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[Orthodox Infidel]

a.m.p wrote...

knightnblu wrote...

You forgot to add in the time dilation into the FTL scenarios.

There's been some debate about it.

This is far from hard science, all the speculations are based on a few codex entires and a few offhand mentions, it's not like we can definitely conclude whether this effect applies here or doesn't.

Extra piece of information regarding this that was mentioned in another thread but not this thread:

Time dilation is a relativistic effect. When you hit light speed, time stops for you. You can't go faster than light because you'd start going backwards in time, something that isn't allowed because of causality. 

The only way to have faster than light travel and relativity co-exist is to violate causality. Relativity does not depend on causality, but most of our understanding of how the universe works does. For instance, without causality, The Illusive Man could die of a gunshot wound before Shepard fires the bullet that kills him.

So most science fiction authors deal with this by adding some extra bits to relativity that basically say relativistic effects don't apply there and choose to keep causality. We don't know that this is how Mass Effect writers chose to deal with it, but it is how most writers have done it in the past.

[a.m.p]

Precious Roy wrote...

Love this thread. A few points on the fleets over Earth (assuming they're still intact):

1. It's mentioned (I think in ME1's entry on the planet) that Mars was essentially bypassed once the Charon relay was discovered, and only houses the prothean research station plus a smallish colony. There's a lot of space there to start up heavy industry and even further colonization if big chunks of Earth are no longer habitable. I can see the Quarians deploying their mining expertise to produce large amounts of raw materials from the Sol system's numerous moons and asteroids to help make this possible, and to build the infrastructure necessary to salvage and replace their lost ships in preparation for the long journey home, which would have the benefit of aiding the other races in the same way.

The problem with Mars is it's not exactly instantly habitable. And it can not be used for agricultural purposes. Hence another interesting question. Can we actually synthesize food in required quantities?
It was mentioned on a different thread that Joker makes a comment about vat-grown hamburgers (around 1:24), and you'd think that if a mad scientist can grow adorable krogans in tanks, something could be done about basic food, both levo- and dextro-protein.
Again, almost no info to speculate on. If anyone knows something else, please share.

2. Galactic civilization will continue to exist but change in nature. Based on the distribution of council races and their homeworlds all being in roughly the same quadrant, it will likely take more the form of something from Star Trek where smaller alliances control areas that are within practical travel time from their seat of government, but crossing the entire galaxy (remember Voyager?) would be monumentally impractical. It would also resemble more the period of colonization on earth from the late 17th to early 19th centuries, before air travel and radio allowed same-day travel and communication. Not a disaster, but definitely different.

Probably. If they can at least crawl to star trek level of practical travel, they could possibly eventually rebuild the relay network. I've just updated my OP with the link to a very interesting thread on that problem.

Orthodox Infidel wrote...
So most science fiction authors deal with this by adding some extra bits
to relativity that basically say relativistic effects don't apply there
and choose to keep causality. We don't know that this is how Mass
Effect writers chose to deal with it, but it is how most writers have
done it in the past.

This, basically.