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> There's no logical reason to believe this is the case. It's a social assumption caused by the fame of Einstein and the way pop culture has constantly told us
by AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> There's no logical reason to believe this is the case. It's a social assumption caused by the fame of Einstein and the way pop culture has constantly told us FTL travel is "impossible", putting anything that can do FTL immediately into the realm of "if you can do one impossible thing, why not N impossible things". But C being the universal speed limit is a theory only 115 years old. That's not very long in the grand scheme of things. And now we're seeing respectable and serious physics research that explores the concept of a warp drive. Whilst still in the realm of impossible, it appears there are gradients of impossible and FTL travel may slowly be moving between them.
This is, in my layman opinion, a very generous interpretation of in favor of the possibility of FTL. C as a fundamental limit is core to one of the most well tested and accurate models in the history of science. The Alcubierre drive variations are essentially just fun math puzzles for physicists to play with in their spare time. Until very recently they required exotic matter and/or ludicrous quantities of negative energy, and the best we've managed to do since then is replace those impossibilities with a ludicrous conventional energy requirement. Even if that was fixed there are still other problems to deal with, like the interior of the bubble being causally separated from the rest of the universe, meaning you couldn't actually control the bubble.
I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I understand how the universe works, so I can't say it is definitely impossible, but it is foolish to believe something is possible that the best evidence in the history of mankind says isn't, until we have evidence that it might be. UFOs can be explained by a lot of things significantly more likely to be real than alien visitation with FTL drives. I mean, if you're willing to believe that, then why not believe they're from Earth's future, or an alternate-timeline Earth, or any other sci-fi explanation that we have roughly equal expectation might be real as FTL.
- maxerickson 6y agoFTL and time travel are the same thing if Einstein is even close to right.
- grogenaut 6y agoAre you putting a negative connotation on this or using it as an explanation? If you time travel outside of your light cone with FTL then can you have any paradoxes?
- maxerickson 6y agoWhether there is directly a paradox doesn't change the moving through time bit of it. I mostly don't think that future FTL capable humans would be disciplined, so we'd be talking to them if they existed (in a four dimensional sense).
- grogenaut 6y agoI think if you're technically time travelling out of your lite cone at 1 second per second it'd be totally fine.
- grogenaut 6y agoI think you wooshed their point and instead told them what they already know. Imagine the GP starts off with "So assume FTL travel is easier than we think..." Then the rest of their post follows. Just like "Assume A Teleporter And a Warp Drive and A Post Money Society" -> All of Star Trek canon follows.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoThere is literally no reason to assume that though. You may as well assume that time travel is possible, ghost are real, and Jesus was a reptilian. Star Trek has the virtue of being unabashed fiction, it doesn't need to have its science make sense, which is good because it doesn't make sense even if you do assume all those things.
- thu2111 6y agoThe assumption that FTL is impossible is predicated on our understanding of physical laws being complete. But current physical theories are not complete, and in particular have large holes in them related to gravity. We don't actually know what's possible and what's not, only what we believe is possible given our current understanding of the universe. There are known unknowns, in other words, and we don't know what's hiding behind those doors. Anyway, whether FTL is or isn't possible isn't the point of my post. The point is that if you assume aliens are basically like us except with warp drives then it's easy to come up with reasonable explanations for their behaviour. It's actually the "FTL = flawless beings so far ahead of us we can't reason about them at all" viewpoint that leads to people being baffled, not that the behaviour is itself inherently impossible to explain.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago> The assumption that FTL is impossible is predicated on our understanding of physical laws being complete. No, the assumption that FTL is impossible is based on it being impossible according to the very best evidence we have. It does not require a complete understanding of physical law to confidently state that the sun will rise in the east and a dropped ball will fall to the ground. > We don't actually know what's possible and what's not, only what we believe is possible given our current understanding of the universe. This will always be true. And we cannot say for certain that I am not a Boltzmann brain imagining a conversation with you. It means nothing. We have to work with what we are given because the alternative is to pretend that fantasy is reality. > Anyway, whether FTL is or isn't possible isn't the point of my post. The point is that if you assume aliens are basically like us except with warp drives then it's easy to come up with reasonable explanations for their behaviour. Fair, but what I'm saying is that that's an assumption on the order of "assume world leaders are actually disguised reptiles".