But the warp drive is showing a stationary ship where space is compressed in front of it and expanded behind it. Unless there's something I'm missing It means that the ship isn't actually travelling faster-than-light. It's space that is being warped.
It's a very tricky and complex concept to figure out though since causality is seemingly still a problem. The warp drive in itself is currently impossible since it requires negative mass, something that most likely doesn't exist. I do wonder if the compression/expansion of space in front of and behind the ship means that the space that the ship is in actually cause the ship to have actual velocity, sort of like how someone surfing on a big wave is gliding forward on the water that makes up the wave.
According to this video, it doesn't matter how one achieves FTL. If the net result of one's propulsion method (or going thru some kind of wormhole from point A to point B) is FTL, then one is inevitably bound to get causality time paradoxes.
But is it possible to causally link two locations at sublight speed, to then travel faster than light between them?
Lets say we create a local wormhole, keep one side on Earth and then transport the other side to Alpha Centauri at 50% the speed of light.
After 9 years we would be able to travel instantaneously to Alpha Centauri and start colonizing.
After 50 years, we would have access to 1300 star systems.
After 160000 years we could take over the entire galaxy. (the farthest point from Earth in the Milky Way is 80000 lightyears away)
By the very nature of the relativistic universe delivered to us by Einstein, presented in that simplified Minkowski diagram in the vid, any FTL would mean time travel into past to some observers/actors. Time travel into the past will create causality paradoxes.
The Chronology Protection Conjecture, proposed by Stephen Hawking, suggests that the laws of physics prevent the formation of closed timelike curves (CTCs), which are paths that allow an object to travel back in time to its own past. This conjecture essentially states that the universe has a mechanism to prevent time travel and avoid paradoxes.
https://www.google.com/search?&q=hawking+time+preservation+conjecture
Thus, FTL looks impossible. I know this conclusion kinda transforms most of our beloved science fiction where FTL is involved into just fiction, fantasy even, but it looks this way.
I guess if you assume that any FTL object removes itself from interacting with the rest of the universe for certain time (for ever?), then it is possible. Like that dark energy triggered space expansion that might be happening between 2 remote points. The 2 points might be moving one from the other at FTL speeds, but they will never ever interact with one another. So the fact that they exceeded the speed of causality is moot point for them.
Yeah, FTL is an interesting concept that 'we' wish was real. It's very unlikely that we'll ever leave our own solar system since the challenge of travelling to another star is insurmountable, now and most likely in the future as well. It's a depressing thought but we'll just have to accept it unless future science actually find something we haven't even thought of yet.
Never say never. How many times we have heard of "not possible" for many of the technologies we currently have
But I agree it will take thousands, if not tens of thousands of years before we have anything close to (reasonable) interstellar travel. Positive side thought: in cosmic timescale it is nothing
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