Faster than light travel implies, and actually necessitates time travel
Today’s challenge is a race to save a close-by exoplanet. You will explain how you can win that race, and during this process you will see that faster than light travel is time travel. To do this task you need to review the Lorentz transformation and the space-time interval.
Suppose we have found an inhabitable planet, but an evil corporation plans on mining the plant of all its natural resources. They send their fastest ship to begin the process which travels at 50% of light speed.
The time wait equation tells you it is better to wait and build a faster ship. The challenge is to describe what the corporations ship sees when your newly built ship over takes them.
Key Takeaways:
- Traveling faster than the speed of light doesn’t simply allow travelers to travel backwards through time, it demands it.
- The Lorentz transformation allows users to see what space-time looks like for every observer, within a group, regardless of that person’s velocity at the point of observation.
- When two events happen in space-time, it’s normal for two observers, experiencing differing velocities to note different separations between them, in both space and time.
“Any FTL journey will appear to someone somewhere in space time as time travel.”
~Comments always welcome…
Relevant Content:
References:
- Patreon.com/pbsspacetime
- PBS Space Time (YouTube Channel)
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