Just a silly question about faster than light travel...?

Question

Let's say the we live in a universe where faster than light speed is possible ala Star Trek/Star Wars... If a ship such as the Enterprise/Millenium Falcon suddenly hit warp speed from a stationary position would not the ship simply "blink out" instead of the cinematic dramatic "explosion" into hyperspace? By that I mean the ship would depart leaving only an afterimage of itself for a few milliseconds because of light reflection? No big flash of light, just "blink" GONE!

Answer 1

Yes faster than light would mean no light would be reflected from it, but it wouldn't look so cool hence the flash on the movie/TV screen. The other thing is the stars shooting by, even at wrap 8 the stars would not flash by as they are so far apart it would still take hours to get from one to another, but that wouldn't look cool either stationary or slow moving stars.

Answer 2

Right a n d wrong.
Right, there wouldn't be any kind of light explosion into so called hyper-space.
Wrong, it would not just blink out, because we can't see any movements faster than lightspeed, because our nerve signals don't travel faster.
If you look after anything moving away from you faster than c (c= speed of light), you would see it as if you skipped seconds on a dvd-movie. You would see it moving away, suddenly you would see it a mile more in front of you, still moving away and suddenly 10 miles in front of you and so on. After a certain period of time (depending on the object's acceleration) you would still see the image of the object, but the object itself would be gonbe for long. Why? Because the light then travels slower than the opject. So to speak, if an objects would move towards you at a speed greater than c, it would hit you before you can see it. If that object passes you, you would see it coming towards you though it is already behind you. And if you turn around and look after it, you'd experience the effect described above.

Answer 3

Due to general relativity, to accelerate to light speed would take an infinite amount of energy. But your question stipulates that it's possible. Even so, to accelerate from rest would destroy every atom in the space ship, beyond vaporization. It would be like accelerating a tomato with a baseball bat, if the bat also contained a nuclear bomb.

You'd be left with a puff of spare quarks and leptons from the former ship and crew.

Answer 4

Yes.

Also, ships that exploded in space would not have but a split second explosion as all the on board oxygen would almost instantaneously be spread across the galaxy.

Oh yeah, and also, ships that are destroyed always begin to fall in Star Wars. Why do they start sinking on the screen?

Answer 5

Who knows, haven't experienced it. Since we live by Einstein's limitation that nothing can go faster than light, we don't really know what would happen if something could travel faster than light. Maybe just before 'takeoff' a puff of smoke the shape of Bill Gates head pops out... who knows.

I however do believe that there is more to space than the limits we as humans place. Just because we can't explain something or believe it, doesn't mean we it can't be done.

Answer 6

That's correct, it should be just 'disappear' instead of leaving a light explosion.
Their probably a great explosion sound if there is air where the ship is, but in space there should be no sound at all.

But if they use the 'black hole' theory, then there probably light, but still no sounds, and there will be no crew or objects that should be smashed to the back of the cabin.

Answer 7

Perhaps, but no one predicted the loud boom heard when the sound barrier was broken.

Maybe the writers were trying to tie the same thing in as well as giving people a visual effect to show the vessel going to warp.

You go faster than light so you see a large flash of light when the light barrier is broken...

Answer 8

I think this is impossible as any object you are in suddenly goes blink from a tremendous movement you'd be flattened into a pancake and likely all fluids inside your body would squeeze out from all your orifaces and pores. Like a wet sponge being squeezed.

The human body is obviously not solid metal. It's very soft with many different structures, fluids, cells and surfaces inside and out and all move and flex at their own rate. G-forces would have to be constant and exact with every single cell in your body for it to overcome this action. And you would need an internal and external infrastructure to hold ever single cell in place.

Movement is movement. We will never be able to travel this fast at an instant, gradually building to that speed would work.

Moving from 0 to 186,000 miles per second (299,792.458 km/s) in a blink is impossible for the human body to withstand unless they are broken down into molecules.

Answer 9

Correct. But may I remind you of that scene from Space Balls where the ship suddenly 'jumped to plaid' (a speed beyond really-really-fast, and ludicrously fast), causing the entire crew to be slammed towards the back of the ship. It is for this reason that ships normally accelerate with care to super-light-speed ;-)

Answer 10

Well, I think there must be an acceleration period to achieve warp, even if it's just for a few secs. At least, that's the way it looks like they do it in Star Trek...a few seconds of the ship accelerating, then *poof*, it's gone! Just a guess ;)