I don't have any friends in town right now since I'm a college drop out back home for a semester, so I had some time to think about weird things and discuss them with my dad. We got into the subject of faster than light travel and we've determined that it is highly unfeasible.
You see, many people thought that faster than sound travel was impossible. This was only because of their fears. But as you know, when you're moving towards a sound the sound becomes higher pitched. This is because the wavelength of the sound becomes shorter the faster you're going while moving towards it.
This same concept applies to the energy of a photon. The faster you move the higher the frequency of light becomes. Thus the energy that is exported greatly increases the great your speeds are. By the time you hit the speed of light a normal frequency of visible light will become as potent as an X-Ray, because you are moving at twice the speed of light relative to the light you're moving towards when you're traveling at the speed of light. Thus the various X-Ray and Gamma Rays in space would become quite high in energy when moving at this the speed of light.
Now, once the speed of light is broken, the faster one begins to travel the shorter the wavelength becomes, greatly increasing the energy output of a normal light particle. This, when travelling fast enough, will translate into extremely intense radiation. One second travel at such a speed would be like living your lifetime under an X-Ray machine.
So we just block these particles, correct? That would take an immense electro magnetic field, so immense that the amount of energy required to run this would be astrononmical, even on a small shuttle sized craft. This intense electrmagnetic field would also be harmful, so one would have to create a means to block the occupants of a ship from their own deflector shield. Also, the energy radiating off of the energy core that powered this device would have to have shielding of its own.
And while travelling at the speed of light, it would be very difficult to light the ship. Light being emitted from a light bulb in the middle of the room would never make it to the front of the room and act like a spot light hitting only the back of the room. At exactly the speed of light one would see a non-dispersence of light, light would stand still, it would be like what you see when you clip outside of a wall in Doom.
And what about the outside of the ship? The ship would be inundated with gamma waves with wavelengths all the way up to nill, meaning no wave, just a solid and constant exposure. The metal would absorb these particles and distribute them evenly throughout the ship, just like the heatsink on your computer's CPU. This would mean that the inside of the should would resemble the inside of a particle accelerator. Not quite liveable territory.
Would the particles themselves cause physical damage to the ship's hull, aside from exposing it to frequency infinity energy level radiation? Perhaps. Perhaps at such speeds photons manifest themselves in a physical form. Only at infinite velocity could this happen, but I doubt this is the case.
I do not believe humans will EVER reach OR break the speed of light, and these may be some of the reasons. I thoroughly discussed this topic, bouncing back and forth all ideas of compensating for these effects and what these effects might be while waiting for a pizza at Papa John's. There will NEVER be a starship that even begins to reach the speed of light.
