JCHateSteve
Herald of the Meteor
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- Sep 5, 2008
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There may be some tech you can build to bypass the limit via some exotic new physics. That's what what the nasa warp drive idea is about. But, the speed of light is a limit, without some hypothetical way around it. It's well established. You can't just accelerate past it.Nothing in any of those said I was wrong, except the mass thing. I pointed out that our current knowledge may not be everything, especially if we are assuming aliens have some manner of traversing distances at a rate faster than the speed of light.
As the last one points out, the speed of light, or the fine structure constant, is just a number. That doesn't make it a limit. We haven't accounted for all the mass in the universe that we have been able to measure with gravity. which would suggest that its either mass we can't measure with the speed of light, or one of our constants is wrong. and IIRC we aren't off on the overall mass by a little, its a sizeable number.
Gravity manipulation doesn't help as it doesn't effect mass. The mass of the universe doesn't effect the speed of light either. Your can't change it as a constant because you inherently change others and the whole standard model falls apart. That same model predicts nearly everything we see really well. You have to get to some pretty extreme sizes or very exotic objects to start having issues. Even competing models like super string hold light as a constant.
It's not that we know everything. It's that the speed of light not being a constant means we know absolutely nothing and the current model works way to well for that to make sense.
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