Today, in this article, I’m going to talk about what the world would be like if humanity managed to break down one of the great physical barriers of our universe: the speed of light.
First of all, this is purely an exercise in imagination, and there are probably many errors from a physics and scientific perspective—I’m not an expert. Just let yourself go with it; it’s not like everything I say is 100% wrong either.
Although it seems like a distant goal, I believe that one day humanity will overcome the barrier posed by the speed of light. So far, nothing has been able to surpass this limit, and its implications are numerous.
The most obvious one, and the one that quickly comes to mind, is related to space exploration and the colonization of space by humans.
Up to now, the fastest and farthest-reaching spacecraft we’ve been able to launch out there is the Voyager 1 probe.
Since 1977, 47 years ago, the Voyager 1 probe has traveled more than 23 billion kilometers and reached a speed exceeding 61,000 km/h, and yet it’s still within the solar system.
If we want to visit other stars, we need FTL technology, or *Faster Than Light*, as it’s called in English. But what would happen on Earth once we have this FTL technology?
One of the fields that comes to mind is computing, which would render Moore’s Law obsolete in terms of computational limitations. Let me explain.
Current computers use electrical signals within chips to perform calculations, transmit information, and everything else. The number of operations that can be performed depends on the number of transistors a given chip has.
That’s why it’s so important to make them as small as possible, because in the same space, if you can fit 5-nanometer transistors instead of 10-nanometer ones, the number of operations doubles using the same space.
Of course, all this has a limit, which is what Moore’s Law describes: every so often, the number of transistors gets smaller, but there’s a physical limit to miniaturization that we seem to be approaching.
For example, the semiconductor industry, with companies like TSMC in Taiwan, is already talking about creating transistors below the nanometer scale.
This is all because the speed of the electrons traveling through the transistors is fixed—it’s the speed of light in the physical medium, in this case, silicon, which has a maximum, which is the speed of light itself, approximately 300,000 km/s.
Now comes the interesting part. If we achieved FTL technology, that limit could be broken, allowing electrons to travel faster, which would increase computational capacity by increasing the speed of the electrons.
If we achieved twice the speed of light, the computational capacity would automatically double; if it were four times, it would quadruple, and so on to infinity, because the improvement would always be there. The distance, let’s say 1 nanometer, would be fixed, but if the speed keeps increasing, the time keeps shrinking asymptotically toward 0, though it never reaches it.
For example, if we achieved a time of 0.001 seconds and then increased the speed by 10x beyond the speed of light, the time would now be 0.0001 seconds—10x faster, and 10x more computation, and so on to infinity.
And this is just one example of the possibilities of FTL technology, but there would be many other fields it would impact. In fact, from an economic perspective, this would truly be infinite growth in abundance.
We could define a post-FTL economy as the true paradise or Olympus of the gods, where productivity would be infinite, and scarcity would disappear from the dictionary because we wouldn’t know what it is.
A post-FTL economy would truly be a magical economy in the purest Harry Potter style.
Dreaming is free.
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