Hope I'm not being obtuse...but aren't they just communicating? I live in an area beleaguered by ducks almost all year long. I rather think they're pointing out points of interest and updating each other on their status. Furthermore, they're flying over other ducks and birds. Wouldn't the quacking serve as a kind of signal to other animals?

We'll have to talk hypothetically here, since such speeds are impossible without particle accelerators. Firstly, relativity states that light ALWAYS recedes from you at 299 792 458 m/s. So in short, if you were travelling at the speed of a particle in the LHC, which is roughly 299 795 455 m/s, then fired a laser directly ahead, it would still appear to recede at that speed. Same goes for if you fire it backwards.

Therefore electricity and any EM waves will also abide by these laws. But, hypothetically, let's say that it travels as a constant 299 792 458 m/s, i.e. at the LHC speed light would appear to travel at 3 m/s.Aside from the problems of time-warping caused by speed, a phone call to a ship travelling close to light speed, which for convenience I will call c, could last a long time. The voice recieved on the ship would be really fast, since while 6 million years may pass on Earth, a day would pass on a ship moving at c.

Again, hypothetically, let's say time warp is not a reality. Then you have the problem of the raqdio waves moving towards you at a relative speed of 3 m/s. So again, this conversation might as well be taking place between Earth and the Andromeda Spiral.

Then there's the sound waves themselves. While light travels at c, sound only travels at 343 m/s - still fairly speedy, but sluggish in terms of c. So by the time the sound reaches the point where your ears would be, you are several thousand kilometres in that direction.

Overall, such a conversation would be impossible.

Agreed, with the reservation that you could also in principle accept signals from the sides and front.

Disagree about the comment regarding sound waves.  Presumably you would be surrounded by air moving at the same speed as yourself, relative to the person your trying to talk to.  So the speed difference would not affect the sound waves at all.

I assume this is by mobile phone.  The radio waves being stretched relativistically, your phone would need to be retuned to a very low frequency.  The message would be similarly stretched out, so communication would be very slow.

Ok, so first lets disregard the fact of whether you or a phone could survive travelling that fast.

In theory it is possible to make the call on mobiles, which transmit microwaves and radiowaves, both of which are on the EM spectrum and therefore travel at the speed of light. As long as you were travelling at less than the speed of light, you should be able to make the call.

However you would then face the problem that sound waves travel considerably slower than the speed of light (around 900 metres per second compared with 300000000 metres per second). This would cause a problem as you would be running far too fast for your sound waves to reach the mobile.

I left British Telecom in 92 when the Erbium fibre optical amp was being jointly developed by Southhampton University and BT labs.(correct me if I'm wrong) Probably as important to my mind as the development of the transistor itself. I was staggered by the capabilities of launching multi coloured semicionductor lasers down one fibre coupled with the sudden increase in processor speed that occurred around this time. As a school physics lab tech I often say to the students that  one fibre could carry all this traffic but I then began to doubt my reasoning. Hence my question, many thanks for not making me a laughing stock.

Thanks

How about uploading a picture to the last word...

Many thanks for your informed reply. have rated it 5 but it only shows as 1