When will we develop faster than light travel?

[Independent voter]

Some say light is as fast as we'll ever go, others say it's only a matter of time before we develop FTL travel. What is your prediction? I would really like to get out in space and explore.

[Kujako]

Depends on how you define it. One could travel a greater distance then light can travel in an equal amount of time while moving less.

[Garnier Fructis]

Aside from dubious warp drives and unknown effects from a complete theory of quantum gravity, probably never.

And before anyone says it, quantum teleportation will never get you from point A to point B faster than a light signal can go.

[Deleted]

About the same time it develops true AI. Never.

[Forgettable]

About the same time it develops true AI. Never.

OK, that made me burst out laughing. You're comparing apples and oranges so hard it makes my brain hurt.

[unbound]

I'd say somewhere between 100 years and 1,000 years in the future assuming that the current trend of anti-intellectualism goes away.

There is no practical way to create warp drive technology today, but, then again, there was no way to create a viable rocket capable of pushing us into outer space a couple of centuries ago either. Technologies we take for granted today weren't even in the imagination 200 years ago (e.g. Ion propulsion) and people didn't think it would be remotely possible to travel faster than the speed of sound back then either.

We have ideas today on how this might work, but it remains to be seen if we can actually enable such ideas. We are still many generations away.

[Garnier Fructis]

Using historical technological advancement and sentiment to argue that something will happen in the future is erroneous logic.

The thing that distinguishes FTL from things like ion propulsion or rockets is that the latter don't violate causality (locally or globally), while the former does.

[Gothicshark]

Some say light is as fast as we'll ever go, others say it's only a matter of time before we develop FTL travel. What is your prediction? I would really like to get out in space and explore.

The basic theory has already been solved, there are just some nasty bugs to work out.

[Deleted]

The basic theory has already been solved, there are just some nasty bugs to work out.

errr no it has not.

[Endus]

We're never going to travel faster than light.

That said, there's quite a few possibilities that would let us "cheat" that. Wormholes, for instance, don't technically let you travel faster than light, they just remove some of the distance that you would have to travel. They're a shortcut, rather than a speed boost.

In the short term, it's more likely that we'll resort to century/generation ships when the time comes to leave our solar system; ships that are designed to host a community over generations, where the expectation is that the generation of colonists will not be those who originally left, but their descendants. We pretty much have the tech to pull that off now, in fact, it's just a matter of investing that much into that kind of massive infrastructure; nobody's got any reason to do so.

Quantum stuff isn't all that helpful in this regard, since quantum-level effects occur on the micro scale, and we exist on the macro scale. We may be able to find a way to tweak quantum entanglement into a means by which to manage instant communications across any distance, and there's a possibility that if quantum effects are responsible for consciousness, that quantum computing may be the breakthrough that leads to proper AI, but those aren't FTL travel.

[Breccia]

We won't. It's impossible. I know you're hoping for some kind of physics-breaking warp drive, or hyperspeed, but there is currently no evidence such exists. We wouldn't even know where to start looking for it.

[schwarzkopf]

Faster than light travel - if possible wouldn't allow any mass to be included anyway.

SO the answer is - never.

Doesn't mean we won't find 'loopholes'

[Kuja]

Odd to see people voting never when you think how much technology has advanced in the past 100 years. So think how much it will advance in the next 100 years, or even 1000, assuming we aren't extinct by then I would assume within 50 years, if they are able to make particles travel faster than light already.

[Lenonis]

I'm going to run with the theory that we're more likely to destroy the planet and/or knock ourselves back to the stone age before we get FTL travel -- so never.

[Garnier Fructis]

Quantum stuff isn't all that helpful in this regard, since quantum-level effects occur on the micro scale, and we exist on the macro scale. We may be able to find a way to tweak quantum entanglement into a means by which to manage instant communications across any distance, and there's a possibility that if quantum effects are responsible for consciousness, that quantum computing may be the breakthrough that leads to proper AI, but those aren't FTL travel.

Quantum entanglement still doesn't let you communicate faster than light because you can't make sense of what you have until you're given some additional information, which is limited by the speed of light.

If that's not convincing, then we still have the no-communication theorem. The large paragraph about it on the wiki page is not all that clear, but the last line on the mathematical formulation says it all:

"From this it is argued that, statistically, Bob cannot tell the difference between what Alice did and a random measurement (or whether she did anything at all)."

[klogaroth]

We won't travel faster than light until we have a fundamental shift of our understanding of the universe.

A complete game changer, like the advent of Newtonian physics, or relativistic physics.

Our current understanding doesn't allow for faster than light travel as a means of reliable transportation. We might be able to "cheat" in some ways, but none of them look to be anything like wanting to go somewhere, plotting a course, and engaging some sort of FTL drive.

It would be rather arrogant to claim that there are no game changers out there to be found though. Don't forget that we've been in the position of thinking that we've nearly "finished" physics before. A whole world of possibilities opened up when we realised that was far from the truth.

[Gothicshark]

errr no it has not.

Alcubierre drive, the theory is sound, the practical implication is still a very long way away.

See: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/ideachev_prt.htm

[Deleted]

One day we will. *)


*) That is if we do not destroy our world before we manage to get there.

[Garnier Fructis]

We won't travel faster than light until we have a fundamental shift of our understanding of the universe.

It would be rather arrogant to claim that there are no game changers out there to be found though. Don't forget that we've been in the position of thinking that we've nearly "finished" physics before. A whole world of possibilities opened up when we realised that was far from the truth.

Even when we've reconciled gravity and quantum mechanics, there is no guarantee at all that that will allow for FTL. There are probably game changers left to be found. But you can't say what game is going to be changed. The bolded part doesn't follow.

Alcubierre drive, the theory is sound, the practical implication is still a very long way away.

See: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/ideachev_prt.htm

The theory is sound up until the part where the whole thing depends on types of matter and energy that we have no reason to believe even exists.

- - - Updated - - -

I do not know if you have seen this, but you may find it interesting:

New method of quantum entanglement vastly increases how much information can be carried in a photon

A team of researchers led by UCLA electrical engineers has demonstrated a new way to harness light particles, or photons, that are connected to each other and act in unison no matter how far apart they are — a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ne...ed-in-a-photon

I was going to make a post about it, but I figured it would be too obscure/arcane for most people.

Interesting, but still doesn't allow for FTL communication. And it can't, because of the aforementioned theorem.

[Endus]

Quantum entanglement still doesn't let you communicate faster than light because you can't make sense of what you have until you're given some additional information, which is limited by the speed of light.

If that's not convincing, then we still have the no-communication theorem. The large paragraph about it on the wiki page is not all that clear, but the last line on the mathematical formulation says it all:

"From this it is argued that, statistically, Bob cannot tell the difference between what Alice did and a random measurement (or whether she did anything at all)."

I do not know if you have seen this, but you may find it interesting:

New method of quantum entanglement vastly increases how much information can be carried in a photon

A team of researchers led by UCLA electrical engineers has demonstrated a new way to harness light particles, or photons, that are connected to each other and act in unison no matter how far apart they are — a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ne...ed-in-a-photon

I was going to make a post about it, but I figured it would be too obscure/arcane for most people.

And just to expand on that, here's an article from four years ago; http://www.popsci.com/technology/art...nous-computing

The idea that quantum entanglement can be used for FTL communication isn't fantasy. It isn't even science fiction. It's a matter of engineering, at this point. The biggest long-term challenge is most likely to be maintaining that entanglement over those distances, and over long periods of time, since you won't be able to re-entangle if it's lost and you're already separated.