Light-Speed Spaceships Would Have Trouble Phoning Home

kalkulat@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 238 points –
Light-Speed Spaceships Would Have Trouble Communicating, Spelling Bad News For Interstellar Travel
iflscience.com

Subspace is the answer of course!

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This is why Jesus invented ‘two cans and a piece of string’.

Dammit, I’m not even a trained physicist but I still have to do all the thinking around here.

But where are you going to get a string that long?

Isn't that what string theory was meant to solve?

Yeah, but they never found the strings, so we don't pay attention to them anymore. Once they have some testable results we may invite them to the party again.

The fucking string store duh

What's the propagation speed of vibrations through carbon nantubes? I've done no math or experiments but back up this startup tech 100%. I pull on it at Alpha Centauri, it instantaneously pulls a receiver at Sol. I'd say a vat of liquid nylon with a thread pulled and dragged but that sounds sticky.

Edit /s no one is towing a rope

Now I'm imagining spider-ships traversing the galaxy making strings of filament behind them, connecting the galaxy in a vast web of communication lines.

Speed is always the same as the speed of sound through the item

Does a lower frequency signal travel the same speed? 1hz? I suppose it would be the same because the tether would have immense mass over it's length. So even though I'm picturing an impractically long tether moving as one solid length to tap slow morse code, the mass would be unfathomably high and therefore inducing significant stretch. That's without getting into vibration kinetic energy being lost to heat along the way

I'm obviously not genuinely proposing this. It's just a brain exercise.

Jesus Christ, why'd this get so downvoted? Do people not get sarcasm?

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