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FTL Travel VS Time Travel

Chuck Anumia

SOC-14 1K
If it were possible to travel faster than the speed of light in a way similar to jump drive but instantly, would we also be able to travel through time?

Are these two seperate issues? :confused:

I would appreciate your thoughts, thanks. :D
 
Not in a useful way.

You could jump to, say, the moon and watch yourself leave Earth (because you got there before the light did), but you couldn't jump to the same place and get there before you left.

I think there are canonical references to misjumps resulting in time travel.
 
Originally posted by Andrew Boulton:
You could jump to, say, the moon and watch yourself leave Earth (because you got there before the light did), but you couldn't jump to the same place and get there before you left.
This happens in Trav anyway - the vast majority of places that you jump to (outside your current system) are more than a light-week of travel away. If you jumped from Earth to Alpha Centauri in a week and looked back at Earth when you got there with a ridiculously powerful telescope, you'd see yourself on Earth as you were 4 and a bit years earlier. Of course, you're not really still on Earth, you're just seeing the light from 4.3 years ago reaching you at Alpha C - that isn't really time travel.
 
Originally posted by cweiskircher:
If it were possible to travel faster than the speed of light in a way similar to jump drive but instantly, would we also be able to travel through time?

Are these two seperate issues? :confused:

I would appreciate your thoughts, thanks. :D
With current science it's our understanding that we can travel into the future (assuming the appropiate technology, and hence ability), but that getting "back" is not possible, or if it is then the science behind the notion (and engineering) is elusive at best.

In terms of Traveller science I think Andrew Boulton's right. I think the possibility is mentioned in "The Traveller Book," but I can't recall exactly where.

Anyway, I hope this helps some
 
Great so "future" travel or traveling forward is possible.

Perhaps faster than light travel instintaniously into the immediate futer could be possible.

HMMMM...I like this idea so far. ;)
 
Originally posted by Malenfant:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Andrew Boulton:
You could jump to, say, the moon and watch yourself leave Earth (because you got there before the light did), but you couldn't jump to the same place and get there before you left.
This happens in Trav anyway - the vast majority of places that you jump to (outside your current system) are more than a light-week of travel away. If you jumped from Earth to Alpha Centauri in a week and looked back at Earth when you got there with a ridiculously powerful telescope, you'd see yourself on Earth as you were 4 and a bit years earlier. Of course, you're not really still on Earth, you're just seeing the light from 4.3 years ago reaching you at Alpha C - that isn't really time travel. </font>[/QUOTE]Well it may not be Time Travel in any meaningful sense. But think of the Sports book you could run on Alpha Centauri.
You would know all the scores for 4 years while you wait for the actual broadcast to catch up to you.
 
Allen Steele wrote a wonderful hard science fiction book on wormholes for FTL and time travel use called "Chronospace". Its well worth the read and I highly recommend it.
 
A few defined terms are in order.

Normal time: 1 subjective second per objective second. This means that you and any other object that remains at a fixed distance from you, and that experiences the same gravity gradient as you, are travelling into the future at the same rate: 1 second per second.

Time travel: 1 subjective second per more-than-one objective second. This means that for every second that the traveler experiences, more than 1 second elapses for an observer. This may be due to the traveler's relativistic velocity in relation to the observer, the traveler being in suspended animation, or the traveler being in a more intense gravity field than the observer. Traveling into the past is expressed as 1 subjective second occurring in -1 objective seconds.

(I wonder what happens to the "Time Traveler" who experiences 1 second of subjective time for every microsecond of objective time... maybe the objective observer watches as the traveler grows old, dies, and decays in a matter of minutes? "I told him to calibrate that auxiliary framing correlator! Now he's gone and made an ash of himself...")

Teleportation: Any change in location that takes zero time to complete, both subjectively and objectively. The velocity is "undefined" since dividing the distance traveled by zero time yields an undefined value (some call this value "infinity" as a convenient handwave). Some gaming systems have declared that some small amount of time (femtoseconds?) elapses during the time it takes to teleport from "here" to "there" or back.

Faster Than Light travel: Any change in location at a velocity greater than 299,792.458 kilometers per second, and that is not instantaneous.

Slower than light travel: Any change in location that occurs at a velocity less than 299,792.458 km/s.

***

Commentary, with Star Trek references:

For some, the "Light Barrier" (c = 299,792.458 km/s)is a velocity that can never be achieved, only transited. Gene Roddenberry called this value "Warp One". The earliest warp engines required the vessel to accelerate to as close as possible to "c" in order to breach the "Warp Threshold", much as current ramjets have to be accelerated to a certain minimum velocity before they can operate. Newer warp engines allow a starship to achieve warp from almost a standing start.

"Traveller" Jump Drives must be more efficient than "Star Trek" Warp Engines, in that there is no need for the vessel to accelerate to some minimum velocity before an FTL jump can occur.

-KR-
 
It's not a question of efficiency; the two use different mechanisms. Warp ships stay in normal space (IIRC they warp the space between Here and There, bringing the two closer together). Jump ships, OTOH, go "around" the intervening space by travelling through jumpspace.
 
I read somewhere that someone believed that Warp=1c (the speed of light being constant) and Jump=200c regaurdles of parsecs jumped.

How long would a ship have to travel in warp to achieve movement to Jump 1 space?
 
Quote Mike
I've checked with friends today at work & Star Treks Warp factor is supposedly based on the power of c (speed of light) ie. factor 2 is c^2,
factor 3 is c^3 etc.

1 parsec is ~ 3.5*10^16m

warp factor m/s time/parsec
1 3*10^8 3.7 yrs
2 9*10^16 0.4 seconds
3 2.7*10^25 13nano seconds
(Jump 1) 6.7*10^12 1 week

Jump 1 ~ warp factor 1.513
Jump 6 < warp 1.6


I still don't see the advantage of warp over Jump drives. Is warp faster than Jump?
 
Originally posted by Andrew Boulton:
It's not a question of efficiency; the two use different mechanisms. Warp ships stay in normal space (IIRC they warp the space between Here and There, bringing the two closer together). Jump ships, OTOH, go "around" the intervening space by travelling through jumpspace.
If I recall my Trek-nology correctly the ship's engines dissasemble the region of space infront of the vessel, and reassemble it behind the ship, creating a "warp" field around the ship. This act propels the vessel through "space" from point A to point B.
 
Originally posted by cweiskircher:
Quote Mike
I've checked with friends today at work & Star Treks Warp factor is supposedly based on the power of c (speed of light) ie. factor 2 is c^2,
factor 3 is c^3 etc.

1 parsec is ~ 3.5*10^16m

warp factor m/s time/parsec
1 3*10^8 3.7 yrs
2 9*10^16 0.4 seconds
3 2.7*10^25 13nano seconds
(Jump 1) 6.7*10^12 1 week

Jump 1 ~ warp factor 1.513
Jump 6 < warp 1.6


I still don't see the advantage of warp over Jump drives. Is warp faster than Jump?
The so-called "classic" Trek formula is actually from a book by Franz Joseph entitle "The Star Fleet Technical Manual." The formula itself has one or two other terms to it, but is really just another piece of fiction. The problem arose when Fran Joseph started documenting all the real star names from reruns of the show, and put them on a map of the galaxy in the book to show various places where the Enterprise had been.

The dilemma was that if Warp 1 equalled the speed of light, then Warp 2 could not be a linear progression because if it were, then Kirk and crew would've been out in space for centuries getting from one destination to the next. Ergo FJ made up a formula to try and show how the Enterprise could achieve higher velocities and still be true to the show's fiction. But even his formula put limitations on where the ship could've gone within the designated "Five year mission..."

In the end it's all hokum
The best way to look at is that Warp 3 is a heck of a lot faster than Warp 1, and so on.

Blue Ghost, Trek-geek at large.
 
No, ST:TOS was simply WF³c, thus WF=1.0 is c, WF=2.0 is 8c, and the Enterprise' maximum sustained WF=6 is 216c. The problem was that the velocities were still too slow by more than an order of magnitude.

It is ST:TNG that introduces the more complex exponential formula with WF=10 being an asymptotic (infinite) limit.
 
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