Faster than light travel.

[Soushi]

Light is the fastest thing that we know of. However, human technology is fairly limited in that department.
In our dimension of space, i don't think that faster than light is possible, because a grain or dust would tear a football sized hole in your ship.
However, the notion of inter-spacial folding and/or sub dimensional travel are a possibility that we can go faster than light.
The only problem, is finding a way to keep the acceleration from turning everybody and everything into a red paste at the rear of the star ship. Anti-grav generators are what we really need.

 

[katsabas]

Umm, speed of thought. Or teleporting or time bending.

 

[Dimbo_Sama]

If you traveled any where near the speed of light your body would be turned to liquid.

it's not possible. it's what we in the entertainment business call. a 'PLOT DEVICE'

 

[Macgyvercas]

It's simple. You just harness a quantum tunnel with an FTL factor of 36.7 recurring. Cookie for the reference.

 

[GundamSentinel]

You can get somewhere faster than light (space bending, playing around with 6th dimensions and stuff), but really be faster than light. No.
(Anyone interested in time dilation should read Alistair Reynolds' books. In the Revelation Space trilogy this plays a very large role. And it's very hard sci-fi, so no funny stuff.)

 

[1066]

Saw a documentary on this once (hosted by William Shatner, of course) and apparently it is theoretically possible to create the warp bubble effect used in Star Trek. Downside being that the energy required would be Suns Consumed.

 

[oppp7]

Juuust think about it, if the fastest speed there is, is the speed of light, what happens to light when it gets caught by a black hole? According to the laws of physics, it SHOULD accelerate.. :/

Yes, but is aceleration from gravity the same as from energy?
I'm asking because I really don't know. But if they aren't the same it would explain why we don't feel the movement across the universe at huge speeds but we do feel the speed in a car. While a gravitational source would pull all mass of an object equally a car would start pulling at the tires and work its way up. But that's my guess for something that I'm not sure how to Wiki.

 

[gamefreakbsp]

Not in my lifetime.

 

[Magnalian]

I heard somewhere that they're thinking of ways to circumvent the whole 'speed of light' dilemma. Would be cool if they can pull it off .

 

[Voodoomancer]

Moving faster than light: maybe not.

Cheating and using a wormhole: Wheee!

Einstein-Rosen bridges FTW!

[sub][sub]BTW: page 3, yay[/sub][/sub]

 

[Maze1125]

There are a few theories for faster than light travel, but they pretty much all involve bending space-time. Such as worm-holes or having the ship create a bubble of space-time that travels faster than light but the ship remains stationary with-in the bubble.

Well if we discover Element zero (like in ME- ME2) or any such thing, we could reduce our mass drasticly enough that normal rockets could make us accelerate as fast as light

Even if we could reduce the mass of a ship to zero, it would still only be able to travel at light-speed itself. Not faster.

There is certainly a possibility, one way or another. I don't think we can outright break Theory of Relativity, but i'm pretty sure we'll find a way to *ahem* "stretch" it. Remember - some centuries ago, reaching the moon was considered as fundamentally impossible as FTL is now.

They say that you can't go faster than the speed of light, but many years ago they also said that you couldn't go faster than the speed of sound. But eventually we'll probably find some sort of cheat code that works in the universe to get around it.

The speed of light is nothing like reaching the moon or the speed of sound. When people said those things were impossible they were just being pessimistic, there was no scientific law preventing it and no theory had to be proved wrong to do it.

The speed of light however is a law and the Theory of Relativity would have to be wrong to do it.

Juuust think about it, if the fastest speed there is, is the speed of light, what happens to light when it gets caught by a black hole? According to the laws of physics, it SHOULD accelerate.. :/

And it does accelerate.
Acceleration means a change in velocity, not a change in speed.
You can change velocity by changing direction while remaining at the same speed. Which is exactly what light does when near a black hole (or, in fact, any mass at all).

 

[Disaster Button]

Probably not going to be possible by conventional means buuuut..

There's always the space fold theory, wormholes, or entering sub universes where the laws of physics don't prevent travel at extreme velocities.

 

[Treblaine]

Through space? No

Between two points? Maybe.

 

[Toaster Hunter]

FTL is impossible. It may be possible to bend space so that the distances involved are much lower, but it would still be traveling slower than the speed of light.

 

[Ignatius87]

Even travel at the speed of light wouldn't be fast enough for space travel (the nearest star to the sun would take 4 years to get to traveling at that speed). We would need something like the warp drive from Star Trek, which compresses the space in front of the ship. As mentioned, this would just drastically reduce the distance traveled, not actually increase speed.

 

[GodsAndFishes]

The speed of light is nothing like reaching the moon or the speed of sound. When people said those things were impossible they were just being pessimistic, there was no scientific law preventing it and no theory had to be proved wrong to do it.

The speed of light however is a law and the Theory of Relativity would have to be wrong to do it.

Exactly, the theory of Relativity, we don't know enough about the universe to be 100% sure about it. But yes it probably is true unless we invent some truly awesome piece of technology that completely smegs it up along with the rest of our knowledge of physics.

 

[ThreeWords]

As I hear, at the speed of light, time and space kinda shrink together, and you end up going immensely fast, but you don't actually go anywhere, cos you're not moving in time.

I didn't really understand it, but hey...

 

[Maj.JakeVitaminwater]

It's very simple actually,
it is impossible to travel at the speed of light because you would expand indefinately before reaching it in a normal universe so all you do is build a warp drive that can fold the fabric of space there by shortening the distance that you travel then in the warped zone time seem normal to those inside it but is actually slowed down compared to the outside universe (ex. a trip that normally takes 1 week still seems as though it take 1 week inside the warped zone, but outside the zone it may take only one day) so when inside the warped zone you are going the same speed you normally would, but outside the warped zone you can seem to be going faster than the speed of light.