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by Sanguinaire 1846 days ago
I'm in the same boat as the person you replied to; breaking causality never made sense to me.

In the case of your explanation, what sticks out to me is the "Suppose their was a way of instantaneously communicating" part - it seems more intuitive to me that the warp bubble would not allow any communication across the threshold, effectively becoming a pocket universe.

2 comments

The ship you're in isn't what's traveling FTL, though; it's going at normal relativistic speeds. But say both you and Earth have an ansible (a faster-than-light communicator); then you get the problem in the previous comment.
And, any FTL travel can be used as an ansible.
Instantaneous communication makes the numbers easier because you don't have to account for travel time, but causality can be broken with any superluminal form of communication.

If you have a ship with warp speed, then you have superluminal communication, because you can just carry a message on board. Even if you can't communicate inside the warp bubble, as long as you can exit the bubble at some point, then you can travel via warp, pop out, and transmit your message conventionally.

In my earlier example, if the ship and mission control had messenger drones capable of travelling many times faster than light, then the ship's response drone could arrive on Earth before mission control's messenger drone was launched.