Faster than Light travel methods?
 

I was playing Steins:Gate the other day and interesting point came up in regards to time travel. That if you went back to the exact same spot one second in the past, you would have moved great relative distance because things like the earth, the solar system and the galaxy are all constantly moving.

Out of curiosity has there ever been any serous theories or explorations of using this point for effective FTL movement?

Velocity is relative within its frame of reference, so it only really matters if there's a sizable difference in relative velocity between your starting location and your ending location. Besides, the velocities involved in the motion of the earth, solar system, and galaxy are so much lower than that of the speed of light that they're little more than rounding errors. That's something that is definitely considered in real astronautics, like for the New Horizons mission to Pluto, for instance, but never really makes it into the stories because frankly, math is boring to most people. I doubt you're going to see much mention of it in fiction, either, for the same reason.

I remember back in my uni days i attended a special physics lecture about coming up with ways to travel FTL. One of the interesting ideas that they talked about was taking advantage of the fact that matter bends spacetime. The idea being that you could bend spactime in such a way that the spaceship would be able to travel on wave of sorts. The wave would then travel FTL even though the ship's local speed wasn't.

The problem came when trying to solve the equations for the mass that would allow this to occur. The simple solution always lead to negative mass! There was no known positive solution because it was too difficult to solve. But obvously since we're talking bending spacetime it would be significant.

This is why TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space!

I thought it was because that's the best they could come up when backronyming TARDIS.

According to wikipedia, the acronym is fully stated in the very first episode.

Time Travel is effectively the next step after FTL travel. Mainly because FTL travel would cause some degree of time travel as a side effect, in theory. And that Time Travel then meant you took control of that.

The issue of course, is that we haven't observed either of these things happening.

If there is somehow a way for FTL travel to happen in nature, we would have been able to observe it and use it in our own technology. Same with time travel, it is something that we dreamed up but not observed.

It is much harder to invent something from scratch, rather than just observe existing phenomena and imitate.

Add to that the fact that FTL travel is pretty much unobservable except by instruments. It's easy enough to observe the result—that something moved from point A to point B faster than light should be able to travel—but actually seeing that movement, considering the medium you need to see it is moving slower than it is, is a bit more difficult...

FTL is pretty much impossible. It's basically the physics equivalent of dividing by zero--it can't be done. You can thank Einstein for taking it from us, and thermodynamics for keeping it away from us. The closer you get to light speed, the amount of energy required for it increases by an infinite amount. As such, time travel is also impossible. The universe has mechanics in play that will make sure it won't work.

Theoretical “Lentz Drive” Could Make Star Trek-Style Warp
Technology a Reality

"Now, a recent paper by a physicist with over ten years experience in practical applications
has proposed a solution that may finally break through those limitations, which has the
potential of bringing into existence the first real-life warp drive.

“The solutions I pursued in my paper are able to travel at arbitrary speed, either below or
above the speed of light,” said Dr. Erik Lentz, the author of the new proposed warp drive in
an email to The Debrief. “This is the first example of positive energy superluminal solutions
in the literature.”"

See:

https://thedebrief.org/theoretical-l...ogy-a-reality/

DARPA Funded Researchers Accidentally Create The World’s First Warp Bubble

"Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Harold G “Sonny” White has
reported the successful manifestation of an actual, real-world “Warp Bubble.” And,
according to White, this first of its kind breakthrough by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI)
team sets a new starting point for those trying to manufacture a full-sized, warp-capable
spacecraft."

See:

https://thedebrief.org/darpa-funded-...t-warp-bubble/