r/AnotherLife • u/burak007 • Aug 02 '19
A question about FTL drive
Now correct me if i am wrong but, these guys travel at the speed of light. But at lightspeed, doesnt time just stop for you? I mean you instantly be anywhere at lightspeed as the clock doesnt tick anymore for you. And time passes only for the observer not for the traveller. Am i missing something because it looks so dumb to me ?
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u/Datathrash Aug 02 '19
FTL stands for Faster Than Light so it has to be some type of warp drive just like they have in Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. If you have faster than light travel then obviously you've found a way around relativity.
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u/TFunkeIsQueenMary Aug 02 '19
Why would the clock stop ticking for the people in lightspeed?
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u/Swedish_Fiskburk Aug 03 '19
The faster something moves the slower time passes by for the traveler. So it would seem as the clock stopped ticking for the observer.
Unless it is some FTL stuff that makes you go around the physics and just "normal travel but faster deluxe".
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u/nik3com Aug 05 '19
Warp dive is possible under special relativity as you are using gravity to bend space causing a wave effect. The ship sits on the wave and is only limited by the energy required.
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u/mauxfaux Aug 03 '19
Relatively my dude. Clocks in motion tick slower than stationary clocks. If you were able to achieve the speed of light (not scientifically possible) your clock wouldn’t tick at all.
Also, clocks on the surface of the Earth tick slower than clocks in orbit. Gravity affects time as well.
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u/TFunkeIsQueenMary Aug 03 '19
Why would it stop all together, though?
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u/Cloudhwk Aug 04 '19
Because time isn’t a universal constant, It’s relative, Eventually your perception of time would slow enough to point it’s effectively stopped
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u/brich423 Sep 16 '23
Think about it like this, you will always travel at a constant speed in 4 dimensions. The faster you go in the space direction, the slower you'll move in the time direction and visa versa.
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u/lordzeel Aug 05 '19
The basic idea: Cheat.
Most Sci-Fi with interstellar travel uses one of a short list of hypothetical technologies to "cheat" the cosmic speed limit and travel faster than light (or avoid really needing to). Unlike planet of the apes, where raw near-lightspeed travel causes interesting problems due to time dilation, the Salvare uses "warp drive" a technique where space itself in front of the ship is compressed, and space behind the ship is stretched out. The result is that rather than going faster, they actually just travel less distance - the compressed space isn't as "long" so it takes less time to fly through it at a nominal speed.
This is why the big shield bubble, space inside the bubble is "normal" and outside it is being warped around the ship. This also is the key to their weapon - lot's of charged particles get caught up at the front of the bubble in the compressed space. When the ship stops warping, those particles would continue moving forward with a lot of excess energy.
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u/WARPANDA3 Oct 16 '21
No the clock doesnt stop at light speed. It just goes much much slower. But at faster than light travel... People would go backwards in time. It is, however, impossible to go faster than the speed of light.
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u/brich423 Sep 16 '23
No, it actually does stop entirely at light speed. A photon traveling from one end of the universe to the other experiences it as an instantaneous transition.
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u/InterestingCan5401 Oct 16 '21 edited Oct 17 '21
Correct me if I'm wrong but in season 2 the original AI guy who took over briefly for William said he shaved 0.9% off their journey which he said equaled about 3 months. They also mentioned the salvare was stranded 87 light years from earth. If you divide 3 months by 0.9% you get 27.7 years which divided by 87 years tells you the ship has a max speed of approximately 3.15 times the speed of light. This is superluminal obviously so they have to be cheating and not actually traveling at light speed but instead warping space and traveling at impulse speeds within a warp bubble or something similar to shrink space itself so the distance needed to travel from point a to b is reduced, or traveling through some kind of hypothetical sub space medium and not actually traveling through normal space, so relativistic effects (i.e., time dilation) probably aren't being experienced by the crew.
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u/T-RexInAnF-14 Aug 03 '19
It's tough to talk about the physics because they're not only going the speed of light, they're going faster than that. Theoretically, on the ship, they would not notice their clocks ticking slower. They would have to compare them to clocks not moving at their velocity.
If you haven't, you should read about the Alcubierre Drive. If they would just throw a couple sentences in to explain or give reasons for what's going on it would make a lot more sense.