The way I think I understand it, even if we had some “element 0” like in mass effect to keep a starship from reaching unmanageable mass while accelerating, faster than light travel still wouldn’t be possible because you’d be violating causality somehow, but every explanation I’ve read on why leaves me bamboozled.
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Because the speed of light IS the resolving rate of causality, not an actual cosmic speed limit.
So being in a universe with time that goes forward, cause must come before effect. Send a text, then someone will get the text, and that takes a certain amount of time. Light is interesting in that it doesn’t actually experience time, because it’s a massless particle. From a photons perspective it is created and then immediately absorbed by whatever it hits. When you do have mass it takes quite a bit of energy to get up to light speed, more and more as you get closer to it. But the speed of light (in a vacuum) is a constant, it never changes, if you imagine a hypothetical guy on a spaceship going the speed of light, what would happen if he shined a flashlight forward? Well it turns out that as a consequence of maintaining causality, time slows down to compensate for this and it will for you as well. So as speed goes up, times ticks slower, your energy goes up. Eventually if you run the calculations your speed will reach that of light, time will reach zero, and the energy will become infinite, and it’s here you find your problems. Because you can’t have more than infinite energy, and time can’t become negative as cause must come before effect (I will say no one knows why this is). So it’s not that you could use a mass effect thing to reduce mass and reach speeds beyond that of light, it’s that nothing with mass can ever do so. Even something as small as an electron, you can only get incredibly close. 99.99999999999% is totally fine, 100% is impossible. 101%? Straight to time jail
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