FTL or not FTL...

POSTED BY: BadgersHat
UPDATED: Friday, May 14, 2004 20:35
VIEWED: 17361
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SIGMANUNKI

Thursday, May 13, 2004 8:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Tracer:
so it seems plausable that serenity dosn't travel faster then light, just really really quick...besides you'd need a lot of energy to travel at the speed of light considering a vessel of serenity's size its safe to say no.

Well, you can't go at the speed of light. Also, if you take that equation and take the limit of the velocity as it approaches the speed of light you get an infinite amount of energy, which is impossible. So, basically you can never actually achieve the speed of light, even theoretically.

Plus, after a certain speed the relativistic effects would make it impossible to steer. I believe in Star Trek full impulse was supposed to be 0.25c because of this.

If there was FTL then (I'd hazard to say) it'd have to be by some sort of spacial manipulation. ie make the distance between the two point shorter somehow.

----
"Canada being mad at you is like Mr. Rogers throwing a brick through your window." -Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

MCFLY

Thursday, May 13, 2004 9:19 PM

I love topics like this. I'm such a geek.

Anyhow, has anyone considered the possibility that FTL travel exists in the firefly universe but Serenity is not FTL capable?

It makes sense given the 'there's all sorts of cool technology out there, but few people can afford it' mentality of the show. In a situation where there are a few colonized systems with many planets, a sublight vessel would still be able to find work on a number of different planets without using FTL. Serenity does seem to stick around pretty close to Persephone throughout the regrettably limited series.

Hack the planet!

SIGMANUNKI

Thursday, May 13, 2004 10:24 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by McFly:
Anyhow, has anyone considered the possibility that FTL travel exists in the firefly universe but Serenity is not FTL capable?

Shiny, never even thought of that

Quote:
Originally posted by McFly:
It makes sense given the 'there's all sorts of cool technology out there, but few people can afford it' mentality of the show. In a situation where there are a few colonized systems with many planets, a sublight vessel would still be able to find work on a number of different planets without using FTL. Serenity does seem to stick around pretty close to Persephone throughout the regrettably limited series.

That would be a great reason of why Serenity stays in the "neighborhood". Zoey did state once that Persephone was like a second home.

Nice one

----
"Canada being mad at you is like Mr. Rogers throwing a brick through your window." -Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

RELFEXIVE

Thursday, May 13, 2004 10:28 PM

The colonists might have had some means of TFL travel to get 'there' but have since lost the ability to use it somehow. Could explain the 'many worlds in one system that is far away' theory.

Mal: "We're not gonna die. We can't die, Bendis. You know why? Because we are so... very... pretty. We are just too pretty for God to let us die."

SAMURAIX47

Friday, May 14, 2004 2:47 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by BadgersHat:
We all seem to be forgetting, Persephone is here in the Solar system (is it one of the moons of Pluto or something? Can't recall, but it orbits our sun).

Here's a link that lists all the moons in our solar system...
http://www.planetary.org/learn/solarsystem/moons.html#names

here is a link to Minor Planet (asteroids) names.
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/MPNames.html

Persephone is an asteroid that was discovered in 1895 by astronomer Max Wolf.

Jaymes

SKYDANCE

Friday, May 14, 2004 7:53 PM

"Faster than Light seems to be impossible, if you believe Einstein ..."

Actually, I've got a degree in Physics, and that's not what the theory says. It says that you can't travel faster than the speed of light if you have mass.

However, everyone who's ever read a copy of Popular Science knows that Tachyons move faster than the speed of light.

A little more esoteric is the knowledge that we have experiments involving the spin of subatomic particles that show information can move instantaneously between two points. Not "very fast" but "instantaneously". No time. Infinite speed.

So, there's a lot of room for something to be discovered that gets past the whole "speed of light" issue by sidestepping the problem. We'll just have to figure out what it is. Meanwhile ...

As much as we want it to be "real," Firefly is a story. It's not real. Ships travel from story to story, not star to star. Try to analyze it too much, and you miss the point. It's about People, not physics.

GUNHAND

Friday, May 14, 2004 8:01 PM

Ships in the 'Verse have artifical gravity, which is something that we sci-fi fans have pretty much taken for granted since...well forever. The reason for this (pseudoscientific gobbledegook aside) is that it's way too expensive to film zero g TV shows. Movies, sometimes but for something that happens every week, not gonna happen.

So we accept artificial gravity without batting an eyelash because it's so ingrained into our consciousness yet debate FTL travel like there's no tommorow.

But the simple fact is artificial gravity is as improbable/fringe/theoretical as FTL travel. But since most movies are filmed here on earth we take the artificial gravity for granted.

Now look at what Skydance wrote again about the speed of light and mass. If you can control gravity/mass to the extent your ship has zero mass then...well then you can have FTL fellas.

And I also agree that if you can't break the "light barrier" the way we did the sound barrier, because they're very different things, then you just have to figure a way around it.

~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
"Oh hey, I got an idea. Instead of us hanging
around playing art critic till I get pinched by
the Man, how's about we move away from this
eerie-ass piece of work and get on with our
increasingly eerie-ass day, how's that?"

My eerie-ass website:
http://gunhandsfirefly.homestead.com/Index.html

FINN MAC CUMHAL

Friday, May 14, 2004 8:35 PM

I have heard of no experiments that have transmitted information faster then light. That is somewhat of a popular misinterpretation. What the experiments that you mention demonstrates is something called entanglement. And the reason it does not send information faster then light is because the measurements are random. You can know the spin of one particle if you measure the spin of the other, because spin is quantized and angular mommentum is conserved. But the results are always random.

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