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The real answer is "whatever you want." We have no known physics for what happens past the speed of light, so you are writing your own rules.
However, if we are to use our own intuitive laws to try to write what happens faster than light, most of our laws of physics state that if every point that you care about is moving at the same pace, the laws of ...
answered Nov 30 at 5:47
Cort Ammon - Reinstate Monica
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31
It is already too late.
Any decision you make will either be a) one you have been gently guided towards by a posthuman superintelligence (with or without your realisation of this fact) or b) one that the posthumans have noted and decided to be entirely compatible with their other aims.
You can't wriggle out from under the unblinking omnidirectional gaze of ...
24
Warp 2, eh? Well, you're clearly using a warp drive, like some actually functional and practical descendant of Alcubierre's ideas. Such systems don't involve the ship travelling faster than light at all, but only the warp in space around it. That's why at sublight speeds the occupants of a ship using a reactionless space-warping drive don't experience any ...
20
They are simply too dull to attract attention from others.
Think of ants or of other insects/bugs. As long as they don't become a direct nuisance, we don't really bother with them. We don't kill ants just because they are ants, but only when they start colonize our houses, we don't kill wasps just because they are wasps, but only when they become a danger ...
answered Nov 29 at 9:43
17
The final great filter
Any civilisation that attempts FTL causality breaking will very quickly twig that it can be used for all sorts of shenanigans. This means the any race brave (or foolish) enough to make the attempt is destined to become a race that uses these causality bending effects for their own gain. To whit: they’ll be time travellers.
But no ...
9
The posthumans leave you alone because they see value in preserving your culture (and their past) and consider it unethical to interfere with it, having learned from experience that such interference usually ends badly for the baseline human individuals involved.
Basically, you're this guy,
a Sentinelese:
The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and ...
8
As per the work of Robin Dunbar, 150 people seems to be the maximum number of acquaintances you can maintain without forgetting important details, and it'd be pretty dull having to deal with forgetting someone's birthday the 200th time, so I'd say people would probably organize into 100-150 person groups.
7
Sulfur-based life is pretty unlikely, for the same reason that life on Earth isn't oxygen-based. Sulfur, like oxygen, usually only likes to form two covalent chemical bonds. Thus, you can in principle have chains of sulfur atoms of varying lengths with with different atoms attached to either end, but that really isn't enough variety of structure to permit ...
7
The "Orions Arm" website hints at a solution to this issue. The shifts are even more extreme, with super intelligences being in a series of nested hierarchies as well. In this universe, intelligences range from baseline humans (S<1) to godlike machine intelligences instanciated in Jupiter sized cpomputronium brains using principles that lesser ...
7
If whatever FTL trick you're using affected the inside of the ship, it wouldn't be very healthy for the crew. It's not just teleportation. Imagine you are walking forward or backward in the ship. What would happen to you if you could experience the warp speed you're travelling at?
Obviously, any transport method used necessarily mustn't be felt inside the ...
6
You exist in reality, where causality will not be violated
A reality with FTL, can not exist and it have never existed. Actually what happens is controversial pending on interpretation of quantum physics:
if multiverse actually exist, then all timelines with FTL simply end or even are retrospectively removed (for practical purposes think this way, ...
6
Oxygen oxidizes.
As oxygen content increases, the problems oxygen poses on our own world would be more problematic.
Minerals exposed to the environment would tend to form the oxide. This led to an enormous problem during the emergence of life: iron was bound as the oxide. Higher levels of oxygen might tend to convert reduced nitrogen and sulfur compounds ...
4
Combat profile
That's your major problem. The Falcon is a great ship, and quite good at fighting fighter craft. However, in the Star Wars expanded universe, there's a lot of problems that come up with small freighters like the Falcon. And the main one is combat profile. You see, a ship like an X-Wing, TIE Fighter, or A-Wing has a sleek profile and can ...
4
I Agree with @Mathew Wells Answer, about 150 People. The question isn't about how long a person has lived it is about memory. People tend forget people, it starts with names, and eventually faces.
The statement average American knows about 600 people, or H. Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth, estimated from an earlier survey that the average American knew ...
4
A wormhole will have energy constraints. If the wormhole is too short, the ends may attract each other. It means you would have to expend enormous energy to keep a wormhole open if it was shorter than some critical length, say 1 million km or something. Where over 1 million km you can keep it open with a very small amount of energy, just enough to guide the ...
4
Chain boom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_River_Chain
In the Revolutionary war some American waterways were defended with chains. The chains spanned the river, just underwater, and were intended to stop British ships traveling upstream. Some sites worked better than others. At the mooring points of the chains there were batteries, presumably to ...
3
In Star Wars, fighters win overall. Personally I like the idea of ships like this instead of fighters in a more realistic setting, but for Star Wars it is harder to make this work outside of niche cases. The Millennium Falcon is mostly effective because it is somewhat unique and can pretend to be a regular freighter, not because ships of its class are ...
3
Here's a possibility that doesn't quite meet your criteria, but is somewhat closer to actual, known physics: Invoke the Chronology Protection Conjecture.
In short, this conjecture asserts that whenever general relativity would appear to make time travel possible, quantum mechanics will step in one way or another to thwart it. It's an explanation for why we ...
3
The Solar System will soon be englobed
I'm basing this off my current story in progress, for which I've asked a supporting question here on SE:WB. My idea (not really my idea, the core element is about as old as antiquity) is that early on in our development, astronomers find tantalizing evidence of an astronomical structure surrounding the Solar System, ...
3
Through sheer luck, a planet-hunting satellite has detected micro-lensing events that are eventually deduced to be due to a primordial black hole (one that masses less than our Sun). The hole is quiescent at discovery, because it's been in the low-density interstellar medium for millennia, but it's soon discovered that a) its heading relative to the ...
2
You Dyson sphere is a Polyhedron of some sort.
This also neatly divides your sphere into self-contained regions because the 'edges' could be impassable barriers. Maybe they are strips of vacuum or impossibly steep mountains. Your travel guild maintains the only bridges or tunnels across these borders.
your magic portals work instantly but you still need ...
2
All these ships have the same fundamental problem: The squishy bit in the middle.
What sort of craft performs best at that scale is simply a matter of which one best handles the requirements of the squishy bit in the middle.
Acceleration is a key factor. They're all limited to the same fundamental acceleration, that being the limit of what a human body can ...
2
A sentient superintelligence (one with its own goals and planning ability) isn't any better than a human setting the policy for a collection of appliance-like AIs. Genetically engineered friends coming to visit? Dial the joke toaster to a target audience IQ of 280 and repeat to them the lines it gives you. A simulation of a billion people wants to open a ...
2
My approach to punishing violations of causality is a phenomenon that I have dubbed 'Paradox Reverberations'.
Let us suppose that we have a time traveller who goes back in time. Should this time traveller do something that invalidates the course of events that led to the time traveling event, a reverberation begins... time flows onwards, the time traveling ...
2
If the nations occupying these canal networks have cannons, there isn't going to BE any naval combat.
Not anywhere within range of land-based artillery at any rate. It's always cheaper and easier to put your cannons in a fortification than on a boat, and you can put MUCH larger cannons in a fortification more easily than you can on a boat. The advantage of ...
1
You could perhaps have FTL trigger vacuum decay. The FTL drive could somehow trigger a vacuum decay, which would more or less ensure everything around the source would be destroyed at the speed of light. Nothing of the civilization in question would remain which fits great with the apocalypse part of your question.
The problem with this apocalypse scenario ...
1
Try not to think about it too hard. It's not possible in this universe to go faster than the speed of light, it is irrational, so justifying how transporters will work in a rational way is also not possible.
The answers you have here that say that it would make no difference are all completely wrong in RL btw. They are based on notions that only work at ...
1
The universe is infinite, so the area the super-intelligence would have to cover would increase infinitely. Covering an infinite area would take infinite resources, something the super-intelligence probably doesn't have. That being the case, they have to be selective about where they go as they expand across the universe. They only want to visit planets ...
1
Because of their reliance on logic, it is really easy for one AI to predict the behaviour of another AI. The correct response to stimuli are easily calculable and being a higher-level AI doesn't change this. Every AI instantly knows what all the other AI is going to do.
This is total deadlock: the only way to gain an advantage is through randomness...
And ...
1
Neutral Zone
Certain superminds are philosophically opposed to one another. They can avoid (or at least postpone) destructive conflict by agreeing to stick to separate territories, with a neutral zone between them to reduce the risk of border incidents.
The Superminds routinely perform remote scans of these areas, but they're only looking for AI activity. ...
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