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Debate with regards to time and FTL travel

  1. Aug 8, 2004 #1
    I figured this might spark some interesting debate with regards to time and FTL travel.
    First off if you were travelling at or near the speed of light wouldn't your body be stretched out thin like a noodle, so much so, that your stretched pencil shaped blood vessels would have trouble fitting through your slit shaped veins.
    I think the strain of travelling at such a speed would seem to lower this cap on speed. Thinking realistically we would be doomed to travelling at a dismal pace, we would never hit any corner of the universe within it's lifespan.
    With that said now we must consider that perhaps the only way to beat this even more strict limitation IS to travel at faster than the speed of light, but one cannot do that without violating causality, or can they?

    Some people have thought that time is a particle, a tachyon and while the idea seems nice what need would there be for a carrier particle for this? What if it were a basic property of the most elemental units of energy that there is. When energy interacts with energy then you get a result that causes time to exist; if no interaction, then no need for time.

    Time unfolds with the rest of the universe, and the fast that you go the slower that time is relative to slower moving objects. This at first seems a little counter-intuitive but thinking about it what if time were slowing itself down to accomodate all those events and to make the universe contiguous? Think about what would happen if time sped up with velocity, does that make any sense? Or what would happen if you weren't moving at all relative to anything?

    Consider the following scenario:
    You are at point A and it is raining outside, and you would like to get to point B. You must decide on a velocity, however, you would rather get the least wet. Unfortunately the rain is falling at the same rate no matter when you leave and will continue to do so until you reach point B. You could walk there, and gradually get wet, or you could run there and get wet quickly, but when you arrive either way you will get equally as wet. Each drop hitting you is like an event, your basic form of energy, yet it is not being pulled by gravity alone but complicated eddies that exist even within the vacuum of space. These droplets hit the droplets that make you up. The droplets inside of you hit each other all the time.

    Now consider that you are in space, and in a vacuum, applying this principle to your movement through even a vacuum, and you now understand why time for you relative to slower moving objects is the way that it is, it runs slower for you.

    If the universe were a vast; but infinitely complicated computer simulation, it could run on ANY computer even if power were limited if storage were sufficient to represent all the universal data and if time were so accomodating. If you handle time any other way, thinking about this, the simulation would be chaotic and impossible to reproduce; even on a vastly smaller scale.

    If you know what is responsible for time, then you are discovering a possible avenue for travel. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you could propel a vessel by manipulating the zero point field, that being said that's exactly what must be done, or even at a much lower level, but essentially you want to thin this field that you are travelling through so that time does not slow to accomodate. You could create an artificial field inside the vessel to eliminate any weird effects like spaghettification and time dialation provided that it is isolated from the movement of the vessel. The way to do this is to essentially have the ship shovel the field around the hull somehow (not saying that I know everything) and this would have two actions:
    1)The ship would be propelled by the cosmic expansion, it would go very fast very quickly, as there would no longer be the resistance on the front of the vessel (it would be sheered away). This is the very same thing that is responsible for it taking something like half the energy to get to 80% of the speed of light vs. 99.9%, it is multiplicative and goes to infinity by our calculations so that you could put an infinite amount of energy into the process, but NEVER reach the speed of light.
    2)Time would no longer be unfolding in the same fashion, it would unfold quite differently for you if given an isolated and completely controlled environment oblivious to these localized field changes and faster velocities, so you can pick how fast you want time to go depending on technological limitations. You would technically, and relative to earth, be travelling at faster than the speed of light.

    I suspect without this field you wouldn't be alive after that trip, but indeed if an artificial field were created, contained and isolated within the vessel then it is very possible that you could survive. This field plays with the elementary bonds between particles, atoms, etc. Meddling with that could really screw with your functioning body.

    Aside from that there are a bunch of firm believers of the higgs bozon, and perhaps that is true because of the fact that there is more than just gravity, because gravity alone spells out a big crunch. Universal expansion (and whatever hubble seems to be detecting) seem to be an anti-gravity of sorts (but not in a traditional way of thinking, you cannot use this in your sneakers and float around all over the place, rofl).

    Now does anybody think that this could be easily represented in math, since I am not the greatest at math? I'll study the math and do it myself, but keeping an open mind I am certain that there's a way to make this fit in with everything else....
  2. jcsd
  3. Aug 8, 2004 #2
    I am not sure to understand everything... :uhh: :confused:

    But there is something that seems obviously wrong to me : when your speed increase, a distant observer at rest will see your length in the direction of the movement decreasing. But your own perception won't notice anything. Inside the spaceship, you feel no change in size. On the contrary, it appears to you that the observer at rest shrinks ! Therefore, this :
    does not old.

    By the same token, your clock seems late to an external observer. But you see the external clock late too. This :
    looks questionable.

    This is only special relativity. Mabe in a full general relativity context, you can recover something out of your ideas. :smile:
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2004

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