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Old 01-22-2008, 12:12 AM   #21
Rolenquin
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Default Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

I don't know if I understand your original post in its entirety, but here are some things you might want to keep in mind:

the speed of light is a constant, finite, and not relative; meaning that no matter how fast you're traveling, light will always be going at the speed c, therefore it is not plausible to go faster than the speed of light.

as for group experiments with lasers that "exceed" light speed but no information is transfered: It is kind of cheating and I'll explain why. To put it in laymen terms it's almost as if the lasers are running a relay race. Once the beam from one laser reaches a point, the next is started and so on and so fourth. So while the group of lasers combined speed exceeds that of light, no single one does therefore making the transmission of information impossible.
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Old 01-22-2008, 12:17 AM   #22
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Default Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

Quote:
the speed of light is a constant, finite, and not relative; meaning that no matter how fast you're traveling, light will always be going at the speed c, therefore it is not plausible to go faster than the speed of light.
The basic premise of the post supposed the eventual ability to do so. Obviously if you claim that under no circumstances can that ever happen, the theory falls apart, but the joy of thought experiments is that you can assume things simply to see where they might lead.
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Old 01-22-2008, 02:31 AM   #23
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Default Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

On teleportation: I won't say anything about the actual idea of teleportation, but when you mention using teleportation as a means to transport humans, it becomes a whole different matter. The question becomes: Is human life a collective state of all the particles of your body, or is it something completely intangible that cannot be represented by the state of one or more particles?

About observing past events: Not only would the camera or recording device have to travel out into space and back faster than the speed of light, this still poses a few more problems. As was mentioned before, there are obvious visibility problems such as other matter being in the way of viewing the earth or parts of it. But the earth's rotation also would make it so that you would not only have to be travelling towards and away from the earth incredibly fast, you'd have to orbit it at the same time, which, at a distance of 20 000 light years away, would be even more unfeasible. Spending just a day at that distance focusing on one part of the earth would involve travelling at speeds of:
pi * [(20 000 light years)/2] / 24 hours --> convert to m/s and you have one fast ****er.

Wait... I'm not trusting myself at the moment, anybody want to verify that almost-equation is in fact correct?

Quote:
To put it in laymen terms it's almost as if the lasers are running a relay race. Once the beam from one laser reaches a point, the next is started and so on and so fourth. So while the group of lasers combined speed exceeds that of light, no single one does therefore making the transmission of information impossible.
This doesn't make sense to me. If the individual lasers are travelling at subluminal speeds, even with zero downtime between a laser reaching the point and the next laser starting, you've still got lasers going at less than the speed of light. To achieve speeds higher than the speed of light you'd have to have to start the next laser before the previous is finished.

Did I interpret that right?
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Old 01-23-2008, 04:47 PM   #24
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Default Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

sorry, I phrased it a bit wrong... read the wikipedia article under Group velocities above c on this link... that's what I meant to describe.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light
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Old 01-23-2008, 04:59 PM   #25
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Default Re: Seeing the past: A somewhat realistic idea

My problem with this whole thing is, even in the event of faster than light travel I don't get how it would be that humans could take advantage of it. Say you send said robot 10 years away but beating the light there by 10,000 years. If it were possible to travel at that speed I highly doubt anything that anything could possibly pick up would be enough to piece together something usable and watchable. Maybe a glimpse at continental shifting, or a casual spot of the revolution of the Earth of yesteryear before history was recorded. There isn't really a logical way of making sense of it. No matter what kind of image you would get if the ship were to start recording as it leaves Earth on it's way to it's destination and back. If it does as you say beat the light to where ever it is that you are going, and the entire thing would work. How would we then watch this footage. Even if you could see everything as it happens. It would take say 10-50 years to even get the footage, and then what? You would have 10,000 plus years of Earth's history, and then you would be filtering through the 10,000 years of footage just to put yourselves 10,000 years more behind. Sure it would be interesting to look back in time, but to fully optimize this concept there would have to be some way to filter through the footage at super speed to see anything useful.
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