Can humanity ever travel faster than light, or does every shortcut through spacetime break causality itself? We explore warp drives, wormholes, tachyons, and why the universe pushes back.

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Credits:

The Physics of FTL Travel

Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur

Editor: Lukas Konecny

Music Courtesy of Stellardrone & Chris Zabriskie

Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images

Chapters

0:00 Intro

0:12 Faster Than Light Is the Wrong Question

4:18 Spacetime Engineering: Moving the Map Instead of the Ship

5:24 Warp Drives: Surfing Spacetime

11:46 Wormholes: Shortcuts with a Side of Time Travel

13:20 Hyperspace: Shortcuts Through the Bulk

15:11 Solitons: The Positive Energy Challenge

17:35 The Krasnikov Tube: Building a Star-Road

20:30 Natural Relativistic Loopholes: Cosmic Strings and Tipler Cylinders

25:05 Tachyons: The Simplest Way to Break Time

28:04 Vacuum & Time-Advance Effects: When Causality Bends, Just a Little

32:19 Quantum Red Herrings

35:42 Nebula

36:54 Why the Universe Pushes Back: Chronology Protection and Self-Defeating Physics

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