euphorik

186,000 Miles Per Second, and that is a constant... while in a vacuum. I watched a VERY interesting show on this history channel yesterday about Einsteins theory of relativity, space travel, and light speed... all while VERY stoned.

It posed these questions (And I want YOUR opinions on them):

1.) Will humans ever be able to travel at the speed of light. And if they can, how?

2.) The closest star "Alpha Centauri" is 1.34 parsecs away, or 4.37 light years away from us (Around 25,000,000,000,000 miles away)

3.) If light is a constant (at 186,000 miles a second) how will we ever be able to see past what the light has already shown us? If at all.

4.) Humans cannot exceed the speed of light.. without using a wormhole or a warp drive. Once we reach 186,000 miles a second we can't push further than that being as you would need an infinite amount of energy to do so. How do you think humans will get to universes that are more than 100 years away traveling at light speed? (besides a wormhole or warp drive).

And finally, #5.)

If humans ARE able to achieve the speed of light than would we have found the fountain of youth? Because as a human approaches the speed of light he or she actually "avoids" time by traveling "faster" than it. And if that turns out to be true (has never been proven) than does that mean we're on the right track for a time machine. (We leave earth traveling at light speed, and are out for a year, we come back and 100 years have passed).

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Gale

Honestly i dont think that we will ever be able to travel at the speed of light, however i think that we will probably get close to it though. Basically the space travel that is described by orson scott card is how far i think we'll get. Yes i know its fiction but it seems to most plausible to me

Ha you added more questions

Even if we achieve the speed of light i dont think we will be able to see past the light that has already past through or is a head of us, we'll just be behind the light that is currently in front of us, and until we run into another object that obstructs the light we will always be behind what is already in front of us, just like how the light that would be behind us will always be behind us unless we stop. (if that makes sense )

I dont think it will be the fountain of life, but we will be able to make it so we age slower compared to people that do not travel at the speed of light.

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Vicki

I watched the same show. I remember the one scene where the ship (a space shuttle that could NEVER have warp drive) warps out to go visit another planet, whatever, and they are gone 10 years or so. However 1,000 years have passed on Earth and everyone they know is dead, and everything has changed. Kinda depressing. Who wants to volunteer for a mission like that?

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euphorik

On that topic though, is light speed the right direction for a time machine?

Haha, yeah.. I accidentally hit enter while typing in something and it hit the post button. Don't know why.

Vicki

Yani pretty much answered the way I would have. I am fighting a headache, and thinking about time travel and headaches don't mix well.

Yana Usdi

In a direct line? Maybe, but we shouldn't. Probably not though. The closer you get to that speed the more energy it takes for even minor increases in speed, the energy required would multiply until we'd need to eat stars perhaps to get the damned ship moving fast enough, maybe a small galaxy. Even at that I'm not convinced it's possible, at least in a straight line. I wouldn't put it past us to try though. But we probably shouldn't.

The more interesting possibility that I see for long distance travel is the idea of wormholes, pinching the fabric of space and time to make a shortcut. Or finding one that's already there. Making it (if possible) would also take an immense amount of power but if they can be made stable and permanent it might be a worthwhile investment in that case.

Faster than light communication on the other hand I think is possible and I've got an idea on how, though I've never seen anyone else discuss it. From my understanding two quantum particles can be bound in such a way that what happens to one happens to the other irregardless of their being separated, and that the interaction happens faster than the speed of light. Digital data is just a 1 or a 0, seems to me that although they'd have to be together to be bound then travel from point to point once you did that it might be suited for faster than light communication. But maybe I'm missing something and there's a reason I've never seen the idea discussed

I'll combine these and brush over them quick, this reply is getting too long already. I don't think we need to physically go everywhere and I don't think we should try to. But I've seen ideas for robotic exploration which suggest that we could send out self replicating explorers who would travel, find resources to build more of themselves, then send them out to do the same thing. Over time the speed of their spread increases until it approaches the speed of light, in all directions at once. Take it far enough and who knows? If the bound particle communication idea has any merit we could at least know about a large area in a comparatively short time. Network them from their point of origin and feed the info back. From there if they found somewhere worth going? Guess it depends on wormholes, generation ships, or something of the sort.

Cool questions.

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sideway

Hasn't it been proven that for a human being to travel at the speed of light it would require all the energy in the universe?

nornerator

Check out the book "Decoding the Universe" a great book on information theory that delves into entropy and quantum entanglement a bit.

I have also always thought that quantum entanglement can provide faster than light communication, essentially because once you know the state of one of the entangled particles, you know the other instantly.

All of the scholarly work I have read on the subject dismisses the idea of faster than light communication because for some reason there is no information content gained by simultaneously knowing the states of two entangled particles. Although personally I have not read a justification that convinces me that there is no information content that travels faster than light. The most current Scientific American cover article discusses this issue but does a poor job bringing any new information to the table. I have not yet finished my quantum mechanics course (last class before graduation) but hopefully once I finish it I will understand why faster than light communication via quantum entanglement is not possible, but until then I have not been convinced.

El Magico

No. Humans will never achieve light speed.

(I had to edit this: Human beings will not travel at light speed. Human minds will.)

Yes, the universe is infinite, and cannot be observed directly.

Yes. Time travel is possible, but only to the future.

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ganja-man

I like this thread its making me think. Those are some really cool ideas, I don't think it's a good idea for us to be traveling through time though, but maybe there are some benefits I don't know of.

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