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Is Star Trek’s Warp Drive Possible?
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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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I think the best we can hope for if we get very very lucky with future laws of physics is a cheap way to travel near but slightly below lightspeed. Maybe some sort of way to lower the rest mass of matter.
It's much more likely there will be no immediate application of whatever the full laws are, because new physics only appears in very extreme circumstances we can't easily replicate.
Now that you mention it, what if we can create a region of space in which c is greater than normal? Is that possible? Would living things be able to continue living inside it?
Like some sort of... sub-space?
Even if so, it doesn't matter how you do it, moving faster than c does bad things to causality. You'd be one Lorentz boost away from a grandfather's paradox. I think that would hold for a region of space with lower c too, weirdly enough, because it itself could also be boosted in a way discordant with everything else.
You could just abandon relativity entirely, I guess, but that's kind of a key ingredient in how the universe works. Making a theory like that, I'd imagine, is like baking chocolate chip cookies without the chips.
I like to think the best we can hope for is that the speed of light limit is somehow naturally localized and the border to that localization is nearby enough for us to discover before we make ourselves extinct.
It's not too likely, since there would probably be solid evidence of it already in the light at can see.
Oh well.
This. And even if it wasn't, it would have to be far enough away to defeat the point. I think a faster speed of light in the milky way would be very obvious.