239
Light-Speed Spaceships Would Have Trouble Phoning Home
(www.iflscience.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
239 points (87.5% liked)
Technology
71540 readers
1425 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Uh, no shit? That's how light works once you're able to travel at relativistic speeds - communication over interstellar distances using light is going to take ages.
Even within our own solar system interplanetary travel will have significant communication time delays.
Edit: also, we already know that matter and light can't exceed c, but I wouldn't be surprised if we discover that other forces (gravitation, or another that we haven't understood yet) can transmit information at speeds >c. I wouldn't be surprised if we turned to quantum entanglement for instantaneous communication over extreme distances either.
The problem with information traveling ftl is, that you're very quickly running into paradoxes. So just by logic wanting to keep intact, I feel like ftl communication will be impossible
If you actually calculate the maximum speed at which information can travel before causing paradoxes, in some situations it could safely exceed c.
For two observers who are not in motion relative to each other, information could be transmitted instantly, regardless of the distance, without causing a paradox.
The faster the observers are traveling relatively to each other, the slower information would have to travel to avoid causing paradoxes.
More interestingly, this maximum paradox-free speed correlates with the time and space dilation caused by the observers' motion.
From your own reference frame, another person is moving at a speed of v*c. The maximum speed at which you could send a message to that observer, without causing a paradox, looks something like c/sqrt(v) (very simplified).