Bandwidth Explains Fermi's Paradox

"We uploaded via the router," Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. "There's a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I'm not so sure now. I think it's something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity – they're bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve E...

 The Enterprise's Impulse Drive

Moving back to the sub-light-speed world: We are not through with Einstein yet. His famous relation between mass and energy, E=mc 2 , which is a consequence of special relativity, presents a further challenge to space travel at impulse speeds. As I have described it in chapter 1, a rocket is a device that propels material backward in order to move forward. As you might imagine, the faster the material is propelled backward, the larger will be the forward impulse the rocket will receive. Mater...