(And it’s possible the scientists weren’t the first ones: There have some anomalous trades on the Planetary Stock Exchange that could only be possible if someone knew they could take advantage of discontinuities in communication speeds.) But people begin to suspect what’s happening when scientists begin detecting small “speed-ups” in interplanetary communication systems. It turns out that this “speeding up the speed of light” effect of hyper-luminal travel is heavily gradated due to the vast distances being traversed by the Gates. In fact, it turns out that most of the dark energy in the universe is just a by-product of extragalactic FTL civilizations and tachyons are basically a form of interstellar pollution.įor the purposes of Eclipse Phase, let’s just ignore QE-communication for the moment and focus our attention entirely on the Pandora Gates. There are no causality violations because the ship never actually goes faster than light (just faster than light was going last week), but suddenly the radio waves from Earth are reaching Mars much faster than they were before.
It turns out that hyper-luminal drives actually increase the local speed of light not just for the ship, but for all spacetime within the light cone of that ship. Fly, Skylark, fly.īut let’s wave our hands a little faster. This is, basically, the approach Eclipse Phase takes: QE-based communication alone completely ruptures relativity at a local and immediate level. It could be the light speed limit that’ll need to be jettisoned (although it’s entirely unclear why or what form the resulting scientific theory would take). To be fair, general relativity and quantum mechanics are fundamentally incompatible with each other and something’s going to have to give if we’re ever going to reconcile those theories. There’s really no way to pull this off without ignoring a century of scientific data, but we’re just going to ignore that: FTL works and there’s no causality violation because, ta-da, we said so. There is no easy escape hatch.īut recently I was drawn into a discussion of how the FTL “realities” of the Eclipse Phase universe could be handled. Without getting elbow-deep in the math so that we can really grasp what’s happening, we’re not going to spontaneously discover something that the last five generations of very clever scientists have overlooked. The realities of relativistic speeds are deeply unintuitive to us, but they are no less real because of that. (Particularly if we replace “FTL message” with “FTL travel” so that Alice can go some place, come back before she left, and shoot herself in the head.) And once you can do that, it’s trivial to create causality violations. There’s really no way around it: If FTL communication is possible, then Alice really will receive an FTL reply from Bob before she sent the original FTL message. This tends to get hackles raised from those who are unhappy with a universal speed limit, but this Wikipedia article gives a pretty good explanation of why FTL causes time travel. If relativity is true (and, in the real world, we have copious evidence that says that it is), then this is impossible. The Eclipse Phase universe, like a lot of science fiction universes, features faster-than-light travel (in the form of the Pandora Gates) and FTL communication (in the form of quantum-entangled transmissions).
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