First, a disclaimer: This may sound correct or obvious, but if so, it is because that is the way I write. Nothing should be taken as either factual or as representing the opinions of educated physicists.
This is the second of my crank ideas.
A recurring concept within science fiction is the idea of a relativistic missile - an object moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light, and thus carrying absurd amounts of energy along for the ride.
My suggestion here is that relativistic objects may not be very long-range, that the energy would bleed off into a gravitational wave. That is, there is something like friction even in space, but instead of losing energy to particles in the immediate vicinity, mass loses energy to the universe as a whole - and unlike with, say, electromagnetic resistance, you don't actually need to have nearby particles for this to take place. (The energy lost would be completely absorbed by other particles in the universe, owing to the Wheeler-Feynman Absorber Theory, if I understand it correctly)
If correct, this may also have severe negative ramifications for interstellar travel.
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