All the confusion, sensations and legends that are woven regarding the question: “what if we travel faster than light?” have their source in two relations which incorrectly connect two phenomena. The first relation (which is general) is the one between the flow of time and the speed of the development of events. The second relation is the particular relation between the speed of light and the flow of time. Both these relations have resulted in two “weird consequences”. One of them is the possibility to violate causality (cause-effect), and the other one is setting the speed of light as the upper-speed limit of other matter particles. Both of these “consequences” emerged from mathematical formalisms and have no reliance whatsoever on natural phenomena. The second consequence (the speed of light as the limit) was set to prevent the violation of causality.
Can we get information on an event before it happens?
No. Besides that it sounds ridiculous, it is not natural either. The information that the messenger carries is an effect and the event on which it informs is the cause. The messenger cannot leave with information about the event without the event actually happening, regardless of his speed.
Which also answers the question: Can causality be broken if we move faster than light?
Is time travel possible?
“Time travel” is imagination and imagination only. We can get early information on an event (on development of matter) via a fast messenger, but that does not mean that “we have traveled in time”. “Time travel” cannot happen because the motion of matter (the development of matter) is immanent and out of the human consciousness. We can only measure that development by the means of time, but we cannot stop its ever-progressive development (See the article What is time?). When one takes measures to regulate desired events, he/she does so only for future events. But even in this case, man-made events have no bearing on the ever- progressive development of matter. In other words, our actions to eventually “travel in time” are also a progressive development of matter. In an elusive, artistic or psychological way we can “travel in time”! But never in reality – physically! Not for a moment! As a protector for the concept of “time travel” serves “the time dilation”. However, in reality, this is nothing but the messenger who leaves a scene – receives the information later, and when returning, he sees the accumulated different developments of the event but not the different flow of time.
Can we watch non-filmed events from human history?
As we have elaborated in the article Why do we see and hear only the past? we can see only the past. So, the question here is a little more specific: can we watch an event which we haven’t seen “live” and which has not been filmed? If some very specific conditions are met, then this is possible. But this has nothing to do with “time travel”. We can watch an event which we haven`t seen before only if we travel faster than the information spread by that event. So, the information spreads out, and we have to accelerate and to overpass it. And what is the benefit of that? We will be able to see/hear the information with great delay, while until it reaches us we have grown older. In order for this to happen, another very specific criteria must be fulfilled: the information from the event which we want to see must not meet matter on its way, because it will be absorbed (vanished) or deformed.
Conclusion
Even if we travel faster than light, nothing extraordinary will happen because the speed of events does not affect the flow of time. Nothing happens because the flow of time (or time itself) has nothing to do specifically with the light, nor with its speed, nor with the speed of any messenger. Light is very extraordinary to us (because we see the world through it), but it is quite common to the laws of motion (it undergoes all the laws of physics like any other particle of matter).
