Astronomical observation from a moving, FTL platform.

[Forbin]

Just a passing thought:

Let's imagine a star 15,000 LY away became a planetary nebula 10,000 years ago. To us on earth, it still looks like a star since the light of the event hasn't reached us yet. (I'm postulating this in Trek's time period, so some exploration cruiser has happened upon the nebula, which is how we'd know).

From Earth, launch a high-FTL ship with a good telescope at the star.

Engage.

Start a video recording.

As the ship approaches the star, the light it encounters will be younger and younger. At some point (10,000 LY away from the star) we'll intercept the light that left when the star novaed, and we'll be filming the event itself! Then as we continue toward the star, we'll be recording a fast-motion video of the nebula as it blooms into its current-real-time form.

Been thinking about that for a while, wondering if anyone ever thought of it before.

 

[Forbin]

Conversely, if an unexpected disaster befell a planet or star, a ship could be launched outward from the event with a scope pointing backwards, and record the event on reverse-motion to see what happened.

 

[apenpaap]

I'm not sure about your idea in the first post, but you won't see things happening backwards if you look back when traveling with, say, 1.5 times light speed. This is because light speed is ALWAYS 300000 km/s, no matter how fast and in which direction you go. If I stand still on the surface of Earth, and you on the surface of Venus, so our speeds are different, we still both see light moving at 300000 km/s relative to ourselve. Special Relativity explains this through a rather complicated bussiness with time slowing down for both of us, but only from each other's viewpoint, but it results in the fact that you can't travel as fast as light, and thus could never accelerate beyond that speed and go faster then light (unless you were already moving faster then lighjt to begin with, in which case you couldn't slow down to light speed and below.

 

[Mr. B]

Interesting idea... although the first thought that came to mind was the difficulty to taking pictures from a moving car.

 

[Forbin]

Actually, I hadn't thought about relativity. Hm.
Yeah, maybe if you stop the ship every now and then. Then you'll get a real-world view of the star at the particular distance you're at.

 

[Peter the Younger]

Actually, I hadn't thought about relativity. Hm.
Yeah, maybe if you stop the ship every now and then. Then you'll get a real-world view of the star at the particular distance you're at.

Yep, I wrote an SF story a few years back that did it that way (using wormholes instead of warp, but same deal.) Trek has been pretty squishy on this one, but if anything like warp is really possible, the ship in the warp bubble is going to be essentially closed off from the rest of the universe while at FTL. This is partially due to the nature of what is being done - you are bending space around you, and nothing gets in - but it's actually a good thing, because if the FTL ship can interact with the outside world, you get into all sorts of problems with general and special relativity.

If you really want to dig into it, Jason Hinson wrote a really fantastic web page explaning FTL and relativity, here. It's pretty long, but I think it's one of the best overviews I've ever read on the subject.

 

[flux_29]

I'm not sure about your idea in the first post, but you won't see things happening backwards if you look back when traveling with, say, 1.5 times light speed. This is because light speed is ALWAYS 300000 km/s, no matter how fast and in which direction you go.

What if the ship made jumps evey few lightyears, like a flipbook?

 

[Ronald Held]

No the value speed of light is a local quantity in General Relativity

 

[apenpaap]

The problem with stopping to watch every now an d then is that you'd need huge acceleration to brake from lightspeed-ish speeds. And when you accelerate, you need General Relativity instead of Special Relativity, and I don't understand that as well as Special Relativity (Since it uses some insanely difficult mathematics), but from what I understand, time would do really strange thing when you accelerated like that, slowing down immensely (Though you wouldn't notice it until you looked at someone who wasn't accelerating, who'd look as if he was playing in a Charlie Chaplin film). What exactly the result would be of this, I don't know, but I doubt you could actually see stuff moving in reverse.

Of course, if we pretend Relativity is completly false, then you would see things in reverse if you looked back when traveling faster then light.