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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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Thanks for this. I have similar thoughts as to some people's definitiveness about our understanding of the universe and its speed limit.
The thing is, we don’t know is the speed limit is a hard problem.
Maybe will struggle with it for centuries or maybe we’ll find a way to avoid the problem within the next 130 years. Maybe we’ll find a way to bend space so that you don’t really need to travel very fast. Maybe wormholes become a viable option. Maybe we’ll build hyperspace gates or something like that.
Or maybe none of that is viable and a thousand years later we’re still struggling with the speed of light wishing there was a way around it.
At some point, microbes and immunology were a complete mystery. People dying after surgery was a hard problem and nobody knew how to fix that. Turns it, all you need is ethanol and penicillin, but we couldn’t even imagine it at the time.