this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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Every time I read about or listen to someone's explanation of why faster than light travel is completely impossible it always makes no sense to me.
I have tried to understand it more times than I can count but every explanation seems to revolve around faster than light travel breaking causality because of information traveling back in time due to relativity. Granted it's always physicists who are explaining why faster than light is impossible and I'm a complete layman so there may be a translation issue there.
See Orion's Arm's explanation:
https://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-faq&topic=FTL%20in%20OA
And related concept's like a wormhole's failure mode (EG they immediately collapse if ever positioned in a way that allows for actual FTL travel):
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4754be03eb3bc
Orion's Arm is really cool because it's set in the far future, but it tries to limit AI engineering to what's theoretically possible with current physics (just not with current engineering), and they have good explanations for it all. For example, warp drives are a thing, and theoretically plausible, but they do not allow for FTL travel.
Yeah the explanations in that page are even worse than any of the ones that I get from actual physicists. Several of the explanations say "FTL is not possible because physics" others simply use equations in place of an explanation.
Well the jist of it is in one sentence:
Basically, FTL automatically lets you make time machines, and this is bad(TM). It just doesn't make any physical sense, so the consensus is bad things happen (like black holes forming) when you actually push against the speed of light, with very reasonable explanations for why this happens.
The exception is wormholes ,which are theoretically possible "FTL" travel, but only if you are very very careful about where you put them. Otherwise they explode.
Yes this is literally the explanation that comes from every physicist and science explainer I have come across. The problem I have is the how. I do not understand how a message sent real time, as in at the same time on two different planets vast distances away, can go back in time "somehow". Like, I get that the actual answer is ultimately "the math says so" but I cannot adequately wrap my head around the concept.