Two Sentence Horror

529 readers

56 users here now

Two Sentence Horrors.

The title should be the first sentence, while the body should be the second.

Keep it spooky.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Slacking

Humanity learned faster-than-light travel was possible when the gruesome mayday signals, of a future mission that was still just at the concept stage, peppered the system. (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by [email protected] to c/twosentencehorror

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The still-ongoing signals, detailing the painful, alien, and prolonged deaths, were swiftly censored after initial public exposure once physicists pointed out that regardless, the crew would have to be identified and sent out as to protect the space-time continuum.

top 4 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I think I understand what you're going for, buuuuut...

A) ftl != Time travel. My understanding is a result of a quirk of our current equations being pushed past their usefulness (no one's "fixed them" because no one's found a reason to; no one's seen evidence for anything that travels ftl). Logically speaking, if light takes 8min to reach Earth from the Sun, it should take 4min for a ship moving at 2c to make the same trip. As such, travelling faster than light shouldn't actually send you back in time.

B) you need to work on the phrasing a bit. The first sentence is confusing.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

No, FTL = possibility of time travel. To explain why would require a deep dive into penrose spacetime diagrams and understanding that the speed of light is a really misleading name since as a universal limiting constant it has nothing to do with photons of light and everything to do with the speed of causality.

When I say speed of causality I mean the fastest that any two parts of the universe can transfer information, energy, or mass in a meaningful way. or more simply put the fastest that anything can happen, like a universal framerate limit. Any wave-particle traveling with 0 mass of its own like photons, neutrinos, and gravity waves move at the speed of causality.

If you can go faster than the speed of causality you can time travel by charting a specific course on the penrose diagram to arrive at a point in space time before you ever left on the journey. Of course FTL requires infinite amounts of energy which can't happen in a finite universe but if wormholes actually do exist beyond just theoretical they offer another route to bypassing the speed of causality to arrive at an earlier point in spacetime.

We already know that the universe itself retroactively rewrites the past when you try getting clever with more advanced double slit experiments just to fuck with the nerds. So, its techically already possible. But thats with particles without mass in very specific quantum entangled pair state gotcha scenarios, where theoretical physicist and the universe have a pissing contest over the limits of knowability by seeing if you can violate Schrodinger's uncertainty principle if youre clever enough.

I know this is just a lemmy comment and im trying to hold off on nerding out but if you are actually interested in some extracurricular on the topic PBS SpaceTime has some excellent videos that make the topic approachable to regular people.

[https://youtu.be/msVuCEs8Ydo](The Speed of Light is NOT About Light)

[https://youtu.be/HUMGc8hEkpc ](Superluminal Time Travel)

[https://youtu.be/8ORLN_KwAgs](How the Quantum Eraser Rewrites the Past)

You might be thinking of the limits of thermal heat, which your statements do hold true for. Theoretically there is no limit to how hot something can get but at a certain temperature point our models of thermal dynamics break down.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

holy mother of infodump, batman!!!

(this was a really fun read, I'd love to hear more :D)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

I agree the first phrase is a bit of a mouthful. I tried editing it a bit to make it clearer.