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Light-Speed Spaceships Would Have Trouble Phoning Home
(www.iflscience.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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This is why Jesus invented ‘two cans and a piece of string’.
Dammit, I’m not even a trained physicist but I still have to do all the thinking around here.
But where are you going to get a string that long?
Isn't that what string theory was meant to solve?
Yeah, but they never found the strings, so we don't pay attention to them anymore. Once they have some testable results we may invite them to the party again.
The fucking string store duh
Jesus Christ, why'd this get so downvoted? Do people not get sarcasm?
I was actually wondering what would happen if you would just put a big rod of metal in 0 g and pushed it? If one end shifts 1 cm, how long would it take for the other end to also shift? Wouldn't that be instant? Well, apparently the signal would travel at the speed of sound. Which is weird, right? It makes sense but it's still weird.
It's mechanical, so each atom is pushing against the ones immediately next to it, and so on, until other end moves.
It would be interesting to work out how much a metal bar the length of our solar system would compress when you push it..
What's the propagation speed of vibrations through carbon nantubes? I've done no math or experiments but back up this startup tech 100%. I pull on it at Alpha Centauri, it instantaneously pulls a receiver at Sol. I'd say a vat of liquid nylon with a thread pulled and dragged but that sounds sticky.
Edit /s no one is towing a rope
Now I'm imagining spider-ships traversing the galaxy making strings of filament behind them, connecting the galaxy in a vast web of communication lines.
Speed is always the same as the speed of sound through the item
Does a lower frequency signal travel the same speed? 1hz? I suppose it would be the same because the tether would have immense mass over it's length. So even though I'm picturing an impractically long tether moving as one solid length to tap slow morse code, the mass would be unfathomably high and therefore inducing significant stretch. That's without getting into vibration kinetic energy being lost to heat along the way
I'm obviously not genuinely proposing this. It's just a brain exercise.