Voyager S5 E26 Equinox
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Wait, no they both do. Normal warp does. FTL as a concept does.
Hey, props to them for embracing it immediately and doing time travel nonsense right away.
But it doesn't. That's the thing. Warp Drive might (but only when utilized in specific fashion, it doesn't violate causality simply by existing) but the Spore Drive never has. The temporal shenanigans that happened with the Discovery wasn't caused by the spore drive. It was caused by a time crystal/Red Angel suit.
Causality is things affecting other things. One event happens which triggers another and there is an outcome. That can continue on indefinitely, but causality is the inherent link between cause and effect. To break causality is to have an outcome that occurs before the event. At no point does the spore drive in Discovery do this. There's no causality paradox or anything similar that happens in Discovery that is caused by that Spore Drive. The closest is when Disco travels forward in time by a couple of months in Season 1. The warp drive only breaks that as well when you start introducing time travel into it, using that warp drive to specifically cause temporal fuckery.
Don't make me break out the spacetime diagram, young man. Because I WILL break out the spacetime diagram.
Anyway, doesn't matter. Star Trek has messed with time travel since TOS season 1. And that was after they started introducing magic men with god powers, which they did in episode 3. It makes zero sense to get nerdy about it. That's my point here.
Break it out. I have no issue admitting when I'm wrong. I just genuinely do not see what y'all are talking about in saying that faster than live travel, simply by existing, manages to violate the order of cause and effect.
I'll help out. Here you go: https://www.askamathematician.com/2012/07/q-how-does-instantaneous-communication-violate-causality/
I love it when sci-fi teaches us about real stuff. The problem is that when you mix instant and classical (non-instant) communication channels, you get situations where information time-travels, and the receiver gets information from the future. This breaks causality (present based on future events), and so nature rightfully abhors it.
The closest we've come to instant communication is the use of entangled particles, but we can't make practical use of the phenomenon. Touch one such particle, and it's pair instantly changes to the opposite state. The catch is that you can't know when to observe the particle, nor can you know what the original state was, via the same mechanism. So you still need to use normal photons moving at slow-ass light-speed to communicate that meta-information, thereby undoing any attempt to exploit it.
I'm falling apart right now because I've not been sleeping properly but I wll 100% look when I awake. Thank you <3
Ah... ok, wow, that's a lot of relativity to explain from scratch for a non-physicist. There must be someone else...
Here, this one is a bit dense but it addresses Star Trek by name, so:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTf4eqdQXpA
Bonus points for starting with the point that forget warp, subspace communication breaks causality already, so you don't even need to boldly go anywhere for any of it to be kinda busted.
If that's a bit too dry you can search for a similar subject line, there are TONS of explanations like this one out there.
Anyway, none of it makes sense, it's all for funsies anyway. Suspend disbelief, ye nerds, and enjoy your sci-fi.
I think MudMan is correctly pointing out that to travel any slower than light speed through space causes time dilation since space is actually space-time.
There is a trade-off between how fast you travel proportional to the speed of light and how much time a stationary observer percieves to have passed compared to you who is travelling.
When you travel faster than the speed of light, all time and causality breaks down. This is not the case with how the writers of Star Trek wrote warp drive mechanics, this is our best understanding of the actual universe. Einsteins theory of relativity.
Fun fact: Light itself (or its quantized unit: the photon) travels at the speed of light and therefore experiences no time. If a photon is emitted from a star across the universe and travels millions of light years before eventually being absorbed by your eye, from our stationary reference point, the light has been travelling for millions of years, but for the photon it was instantaneous. Zero time passed for the photon. This is the idea of time dilation.
I'm not awake enough yet to comprehend this but will respond soon. Sorry!
Hey now, that's way too much actual science theory for a sci-fi franchise 😁