Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

Why do you assume they need to travel between galaxies? They could be going to the next solar system over and we're simply seeing the leakage of their propulsion. Just because the light travels across galaxies doesn't mean it's purpose is to travel across galaxies. Moreover, a species that can unleash this much energy has probably conquered such things as mortality and age related decay.

View on HN

That's a good point perhaps I jumped to conclusions.

you also assume they're traveling AT or NEAR light speed, they could be traveling many times that OR not traveling via speed at all, but warping space and literally folding it over on itself and going THROUGH space like basically creating a controlled wormhole.

No they couldn't actually. You didn't read the article.. here it is:

https://www.space.com/35996-fast-radio-bursts-powering-alien...

the suggestion is that they would be gathering the waves in a light sails. Also you can't travel faster than light, end of story. Warping space or traveling through "wormholes" is not faster than light travel.

Oh man, I don't want to get into an argument on HN. But you didn't really read the previous comment with a generous eye. The poster never mentioned "faster than light" travel at all. In fact, they specifically called out AT or NEAR light speed, and then gave wormhole travel as an example of "not traveling via speed".

gremlinsinc literally said "they could be traveling many times that" in respect to "AT or NEAR light speed." As in they could be traveling many time faster than light. He didn't use the exact phrase "faster than light" but his meaning is pretty clear.

Transportation technically is faster than the speed of light, because if travelling at the speed of light you get to point B in 5 years, and by using a warp drive/worm hole device you get their in 3 days, you've traveled faster than light, doesn't matter if you cheated using physics, you still got their in a fraction of the time. Sure you're 'speed limit' didn't exceed the speed of light, but the distance/normal travel time DID exceed the speed of light, so it's just semantics.

If somebody edit the exact speed of light, he could claim faster than light!

Mortality is a feature not a bug.

It's a feature for the genes, it's an anti-feature for the individual organisms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com