Non-causality-violating FTL travel. / Can omnipotence beat causality?

While building my sifi world I dug into ftl-travel and encountered these mean bullies, causality and relativity. They told me I can't have faster than light travel, because effect can't precede cause and it is easy to violate that using ftl. I really don't like that.

My idea to circumvent causality and time travel issues is to have the ftl machine send out an "editing wave" before the ftl event happens. The editing wave will be emitted from the entry and exit point of the ftl tranfer and all of the other fixed ftl points at the same time. It will be calculated what needs to be changed in the current state of information, energy and matter in the universe to ensure that no causality violation happens. There is no time travel, as the universe is only edited at light speed. The events that would have violated causality would still have happend, but their effects would be wiped out, preventing them from preceeding their causes. Essentially it is like committing a crime and then cleaning up so thoroughly that it seems the victim never existed in the first place.

This includes wiping out the entire existence and history of the vessel and it's crew. The editor considers this to be the path of least resistance. The ship arrives at the exit point as a strongly edited copy and the crew will have little memory and only vague intentions left. Any investigation will show that the vessel, the crew and the information were spontaneously created by a freak quantum event.

It is not possible to construct new ftl points, as they are artifacts of an elder civilisation and they prevented that anyone following them could mess with the universe the way they did.

I'm perfectly aware that this is $handwavium^2$. But I wonder if:

• This would actually work, given the editing ability mentioned above?

• Should it not work, how could I tweak it to work given the editing ability? Should this be the case use the new scenario as the baseline for the following questions.

• There would be any side effects I missed?

• Is there any reason not to make the transfer instantaneous?

• Is there any way to do this without making the editor omnipotent and omniscient?

• Is this actual ftl travel or just an elaborate way to commit suicide?

• Finally how severe would the editing have to be? I would like it to be as subtle as possible, human civilisation should still exist after the first time someone uses ftl.

NOTE: I wasn't sure whether to put this on worldbuilding or physics? Any opinions on that?

posted over 5 years ago

TheDyingOfLight‭

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