I Am Giving You Explicit Permission To Fix My Faulty Logic - Tumblr Posts
given that it’s been about six months since I made this post and I’ve learned more about warp theory and relativity in the intervening time, I feel I ought to correct and clarify what I meant by that specific line.
first of all, just because you see something happen does not mean it is currently happening. when you look at the moon, for example, you’re seeing about 3 seconds into the past since that’s the time it takes for photons to cross that distance. if we were to observe a system orbiting α Centauri, we’d be four and a bit years behind. however, that means that whatever is happening “right now” at α Cen, we will see it four and a bit years later. if your warp ship leaves α Cen and arrives in orbit of Earth four years later, you may be able to look through your telescopes and watch your departure, but that’s just the light; you’re here, so of course you’ve already left there. if instead you were to immediately turn around and return, you would still arrive after you left because your transit still occurred over a given amount of time for both you and observers (~8 years). even though you beat out the light echoes by two thirds of a year, you still moved forward in the chain of causality.
now, what complicates this is the fact that time flows differently under varying conditions of gravity and velocity. however, the only places in the universe where this difference is noticeable enough to cause problems are in the vicinity of extremely massive objects (black holes, neutron stars, etc) or from the reference frame of objects moving at significant fractions of light speed in real space. therefore, we can safely assume that the pace of time on any inhabitable body in the universe (planet, moon, asteroid, station, spaceship below 0.1c) is functionally identical to the pace of time here on Earth, with perhaps a second-per-year time slip at worst. and because you aren’t physically exceeding the speed of light with a warp drive, the relativistic effects of your transit wouldn’t be any worse than had you simply traveled at your real-space-velocity in real space– in fact, it would probably be better, since rather than coming home to find out everyone you knew is dead, your personal body clock would merely be a few hours or days behind local time (depending on your real-space-velocity, and distance travelled, of course). I dunno about you, but I would vastly prefer the interstellar jet lag.
thinking about what makes humans special and I’m kind of in love with the idea of a sci-fi universe where humans are the first and only species that invented FTL because we just Would Not Fucking Give Up on it. all these other interstellar civilizations are thousands of years older than we are and most have megastructures and immortality and plasma weapons and crazy advanced supercomputers. but they all resigned themselves to the fact that FTL is impossible, and nearly shat themselves when these primitive backwater super-monkeys showed up in their systems by dropping out of warp drive.
“How did you do that?” they ask, with their effortless and flawless auto-translators that are centuries from anything we could achieve.
“Do what?” we reply, eyeing the oxygen meter because we still haven’t quite perfected atmospheric recycling.
“What do you mean, ‘do what?’” they press, incredulous. “Your spacecraft just crossed an interplanetary distance in minutes!”
“Oh, the Alcubierre drive? Pretty simple, we just tricked the quantum vacuum into giving off a controlled negative energy density to create a localized bubble of warped spacetime that amplifies apparent velocity. Still working on the power efficiency though, it’s real basic and eats up so much fusion fuel.”
“You did WHAT to spacetime?? With a fusion reactor?! What about relativity?!”
“Yeah it turns out Einstein was a little wrong and the universe can be treated as a single reference frame, because knowing takes precedence over observing... Hang on, how do you guys with your Dyson spheres and antimatter engines not have faster-than-light drives?”
“HOW DO YOU FUSION DRIVE SIMPLETONS HAVE THEM?! We tried for centuries and gave up on it!”
“Oh yeah it took a while but we just kept trying.”
“Why?”
“Hubris and general cosmic spite, mostly.”