What if light was faster?

[Bohandas]

Could be. I completely forgot about electroweak unification when I wrote this and assumed that the binding energy would be unchanged. Since all I know about "electroweak unification" is that it exists (and can wreck my interpretation) I really don't know. I'd be surprised if everything simply scaled linearly, especially since energy squares quadratically.

No, I was assuming the binding energy would be unchanged too, which would mean that the energy released by fusion and fission would be the same but the atoms would be lighter (as with E unchanged and C increased M would have to decrease to balance the equation)

[Lvl 2 Expert]

One of the funny things about light being faster is that it wouldn't matter nearly as much for interstellar travel as we (very much including me) would like to think. I did some calculations in the realistic science fiction world thread a while back and it turns out a ship powered by nuclear fusion can maybe reach a few percents, of our current light speed, assuming most of the ship is fuel. That's a simple Newtonian calculation, so you're not getting anything extra out of that when you raise the ceiling. A semi-realistic antimatter ship could get to 10% of light speed and back if about 10% of the ship's weight was fuel, so even those ships are not going to go faster than our current speed of light if you raise it. Ships with external power sources, like solar sails being accelerated and decelerated by lasers on both ends, don't have as hard a practical limit, but it still costs a shipload of energy to get them to use their new found freedom.

So for a science fiction writer, a "space bending weird engine drive thing look at how cool it is" might still be a more practical solution than a raised light speed, because it also explains how they can carry enough energy for their trip, they plain need less, and it explains how humans can survive the acceleration, there isn't any strictly speaking.

Interstellar communications on the other hand would of course greatly improve. Sure, that's only if you have a good enough directional antenna and probably a terrifying amount of power (space is seriously huge), but a higher light speed does lower the delay you get, at no additional cost.

[factotum]

Interstellar communications on the other hand would of course greatly improve. Sure, that's only if you have a good enough directional antenna and probably a terrifying amount of power (space is seriously huge), but a higher light speed does lower the delay you get, at no additional cost.

Even local communications would improve--a lot of our comms go via geostationary satellites with a minimum signal delay of 1/4 second or so, which would be down to 1/400th second under the new regime.