reply to post by orangutang
The speed of light barrier is an interesting one.
My favourite example would be a satellite equipped with a powerful laser beam shines the beam out into space and then rotates once per second. As the
beam shines out into carefully designed dark areas of space, not touching anything, we can look at the end of the beam. So we move 186,000 miles away
from the rotating satellite and have a look at what the beam is doing. As the beam is now 186,000 miles away from the satellite it is trying to move
sideways through space faster than the light can travel. What happens? The assumption is that the beam would bend and form a spiral around the
satellite.
The speed of light barrier is really to do with matter and energy being two sides of the same coin. E=MC2 thus M=E/C2. The slowing down of light
appears to produce matter (forgive my naivety). There are energies supposed to be able to travel faster than light, but the real problem is conversion
from one into the other. Matter to energy = Kaboom, but look at it the other way around energy to matter would require too much energy.
The alternative is to consider Time. There are also problems that are exothermic and endothermic. Depending if you travel forwards or back you either
get there as a fireball or a block of ice. To travel faster than light is to travel backwards through time. I do believe that this is possible and
there have been some instances involving magnetic fields and lightning strikes, where some one has appeared to have been transported backwards through
time (and lived).
So perhaps there is some possibility, but where biological substances might do this I doubt that metals would. To transmit a craft might be achievable
(if it was plastic) but to send the transmitter as well looks harder. So while it might be theoretically possible it might not be practical at all.