Talk:Faster Than Light Travel

Actually, this isn't about faster-than-light-travel. It's about any kind of Faster-Than-Light, travel or communications. The basic premise of the text is that there can be no Faster-Than-Light travel or communications, because communications are a form of travel.

Comments
Don't be shy, give me your opinion!

Backstory
I wrote Why I don't believe in FTL, but wish I did in early 2005 and posted it on Kuro5hin. It generated a respectable 44 comments. I think that light speed is an unbreakable limit, and should be accepted as such in both hard science-fiction and FutureFic. I feel strongly about this belief that there can be no FTL, so I'm going to rework the text, incorporating wisdom from those who commented on it.

K5 comments
This is a temporary holding area for interesting comments posted on the original K5 posting of my story. I won't reuse them directly in order to keep this public domain, but I'm putting them here for inspiration.

This area is especially ugly and unsorted and will soon disappear or be radically transformed

As beings of Pure Energy - We would seek more energy in which to grow; hence, the Dyson star. Some will seek to maximise their potential, and that means harnessing the power of stars. With FTL, the powers of billions of stars would be accessible very quickly; without, not so much... -StylusEpix

There might be ways to travel between galaxies; perhaps humans just aren't capable of understanding them. That might be why we see no evidence of it. There's no reason to think that humankind is special. rep: There's a lot of places we can visit if we have billions of years ahead of us. By then, I doubt we'll be very much human anymore. It's so easy to believe in satifying answers like: we're special, we'll be able to do things no others can, we'll live forever... But they're not good explanations. A lot more can be understood about the universe if we assume FTL isn't possible, than if we assume it is. We don't believe in the afterlife, and we are denied the alternatives we hope for. The search for the meaning of life continues, after this... -StylusEpix

Consider SR, FTL, and causality. You cant't have all three; you need to keep two and throw one away. You can have SR and FTL, because there's nothing inherently wrong with throwing away causality. Obviously, you can keep SR and casuality. But if you want to keep causality and FTL, you need to throw away SR. The bad news is that you have to give it up wholesale.

I am not sold on the idea of billions of inhabited star systems. Millions of those systems are millions of years older than we are, and would surely have done SOMETHING we would notice. It's possible that few or no other star systems support life or complex life. Enormously improbable events happen every day in something as big as the universe. *We* are enormously improbably - why assume that we are less improbable than we are? rep: Life doesn't mean intelligence. Only a tiny fraction of these star systems that support life may have developed civilizations. The signs wouldn't be easy to see - we've only recently developed the ability to detect extrasolar planets. And I assume that most civilizations aren't spending huge ressources broadcasting a signal towards earth - and their undirected radio emissions don't have a very long range. -SE rep: There are arrays on earth perfectly capable of picking up a typical 50,000 watt radio broadcast as commonly used in the US from a good distance across the galaxy. The "hope" behind SETI is that we'll pick up unintentional communications of that sort.

dont be too quick
i think your view may be proven wrong. science once told us that man could not travel faster than a horse and that the world was flat, and this was said by very well educated men (who also said that women were not clever enough to have their own opinions), so i think just like we learned to fly and leave the orbit we are bound to learn how to travel faster than light with some very clever bit of kit.

Article
Isn't this page about FLT technology, not about extraterrestrial life? Blurrr (Complaints department) 18:12, 27 December 2008 (UTC)