# faster than speed of light space travel



## J.C. Bell (Nov 14, 2012)

Maybe a strange question but anyone have thoughts on what would happen to the universe outside of a ship traveling faster than the speed of light?  Also, say you had a crew that wanted to journey to a planet in another galaxy that was say 100,000 ly away.  How would they even know where it was since any image or knowledge they have of it is over 100,000 yrs old?


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## CupofJoe (Nov 15, 2012)

J.C. Bell said:


> Maybe a strange question but anyone have thoughts on what would happen to the universe outside of a ship traveling faster than the speed of light?  Also, say you had a crew that wanted to journey to a planet in another galaxy that was say 100,000 ly away.  How would they even know where it was since any image or knowledge they have of it is over 100,000 yrs old?


[This is my take - given the FTL travel is more like the Star Trek that the Stargate]

 One Idea is that a ship and crew would see sparkles or a rippling grey mat of light as they run through the light from stars... [I have heard it explained that all the “windows” on Star Trek ships are actually view-screens giving a pleasing and acceptable image of space travel to the crew rather than the writhing mass of pulsating colours and random bursts of light that they would probably see and that would make them nauseous and send them mad - now there is an episode of ST:Voyager I would have watched...]

 As for finding a star [assuming good enough data] you can work out where it should be from where it has been. Given the odd wobble the sun and earth have been on a predictable course for a few billion years. My guess is that you would make a best-guess journey to some empty bit of space near your destination and then check again when you are that much closer, say only 50 ly away [making your next bit of the journey 2000 time more accurate...].


 But as FTL is currently theoretically [now that is setting myself up for a fall] and practically impossible, we can make up our own rules...


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## psychotick (Nov 15, 2012)

Hi,

At FTL speeds the sum total of any light you could see would be the pin point of light at the nose and according to relativity you wouldn't even see that because you'd be frozen in time. Light from behind couldn't catch you up. Light from the side would be grossly distorted.

As for finding a destination, my thought is that you would program in a destination at the start and then know nothing else, no course changes etc, until you got to the end.

Cheers, Greg.


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## JCFarnham (Nov 15, 2012)

For the purposes of real life, there wouldn't be _anything_ to see at even a fraction of lightspeed. We rely on light heavily, and when that and any concept of coherent chronology goes out of the window... we humans would be stuffed. Better to be put to sleep and woken on arrival than go through that kind of experience. Think of the inertia.

For the purposes of fiction? The Hard-SF authors either find a loop hole to the problem (wormholes, and the like) so they don't have to violate causality. The soft authors go, "MEH" and do what Star Trek and Wars did. To put it simply they go with what ever the most prevailent franchise does, since that image is so visible. 

I on the other hand don't put windows in my ships (side-stepping what would they see, not to mention not actually breaking the speed limit besides). I do however included the command deck view screen trope for ease of communication.


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## Telcontar (Nov 15, 2012)

Actually, the concept of "warp travel" is one of the possibilities allowed by hard science fiction. Currently we don't even know how to _begin_ achieving it, but it follows all currently known physical laws. Check out Wikipedia's article on Warp Drive.


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## lawrence (Nov 15, 2012)

Really fascinating issue. Gravity has time dilation properties, akin to the velocity based conjectures. Extreme gravitation impacts the passing of time hugely, some physicists think.


Its worth remembering that distances are so vast that even ships that can travel ten time the speed of light would struggle to explore beyond our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. (thousands of years to reach the edge even at 10x speed of light) and other galaxies are often so far away the distances are measured in megalightyears (one million lightyear unit!!) Its hard to imagine construction materials suitable too, everything and everyone would disintegrate?

Its a huge stretch to create propulsion and fuel concepts that can provide any hope of a ship reaching a _tenth_ velocity of lightspeed, nevermind ten times its value. Wormholes/freaky fabric of space physics seem the only route, probably because it employs an almost magical quality. And magic is what it takes to breach immense distances of the Universe.


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