4 ms·
I don't think it's fair to say "or immortality, or generational ships." You can make a one way trip, sometimes, but you can't meaningfully communicate. FTL is n
by R0b0t1 5y ago
I don't think it's fair to say "or immortality, or generational ships." You can make a one way trip, sometimes, but you can't meaningfully communicate. FTL is necessary or the universe is kind of boring on a grand scale.
- hallway_monitor 5y agoIt's not boring, it's just too big and therefore too slow for our tastes. If we lived 5,000 years, taking a 100 year trip to Alpha Centauri might not seem so bad. I think extending lifespan like this is more likely than building an FTL drive.
- R0b0t1 5y agoMy concern is the mismatch between the timescale we communicate with people and the timescale of the trips (minutes or hours vs centuries). It would be such a massive transition during your trip that it is hard to adequately describe it.
- godelski 5y agoIn the past information had to travel by people or pigeon (some sort of physical movement). Realistically this is communication happening faster than travel does. Currently we have the inverse, where information is faster than travel. This should similarly happen in this FTL world because of Ansbiles and that you can not just send ships full of people FTL but information (and presumably more easily). So I think the only difference is that the travel time is scale. Right now there's nowhere it takes months to travel and we can communicate instantly. In this scenario we actually have a mixture of past and present. We can maintain near instant communication but maximal traveling distance is years instead of days.
- godelski 5y agoWhat I'm saying is that you're not going to travel a meaningful distance in the Milky Way (as in percentage) within several lifetimes. Longer life or generational ships are absolutely necessary, even at high speeds and time dilation.