I’m wondering if interstellar travel is possible. So I guess the starting point is figuring out FTL travel.
In: 1302
The speed of light is better described as the speed of causality. The universe is built with a speed limit for cause and effect. Light just happens to travel at that speed. As we travel closer to that speed, time passes slower for us.
Let’s say we wanted to travel to a far away star system, a thousand light-years away. Let’s also say that (via some magical process) we had a spaceship that could accelerate us up to 99.99% of the speed of light almost instantaneously (and that we could survive that acceleration – because magic). From our perspective, the distance to that far-away system would drastically decrease. We would get there relatively quickly, no problem, and only experience a short period of time on the trip.
From the perspective of an observer on earth, however, it would still look like the trip took over a thousand years. If we were to go there, have a stroll around the solar system, then come back, Earth would be over two thousand years in the future but we would have only experienced a fraction of that.
Another way of looking at it is that we are always moving at the speed of light, if you also consider the axis of time. The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time, and vice versa. A video that explains this better than I could is here: https://youtu.be/au0QJYISe4c?si=gDl3Sie67lv_IQGg
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