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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9709270" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well, firstly, relativistic aberration would distort the direction that light seemed to come toward you. Second, the relativistic Doppler effect would apply--which is distinct from the ordinary, Newtonian Doppler effect in specific and (importantly) observable ways.Finally, as you accelerated to "almost-but-never-quite" c, assuming you wanted to accelerate to that speed in less than "several years", you would also observe the Unruh effect, which cannot be observed by an inertial observer. Indeed, you have to be accelerating extremely fast to observe it at all, such that it's still debated whether any experiments have ever detected it (though the consensus is that the effect does occur, it's just too small to observe at most accelerations human-made detectors can achieve.)So no. There are several physical observations one could make--some known to science since Einstein's heyday--which would very much mean the world did not look perfectly normal around you.There are, for example, simulations of what it would look like if the speed of light were (say) only 100 m/s rather than ~2.99x10^8 m/s. The numbers might be different for any given actual example, but the general concept remains.The fact is, things would not look normal. The internals of your near-c rocketship would look normal, because everything is locally at the same velocity. But anything not actually accelerating like that? Would look profoundly different.As for how actual FTL-travel could work? It works by basically dodging the question. We know the Alcubierre drive is a theoretically consistent solution to Einstein's equations, which averts the problems by cheating, more or less. The spacecraft doesn't "accelerate" in the sense of gaining kinetic energy. But it does change locations, because it distorts spacetime itself. This results in changing location....without technically undergoing "motion" as it is properly defined.I could go into the technobabble explanation from Star Trek, but to not bore you with the details, it's basically "we cheat by trapping the ship inside a bubble of Reality Energy that technically puts it in its own separate universe". That's what the "warp field" is, and why higher warp field factors result in greater speed. You aren't "moving" in space; you're having a micro-universe-bubble slide around relative to the universe at large. Within the bubble, the ship actually isn't moving at all, and thus never violates relativity.</blockquote>

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