this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
198 points (95.8% liked)
Risa
6943 readers
20 users here now
Star Trek memes and shitposts
Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think MudMan is correctly pointing out that to travel any slower than light speed through space causes time dilation since space is actually space-time.
There is a trade-off between how fast you travel proportional to the speed of light and how much time a stationary observer percieves to have passed compared to you who is travelling.
When you travel faster than the speed of light, all time and causality breaks down. This is not the case with how the writers of Star Trek wrote warp drive mechanics, this is our best understanding of the actual universe. Einsteins theory of relativity.
Fun fact: Light itself (or its quantized unit: the photon) travels at the speed of light and therefore experiences no time. If a photon is emitted from a star across the universe and travels millions of light years before eventually being absorbed by your eye, from our stationary reference point, the light has been travelling for millions of years, but for the photon it was instantaneous. Zero time passed for the photon. This is the idea of time dilation.