Like wars erupting over FTL rather than sharing it, because the country or a corporation who would be the first to have such technology stands to have the potential to colonize distant planets.
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No, not unless it is some sort of instantaneous matter transmission. Assuming mass and inertia still apply it would still take years to get to the closes suns. Hugh expense, difficult to control and limited benefit. Probably end up bankrupting the sending country.
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A bit technical but still readable. There’s fundamentally no way to travel faster than light that couldn’t be used to send information back in time.
Wormholes don’t fit into that idea. I would consider that to be FTL even though your actual speed doesn’t need to be all that fast to make use of them.
I think they do. The logic holds as long as there is a method of faster than light communication, regardless of whether that method involves objects actually traveling faster than light or objects traveling through a wormhole.
Actually there is. The issue with that proof is that is assumes that local arrow of time for the thing you’re sending back goes forward. This is just an assumption. There’s no proof that it does.
In other words: If your local time goes backward as you travel back in time, there’s no paradox since paradox causing information will just unwrite itself from your brain as you get younger.
There are so many good literary possibilities with this. Imagine a ship of older such types sent to a distant planet. They not only start de-aging during the journey but also losing memories to the point where a bunch of very confused young people arrives at a distant planet where their most recent memory is fighting with mom & dad over being able to drive the car and no idea how/why they’re on a habitable but distant planet
Should plan it so that they were recently trained and briefed on their mission on that new planet, so instead of being just after they’ve argued with their parents they have just finished their training
Maybe it’d be like military service, except they sign up at 18, get shipped out at 70, and arrive… at 18
The message literally crosses the path of the ship. It can observe it there. Causality is not violated.
There’s much more to colonizing a planet than just traveling there. It’s a massive ugly investment that may never turn a profit.
For example we have technology allowing travel to the moon, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to colonize it any time soon.
Colonizing other continents was also both hella dangerous and expensive at the time.
I think there’s a lot of factors, including where the FTL transit time, potentia habitability of the destination, and conditions back on Earth.
There’s a big difference between “hey we’re sending you lot on a trip with at least a year transit time to a potentially hostile destination” versus “go ahead and start building, if you need anything call Tony and he’ll have a guy there by Tuesday”.
If FTL were a thing, or even near FTL with long-term habitability I don’t totally see something like the Mormon Ark-Ship (from the Expanse) being funded by a wealthy enough group.
They are talking about setting up moon colonies soon though, that’s what the artimis missions are building up to. Afaik China is doing the same thing.
They are talking about setting up moon colonies soon though
Bases, not colonies. Colony implies you can start family there. That won’t be the case for a long time
I can imagine such a scenario as well because we are humans and we would do dumb shit like that.
FTL can mean different things. It could be the Trekkian warping space around you. It could be the Galactican jump to somewhere else. Or a portal. Or something else. Which tech it will be will matter. And different to most sci-fi, there could be more than one way if indeed c can be smashed.
The problem with space is that it isn’t completely empty and stuff in it moves like evil landmines. You don’t want to warp into a moon or jump inside an asteroid belt. Which means you will need this sort of highway or scenic spot system of space that is actually confirmed empty so travel along the route doesn’t blow you up or jumping doesn’t mean you accidentally end up in a black hole. In my mind, that would prohibit the use of the technology inside a star system because there are two many moving parts to consider and keep track of. So you need to take a year-long sub-LTS access ramp to reach the highway at the edge of the solar system before you can move safely faster than a flash. The same is true for the resource rich destination.
That’s why I can also imagine a scenario where having the technology might not be as impactful as we fear and thus not lead to war. The infrastructure would have to be so massive to make this work, it isn’t an immediate advantage to have it. More of a burden really, provided the economy still roughly works as it does today. And if we have the tech to reach the edge of our solar system in a shuttle bus service kind of way, we will be already enlarging our resource pool with stuff we find inside our solar system in an early Expansian kind of way. Better ROI on that than stuff from further away.
The Foundation books have something similar where ships can’t make jumps too close to planets. Characters sometimes complain about crossing the entire galaxy in nearly an instant then spending days slowly using impulse to get near the planet
Don’t worry, we would make FTL weapons and solve the problem.
I don’t think wars would break out over the tech itself, since it’s a technology that is more beneficial when shared. But if it used some super rare resource for power/fuel, we would sure as shit fight over that.
Exactly. Some wars have fought over territory, and finite resources like oil or water, and it’s not far off that a discovered rare commodity in a distant planet may become a bone of contention.
If they ever somehow did manage to invent FTL travel, they’d just upgrade humans from the status of conscious intelligent beings into a stream of FTL particles to supercharge their AI/Quantum Computers…
We would totally get into a sunk cost fallacy war with any alien races we were to discover. Not to mention unless it’s true FTL that one second in there is at most one second outside of it it’ll result still in essentially generational ships to reach distant stars.
You could almost say, a Forever War
Snickers Gold star to ya.
You know techbros would try to integrate it into everyone’s terrestrial life and unprecedented nightmares would ensue, like light-speed schoolbusses torpedoing into hospitals wiping out all life in a 10-mile radius
Quantum entanglement is real. Instantaneous transmission of spin states between entangled particles. So information propagating faster than light. We can detect gravity waves. The things science has yet to discover might actually be infinite. Will we ever be able to move a human being, intact, faster than light? If science advances enough, will we even need to?
While non locality is weird, it can’t actually be used to transmit information. Any attempt to force an entangled particle into another state breaks the entanglement. So you can’t really transmit any information between the two.
We do not have FTL info transfer. That’s not a thing. It breaks casualty.
