportation *is* instantaneous.

Obviously there are physical limitations to how fast you can go in normal space. Doesn't mean there doesn't exist some way around it. Some way of covering large distances without just trying to accelerate normally in normal space.

You need infinite energy to accelerate something to light speed. I'm not sure how we can find an unlimited energy source. Travelling that fast would also just send you into the future. Wormholes seem like the best way to travel across the universe.

The only way is to bend space itself so you dont have to go that fast to travel far.

Didn't einstein say it was impossible?

There is no way to know the extent of what we don't know. So I cannot say with absolute certainty it's impossible

Certainly impossible per our current understanding, though, and it doesn't seem like that will change anytime soon

There are probably mechanics a sufficiently advanced civilization could manipulate, but it won't be anything beyond complete speculation from our current perspective.

whitelytning posted...

I dont know enough and defer to the general no answer that the experts in the field say.

However, the limit always seemed somewhat arbitrary. What is it about light speed that makes it the hard limit? Why not a different limit? Is it just that we havent observed anything faster? If the energy required to get something moving that fast is such an obstacle wouldnt the limit be something less than the speed of light? Why that number?

I used to struggle with that question too, and someone explained it as the speed of light is actually the default speed of everything, but everything else has mass that slows it down.

I dunno if thats really accurate, but its what made it finally make sense to me.

Why worry about light speed when we could instead focus on ripping holes in space/time and travel where we want to go instantaneously?

Wasn't Einstein never wrong on any of his theories?

Garioshi posted...

Until anything at all indicates FTL travel is remotely possible, I am going to stick with the entirety of physics that says otherwise.

People once thought faster than sound travel was not possible, and were proven wrong.

Garioshi posted...

I'm a physicist, so no.

Just alter the physical properties of spacetime so that the speed of light is higher than normal. Instant faster-than-light drive (if looked at from a part of space with normal physical constants).

Iz very simple!

I think the solution to fast travel are black holes. I believe they are the key to this universe. We just need to travel to one and study it up close. Maybe the singularity of a black hole is just a door to another black hole? Maybe if we made our own little black holes we can fast travel.

Pikachuchupika posted...

I think the solution to fast travel are black holes. I believe they are the key to this universe. We just need to travel to one and study it up close. Maybe the singularity of a black hole is just a door to another black hole? Maybe if we made our own little black holes we can fast travel.

Problem is spaghetti-ifcation.

There already is something faster than the speed of light!
The speed of dark!
Dark is always ahead of light

TyVulpine posted...

Problem is spaghetti-ifcation.

That's why we need to get up close to one and study it. There's so much we don't know about black holes. Maybe there is a way to prevent spaghettification.

TyVulpine posted...

Problem is spaghetti-ifcation.

Never mind the sphagettification (or the fact that once you passed the black hole's horizon, there's no coming back), the distance alone is already a huge issue.

The nearest black hole to visit in the first place, is still almost 1600 lightyears away.

If I'm not wrong (correct me if I do):

In distance, that's equivalent to 5.88 trillion miles (or 9.46 trillion kilometres) x 1600.
In time, assuming you have the tech to constantly travel at near lightspeed through the entire trip, it takes a bit more than 1600 years to reach.

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That being said, if humanity ever reached close enough to a black hole, I'm sure people of that time will extensively study it.

TyVulpine posted...

People once thought faster than sound travel was not possible, and were proven wrong.

And if FTL travel is proven possible, I'll be happy to change my mind.

I think FTL as a term is a bit misleading because I believe its pretty well accepted that accelerating an object with mass to that speed is not possible.

But bypassing light speed might be, in theory. Wormholes, Alcubierre drive (warp), etc.

Without knowing anything about physics, I do know we threw out a lot of Newtons shit after Einstein. So who knows maybe someone else will come along and blow this thing wide open

yes and it's not any method we can think of or comprehend at the moment

just the same way 'the internet' seemed like a completely abstract, useless invention that people couldn't have even predicted back in the day. the same way, we can't quite understand it. but i thinkn we'll get there eventually, as a species.

whitelytning posted...

However, the limit always seemed somewhat arbitrary. What is it about light speed that makes it the hard limit?

Here's the simplified breakdown.

1. When you push something, it moves.
2. The less mass something has when you push it, the faster it moves.
3. The less mass YOU have when you push something, the slower the thing you're pushing moves.
4. If something has no mass, it reaches the speed of light instantly when pushed by anything that has mass.
5. If something that has mass is moving, in order to move faster it needs to be pushed.
6. It can only be pushed by something that is moving just as fast otherwise it can't reach to push.
7. At some point the mass will be moving so fast that there will be a time when the only thing that can push the mass is light
8. But light has no mass and so it can't push it to the speed of light
9. Therefore nothing can go faster because there's nothing to push you that fast.

According to Einstein, I think, in order for a mass to reach the speed of light you need infinite force over a finite duration or a finite force over infinite duration. For obvious reasons, that will never happen.

ellis123 posted...

The current form of teleportation that is being pushed (to my knowledge) is quantum teleportation in which qubit entanglement is used. While it has a start-up time cost which is impacted by the speed of light the actual teleportation *is* instantaneous.

I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that the laws of physics basically prevent data from being sent via quantum entanglement as the entanglement is already established and modifying or adding to one to impact the other is impossible. That just means if A is up then B is down, not that we can insert something via A and have it appear at B.

I want to believe that Farscape is a documentary, not science fiction.

K181 posted...

I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that the laws of physics basically prevent data from being sent via quantum entanglement as the entanglement is already established and modifying or adding to one to impact the other is impossible. That just means if A is up then B is down, not that we can insert something via A and have it appear at B.

Correct. There's more to it though that I don't understand like apparently this cannot be used to communicate information faster than light either and I don't really know why but that's what I was told.

If you had a spacecraft capable of going faster than light, wouldnt any human occupants be turned into paste before it even got close to lightspeed?

Rotterdammerung posted...

I feel like therell be some stupid physics loophole that makes it possible

I don't think it'll be in the form of actually exceeding light speed, but going around it, like maybe with wormholes or something.

This, of course, presumes humans are around long enough to technologically advance that far. Concerningly, we still haven't found indication of other advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe, possibly because no culture survives long enough to reach interstellar travel. Or it could be that we're in a simulation and there isn't life programmed in other star systems and the universe is deliberately programmed with limits like light speed to ensure we never need to know that there's nothing out there.

I think this might be worth looking at.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_rocket

The max speed would be under the speed of light. I would imagine a long time to reach that speed

Devilanse333 posted...

If you had a spacecraft capable of going faster than light, wouldnt any human occupants be turned into paste before it even got close to lightspeed?

That's an issue with acceleration not velocity. Though I'm not sure how forces like that would interact with mass in superluminal speed.

Devilanse333 posted...

If you had a spacecraft capable of going faster than light, wouldnt any human occupants be turned into paste before it even got close to lightspeed?

Only if it accelerated fast enough.

But the thing is that to get a tiny spaceship up to the speed of light, you'd basically need more energy that the universe contains.

voted no just because it seems crazy