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View Full Version : Illusory perception at speeds faster than light (possibly killing catgirls)



gooddragon1
2017-08-31, 02:13 AM
Preface: I was having a nice day today. Then a catgirl was mean to me.

Among other issues, going faster than light means that you might have trouble seeing, hearing, or smelling anything because light won't be moving fast enough to reach your eyes and your interactions with air molecules might make it hard for you to hear or smell anything.

So, would a self inflicted illusion be able to approximate these things or would the environment be too warped anyways?

Martin Greywolf
2017-08-31, 02:47 AM
This is very much an "imagine a completely new primary color" kind of question. Once you break speed of light, so many things break down we no longer have any idea what it will look like.

The most common way of FTL in fiction is one where a bubble of normal space is accelerated somehow to exceed speed of light relative to rest of the universe, but not exceed it within it. This is called the Alcubierre drive, and answer to what you'd maybe see from the inside can be found here (https://www.quora.com/What-would-the-stars-look-like-from-inside-an-Alcubierre-bubble).

Anymage
2017-08-31, 03:48 AM
If you have some fantastic power like the speed force backing you, just be handwavey and assume it fixes all the problems you'd be facing.

If you don't, I'm just going to link this (https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/) for an idea of what going at even a significant fraction of C in an atmosphere would do. Go faster, and being caught in a nuclear fireball will quickly become the least of your problems. Speedster is one of those superpowers you really don't want to get too scientifically accurate on.

Storm_Of_Snow
2017-08-31, 05:31 AM
I guess it depends on whether the illusion is mental interference (in which case, you'd sense everything about the illusion no matter what speed you were at) or something more like a hologram which is projected into real space, and in the latter case whether it stays within your frame of reference or is projected at a point which you're moving away from.

Although that would only mean you'd be unable to sense EM waves from behind you (light, radio etc) - anything from in front could still be sensed, although everything would be blue-shifted and at light speed, you've turned visible light into some pretty nasty bits of the EM spectrum.

Anything off to the sides could still be sensed normally, although at those speeds, it won't remain off to the side for very long. :smallsmile:

Anonymouswizard
2017-08-31, 05:49 AM
The most common way of FTL in fiction is one where a bubble of normal space is accelerated somehow to exceed speed of light relative to rest of the universe, but not exceed it within it. This is called the Alcubierre drive, and answer to what you'd maybe see from the inside can be found here (https://www.quora.com/What-would-the-stars-look-like-from-inside-an-Alcubierre-bubble).

Eh, I suspect hyperspace is more common, and wormholes are still popular because you don't have to do any of that tedious mucking about with warp bubbles. There's also the version where you essentially stick the ship inside a wormhole and move the wormhole at greater than the speed of light, but that's not functionally different to bubble Alcubierre.

The Alcubierre Drive is mostly popular among those authors who haven't looked into it's drawbacks IME, because they want realistic FTL travel, see someone's designed a theoretically version, and don't read far enough to see you probably need a large planet in energy to activate it and it causes hard radiation when turned off. Although those that do understand those tend to write better stories because of the limitations.

The short answer for any realistic FTL is 'effectively going FTL while still not', which means you'll easily see whatever you're not going FTL relative to, but everything else is probably black (or white, depending on exactly how your method operates).

Of course, if we suspend realism and allow you to go FTL with Newtonian acceleration, you can probably still see, but by the time you've processed what you saw you likely can't see it now. You'd have to react too stuff that is no longer true.

Using an illusion to see will probably just move you towards reacting to past stuff if it's directly into the mind, if it's light them you might be reacting to stuff twice as far into the past (as whatever has to make the illusions has to mentally process them before it can generate them).

n00b17
2017-08-31, 09:42 AM
The issue here is the way time distorts. One of the reasons physicists don't like to consider FTL is that (aside from breaking special relativity and requiring complex-valued energy) it also basically causes time travel. Your perception of time slows as you go faster, stops as you approach the speed of light, becomes negative if you force a higher speed into the equation. If you fly from point A to point B in one hour, and it normally takes light 3 hours, you pass the light coming from A, so it appears to happen in reverse. And when you get to B, you have access to information that won't exist there for another 2 hours.

Worse yet, you can actually use it to send signals into your own past, using a technique called the "tachyonic antitelephone".

So your illusion would have to be able to give a more-or-less complete impression of time travel.

TL;DR, if you want to go faster than light, make sure you're using Newtonian physics

gooddragon1
2017-09-01, 01:22 AM
I guess it depends on whether the illusion is mental interference (in which case, you'd sense everything about the illusion no matter what speed you were at)

This one.


So your illusion would have to be able to give a more-or-less complete impression of time travel.


Using an illusion to see will probably just move you towards reacting to past stuff if it's directly into the mind.

So you'd have pre-emptive reflexes?