Novel Uses for FTL

Here's another one: you can use FTL to vastly increase the amount of solar energy that can be accumulated at one spot by combining the output of arrays around multiple star systems.

Another one: FTL is a very good way of preserving things, because the time dilation effect slows down the passage of time on a ship from the perspective of people back at the starting frame of reference.

I'm now imagining a massive museum-starship, constantly flying at FTL speeds in a massive interstellar circle to preserve its contents. Every hundred years or so it slows and stops, allowing people to briefly enter and experience its exhibits, before it once again closes its doors and resumes its preservational cycle.

(There might even be a story in either the lives of the curators, or the experience of a visitor who ends up not leaving before it returns to its FTL cycle.)

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Another idea: Use rapid void-jumping to spy on targets, with the spy vanishing again before they can be apprehended. Alternatively, the same tactic might be used to spook people.

Of course, this operates under the assumption that void-jumps cannot be detected or tracked, and that there's no way to peer into the void from without.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Sep 20th 2019 at 6:08:54 PM

This might not count but a side effect of the FTL I'm using is that you can make microstopic wormholes to pass radio messages. Because of relative motion and on occasion relativistic effects the messages can often be redshifted or blueshifted so live communications is out but you can send video and text to virtually anywhere in the galaxy so long as you know where you're sending it.

Check out this article: [1]

FTL communication would very easily allow you to observe and react to events before they happen.

I still don't think that's how it works. Forgive me but wouldn't a spaceship see an illusion of reversed causality rather than be able to interact with reversed causality?

That’s addressed in there. Basically, you’re forgetting relativity. Accounting for that, you could conceivably observe an event, and then communicate your observations of the event to wherever it occurred before the event had happened for them.

Novel ideas for FTL eh? Long distance meals anyone? Teleport me a delivery of Epsilon Eridani tacos, the best in the galaxy!

I know it's addressed, I just don't think that's correct. More likely, the Ship would call Earth only to find the message was already sent.

I mean, look at Quantum Entanglement.

Edited by Belisaurius on Sep 21st 2019 at 12:21:54 PM

Using FTL, you cannot bring information back to its origin point prior to its departure from the perspective of the traveler or someone at the origin point. However, you can send things back in time from the perspective of other observers, which is why it's so weird. Superluminal paths through spacetime violate all sorts of mathematical rules about the progression of causal relationships. It's fun to play around with these ideas.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 21st 2019 at 2:08:36 PM

There's also the Xeelee sequence route, where the FTL is explicitly the same as time travel and universe simply doesn't give a wet fart about paradoxes and violations of causality.

Edited by ericshaofangwang on Sep 22nd 2019 at 7:31:16 PM