Appleseed said:In reply to aircooled :
There are two movie tropes that make me physically angry and this is one of them. "Duhhh, what if we explain that we can break all the laws of physics by poking a pencil through a piece of paper, then it all makes sense right? Duhhh"
In reply to gearheadmb :
In reply to gearheadmb :
Okay, so what's the best cinematic explanation for FTL travel you've seen...?
Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) said:
Akshually Star Trek is correct on this one. The warp drive runs on fantasy technology, but it is a *warp drive* and doesn't just push the ship around like a rocket, it uses power to generate a warp bubble that distorts spacetime around the ship to move it. The closest real-life equivalent would be the theoretical Alcubierre drive. No power would mean no warp bubble and therefore no movement. Some but not all "impulse drives" in Star Trek (used for sub-light travel) do just push the ship around like a rocket though.
A bigger problem for Star Trek and a lot of sci-fi that involves travelling close to or faster than light would be time dilation and/or possible violations of causality through FTL comms and travel...
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I don't see a causality paradox.
The description I read was that, if you were at Proxima Centauri and then warped home at FTL, you would be on Earth and also able to be observed on PC.
Which makes no sense to me, because the light you see from PC is four years old. That is like saying it is a paradox for a movie star to sit in a theater and watch his own movie.
gearheadmb said:Appleseed said:In reply to aircooled :
There are two movie tropes that make me physically angry and this is one of them. "Duhhh, what if we explain that we can break all the laws of physics by poking a pencil through a piece of paper, then it all makes sense right? Duhhh"
How else are you going to explain a warp gate without going into half an hour of math?
Pete. (l33t FS) said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
I don't see a causality paradox.
The description I read was that, if you were at Proxima Centauri and then warped home at FTL, you would be on Earth and also able to be observed on PC.
Which makes no sense to me, because the light you see from PC is four years old. That is like saying it is a paradox for a movie star to sit in a theater and watch his own movie.
It's a mind-bending problem and I can see how just outrunning light to see yourself doesn't seem like a paradox (although it's a lot more like seeing yourself on a live security camera because you ran real fast than watching yourself in a movie), but here's a way you could use the effect to effectively send messages to the past:
https://www.askamathematician.com/2012/07/q-how-does-instantaneous-communication-violate-causality/
Say two people are chatting via FTL comms and can send a keyword that will trigger a bomb and kill the person on the other end. One participant could send a reply to a message and kill the person on the other end...before they sent the message the trigger word was in reply to. The message couldn't go out then, although it already did? And the person who died would've been killed by a message quoting something they hadn't said yet (and never got a chance to).
The saying goes "Relativity, causality, FTL, pick any two"
Edit: Requisite meme:
aircooled said:Pete. (l33t FS) said:Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) said:But that isn't how warp drive works... you never travel faster than the speed of light, but the warp bubble shrinks space in front of you and expands space behind you.
Plus something about reactionless drives changing your mass/inertia... there's some handwavium involved
I knew I would get a reply like this when I posted the meme. Not disappointed!
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I do not see how causality is violated. The comms are FTL, right? So by definition he has to be sending the message after he receives whatever message. The issue with the arguments for violating causality either boil down to assuming that transmitted light equals the person, or it fails to acknowledge the frame of reference created by the communication.
If we were to send an FTL message to a distant star, we wouldn't send it to where the light we see is coming from, any more than one would shoot at a duck by aiming at where it is.
Not that any of it matters, because IIRC it was proven that the "speed of light" is the limit because it is the limit of causality itself. If the Sun disappeared right now, we wouldn't know for eight minutes even with factoring in the orbital mechanics, in other words...
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