Thursday, April 3, 2014

Space Travel (part 4)


Obviously, the barrier to interstellar travel is the amount of time it would take to travel such great distances. This is all assuming that we must travel slower than light speed. Faster than light (FTL) speed, however, is said to be a theoretical impossibility, based upon the concept of Special Relativity. This theory was developed by Einstein, and is based on the assumption that the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant. It is also based on the assumption that the laws of physics do not vary in all inertial systems. Basically, we are being told that the speed of light is a permanent speed limit! Yet some dispute exists about the assumptions inherent within Special Relativity, and unexpected lower decay rates in the muon decay experiment suggest that conclusions about time dilation might be incorrect--FTL speeds might actually be possible! In the Solar Echoes universe, it was necessary for FTL speeds to exist for many reasons, though the origin of this technology is of great interest to historians--each of the alien races "discovered" this technology within only 100 years of each other!

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