: But yeah, I totally agree. It only has twelve years between the sending of
: the message by Leela and the redieving of the message by Earth. That's...
: that's just not right.
Yes, Marathon has mistakes, but that's still not reason enought to walk away from it. Someone definitely made a mistake about the distance between Earth and Tau Ceti - either Bungie or Lela. In a fictioanl universe, could Tau Ceti be that much further away? Only if some cataclysmic event moves it from its current location! For the sake of continuity, let's just assume that Tau Ceti is some other star system than the one we currently know.
Regarding the ramjet idea - acceleration and decelleration time would actually take up the bulk of travel time. You really couldn't accelerate at much more than one earth G (32.2 ft/sec/sec in English Units) without significantly affecting physiology, and you also have to decellerate as you approach Tau Ceti.
Regarding time travel - well, in an Einsteinian universe, you can travel forward in time at virtually any rate, but you cannot travel back in time at all. It is also impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, which is intimately related to the problem with time travel. The existence of FTL travel would in and of itself imply the feasibility of bi-directional time travel and open up the possibility of multiple time lines. The possibility of escaping the Physical constraints of Relativity is at the very foundation of most science fiction, so who am I to invalidate some of the best literature out there?
