This has bothered me for ages! (re: Travel faster than the speed of light)

I'm inpressed But wait, you don't believe GR/SR

Hi Trixie! Oh dear, where to start When we say you can't go faster than light, why can't people just leave it at that???Ok, forget all the frying yourself or the spacecraft or the planet or whatever. It's irrelevant to the discussion.Given that at the speed of light, it takes zero time to arrive at your destination, how do you intend to accelerate to beyond the speed of light? Given that at the speed of light, the distance between you and your destination is zero, why would you even try?What you have to understand is that the speed of light is just a speed limit on the perceived velocity of an object, not on the speed of the object itself. You yourself can travel at any speed you like up to infinte speed, if you are defining speed as distance travelled over time taken. Alpha C is ~4lyrs away. I cn get there in 8 yrs, so have speed .5c. I can get there in 4 yrs so have speed c. I can get there in 1 day, so have speed ~1460c.RAZD had it correct. What you are trying to describe is no longer an object travelling, but an extended physical object spanning two distant points. But it is an object that at some point blinks into existance and then at some later time blinks out of existence. Not a concept that makes a lot of sense.The speed of light is a barrier between concepts of objects evolving through time, and objects that are physically extended. It's a lot deeper than you imagine...Of coures, you can repeat your idea but instead of trying to travel superluminary, you can employ a wormhole to "teleport" to your destination. You will then be able to see yourself back at your origin before taking the trip, and all such fun. If you travel in such a way that you arrive at a destination before a light-ray, you have a time-machine. Simple as that.

Yep And if you stand the right distance from a black hole (3 times its mass in geometrical units) and look left or right, you will see an inifnite number of yourself disappearing into the distance! You can do fun thing with gravity...BUT, a normal closed universe will always collapse before your light has time to travel all of the way around. In an accelerating closed universe, the universe will out run your light, so again it won't work. It works best in the Einstein Static Universe (ESU), where there is no expansion or contraction.

Mass doesn't increase with velocity, only "perceived" mass. There is thus no increase in space-time curvature, and hence no gravitational effects.Also, just to be picky, it's not sufficient mass that reveals the Schwarzschild radius, it's density. You must contain all of your mass M within a radius 2MG/c^2.

Hi Brad, yes there is definitely perceived inertia. In fact, it is precisely this "inertia" that leads to the idea of the mass increasing. For a given observed impulse, there is not the observed expected increase in velocity. This suggests that the inertia must be increasing, and hence the mass.

Hi Mod... it's late and I need sleep! So more later, but for now:Wormholes are best You can have DS9 natural, "stargate" manufactured, and the original and best: Contact type plucked from the quantum foam! Wormholes as we now know them were discovered by Misner and Thorne by the direct request of Sagan whilst he was writing Contact! Super-Science to order The AWD is almost as cool...Changing the speed of light doesn't really work too well. It doesn't actually make any sense for reasons that are hard to explain at this time of night. But when has sci-fi ever had to make sense? The AWD is probably the closest realistic version of this.I'll get back to you on your maths tomorrow.Just remember that any FTL is equivalent to time travel. You can't have one without the other. Sci-fi is of course free to dismiss this as it invariably does all the time...BTW, sci-fi is usually better not trying to describe its science. Dune is all the better for keeping everything semi mystical. As much as I love Donaldson's Gap Series, his attempts to explain the science had me weeping with frustration!