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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One thing:
“Accelerating to faster than light” wouldn’t do anything, because you can’t do that. It’s not because it violates causality, that would be a consequence IF you did it. But you can’t do it not because some higher force find causality sacred, it’s simply because nothing with mass can reach the speed of light. That’s the only reason.
“Speed of light” is the maximum speed any massless particle (not just light) can travel. It’s the maximum speed information can be exchanged. Because there is an upper limit to information, sequence of events can be determined.
As a consequence of that, despite all the wackiness with Relativity, where two observers might disagree on the order of two unrelated events, they will agree on causality.
In other words, if A causes B and C causes D, two observers can disagree whether A happened before C or B before D, but they will agree that A happened before B and C before D.
With no speed limit, if information from C got to you before A, you could say C caused A. But someone else somewhere else would say A still caused C. At that point the world just stops making the bit of sense it still had.
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