wouldn't the tiny particles in the near-but-not-complete-vacuum that is outer space make for massive impacts at such speeds?

glossing over the obvious question of if ftl or even near light speed is physically possible in the first place, it seems to me that the engineering involved to make humans inside or even the ship itself survive would be unsolvable.

I assume something based on our own planet's magnetic field would be the foundation.


Possibly two "belts" of magnetic fields enveloping the ship. If one were positively charged, and one negatively charged, it may be possible to deflect any tiny particle that has a charge.

Of course there is the possibility of particles with no charge. I can think of no way of deflecting them. There would need to be something projected along the path of the ship which would be able to destroy very small particles. Possibly some type of particle beam "weapon" that would destroy any tiny particle in the path of the vehicle.

Then you need only worry about particles with no charge moving at an angle to the ship and intersecting the course and impacting the ship.

I suppose it might be possible to have some type of plasma envelop the outer skin of the ship which could protect it from the occasional impact of a tiny particle without a charge.


Then again, I love Sci-Fi. I also don't believe that faster than light travel is possible. Even this warp theory, where you don't travel faster than light in the local sense, seems pretty far fetched to me.

I still would love to see it attempted. Who knows? Something might come of it eventually, and the spin off technology could be revolutionary.

without it exploding due to the pressure on the hull? In a vacuum, the tendency at the atomic level becomes like that of a gas. Considering the cold of space, the energy might level off to keep it from burning up, but pressure from the inside out will be phenomenal.

I can't imagine a material that could survive the pressure to explode while retaining the air pressure to support an atmosphere, let alone one that could sustain a human. It would need to be meters thick, right off the bat, and the atmosphere would have to be minimal inside to keep the whole thing stable.

FTL, in my opinion isn't possible. My opinion has always been that the basement of energy is absolute zero, and the ceiling is the speed of light, for several reasons, at the atomic level.

Basically, I tried to resolve the issue of effect preceding cause by assuming an infinite reduction of the measure of the point in time (so instead of saying the cause happened on March 1st, we say the hour and then the minute and then the second and so on and so forth). But then I realized that a reduction in the measure is not actually a reduction in the point. The point is, just like infinity, not quantifiable nor reducible.

So basically what I've done is committed the same logical fallacy as Zeno's Paradox.

I remember first trying to conceive limits in calculus without simply conceding to the mathematics. I was equally frustrated.

To the point, however, FTL violates at least causality. It would allow for an effect to travel from point A to point B and then back to point A before the point in time at which cause occurred at point A. It would be like leaving Earth and then eventually returning before you were born.

This suggests logic is interwoven with existence itself and our ability to conceive logic, what might also be called The Real in Lacanian terms, is hopelessly flawed.

perhaps you can return before you were born, or at least before you wasted those 30 minutes, and use that time to ponder the latest episode of game of thrones instead.

But I see no evidence that such a thing could happen. And, because of the nature of time travel, if time travel can happen, it already has happened. In other words, its effects would be endless and because it can completely circumvent the arrow of time, all future, present and past could logically become one and we would see this insanity everywhere.

Not only would it be possible for myself to sit at my computer right now while I stand in another room, I believe that based on my limited understanding of the circumstance, it would be not only possible but necessary. Unless I don't have a complete understanding of time. Which is always possible. Or is it necessary?

TELL ME THE ANSWERS UNBLOCK.

i always had this dream that i was the one who gave the beatles their entire catalog because i traveled back in time somehow and met them and gave them the melodies, or they had the melody but the harmony was all wrong.

i have no great musical talent, but i had simply heard the "correct" version from the later beatles from "before" i had traveled back in time. i knew nothing beyond what i knew from the beatles, yet they were lost without me, lol!

I gather, though, that such travel may be possible only by postulating the movement of a picket of space in isolation from the rest of the universe. I would be more worried about not being able to see out those big-ass windows.

He addresses that question.

Remember ... it's not really that the ship is moving through space ... it is moving space itself. Kind of. In its local frame, the ship is not moving faster than light. The causality questions raised down thread don't apply. Kinda weird, but general relativity is.

White's contribution here is that he has come up with a model that reduces the energy requirement for a 10m ring at 10 times the speed of light (10c) from about the mass of Jupiter to about the mass of Voyager 1. That model allows us to construct devices which, if nature really works as general relativity predicts, will produce a small but measurable warp field. Multiple experiments are in progress, and they are being conducted by a couple of different teams. Preliminary results: Interesting, but not conclusive. The "signal" they are seeing may yet still be noise or experimental error. (The "signal", if any, will be very weak ... )

Both interferometry and time of flight techniques are being used to detect a space/time distortion.

IF they actually detect a distortion, it will be a "Chicago pile" moment.

So, while the news media are of course jumping on the artist's rendition of what White's configuration might look like in implementation, there are no starship designs on the drawing boards. This is still at the level of fundamental physics. Me, I find that real exciting stuff.

Trav

The craft is not traveling through space (where it could get hit by anything).

where space is pushed apart and aside as the ship and its space bubble travels, and the split space rejoins itself behind the ship as it passes? is that the idea?

Not sarcasm.

into small pieces. At least take some of the moran teabaggers with them...that way when they run into hostile lifeforms, they can beam aboard a teabagger that will confuse the aliens (with his mental judo) until said starship can escape. Maybe a 6-pack of teabaggers for every starship. They can sleep in the cargo holds.

Last edited Wed Jun 11, 2014, 09:05 PM - Edit history (1)

Bad Rex, bad!

Naaaahhhhhhhhhh.

Peace to you, Rex.

what's a tea bagger not to like about that?

Because it sounds like you would enjoy his work.

Ever see one on Star Trek?

I'm just waiting for the day when we see the Borg or the Romulans attack and our gallant captain is sitting on the throne with his pants around his ankles while thumbing through the latest Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

now where all that goes...is probably an episode in itself. They say they don't waste anything, but yeah they do.

Because if you've got a holodeck, you also have a bathroom. And the least interesting Dixon Hill scenario ever.

as to "what for?"

It's because of this.

will be much safer if our species just dies off here, like the dinosaurs.

A billion $ for a ticket and you get to go. The free market expands...

"Earth first; we'll kill the other planets later".

If we were more evolved, I'd say go for it. As things stand right now, I feel like a sucker who is footing the bill for the technology the 1% is planning to use to save their asses and destroy another planet, after they've raped and killed the earth beyond all hope of regeneration.

When humanity truly masters space travel and I believe we will, a trip to space will probably be the equivalent of a plane ticket, the cost of all new technologies are high in the beginning and they drop as we become more efficient and proficient.

I also don't believe our cultural evolution is static, and 100-200 years from now they will probably look back and view us as primitive if not barbaric.

I believe mastering space travel and taking care of our environment go hand in hand as both are required to insure the survival of our species and I believe those messages are taking hold.

I don't expect to live long enough to personally travel in space, but for me this a form of hope.

"It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars, it will be a species very like us, but with more of our stenghts and fewer of our weaknesses, more confident, far seeing, capable and prudent..."

...food replicator?

But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this—that men despair and think things impossible.
— Sir Francis Bacon

Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.
— Simon Newcomb

To divide a cube into two other cubes, a fourth power, or in general any power whatever into two powers of the same denomination above the second is impossible, and I have assuredly found an admirable proof of this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it.

Known as Fermat's Last Theorem, the proof of which remained elusive until 1994.
— Pierre de Ferma

What man landing on the moon is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him.
— Russell Wayne Baker

From the wiki:

On appointment as Astronomer Royal, he reiterated his long-held view that "space travel is utter bilge". Speaking to Time in 1956, Woolley noted

"It's utter bilge. I don't think anybody will ever put up enough money to do such a thing . . . What good would it do us? If we spent the same amount of money on preparing first-class astronomical equipment we would learn much more about the universe . . . It is all rather rot"

I believe the basement of energy is absolute zero, and the ceiling is the speed of light. Attaining close to either is within our reach, but exceeding either at the atomic level doesn't seem possible. The transition from matter to energy and back to matter again could surprise us all, however, and that will likely hide the solution when we attain either state of basement or ceiling of energy.

Whereas the former allows for logical contradictions, the latter exists along a continuum of probability.

There are things which are actually impossible given the acceptance of a system of logic. What this means is that the impossibility can only be possible if the conditions are somehow improper.

In other words, the impossible is a real thing. How we define it may change but there is always the possibility of the impossible.

I agree some things are impossible, but I don't believe mastering space travel is it.

FTL meaning faster than light.

And I suppose what you're saying depends on the definition of mastery. We already mastered space travel in a way by simply sitting on a rock rocketing through the cosmos.

having just learned how to crawl.

Peace to you, Gravitycollapse.

Fermat's Last Theorem says a thing is impossible. Fermat's Last Theorem is true. This is unlike your other quotes which say certain things are impossible but they were later shown to be possible (or support the idea, as with the Bacon quote).

Mathematics routinely and accurately say things are impossible. The existence of engineering or similar predictions of impossibility that later turned out to be incorrect says nothing about the 1) mathematical statements of impossibility or 2) contemporary engineering or similar predictions of impossibility.

I don't know what kind of statement the person you were responding to was making but I DO know that people being wrong about some things being impossible in the past tells you absolutely nothing about this person being wrong (or right) now.

The Higgs was predicted by Peter Higgs four decades before it was 'discovered' in the Large Hadron Collider. Antimatter was predicted by Paul Dirac in 1928, then Paul Anderson discovered positrons a few years later.

Quite a few discoveries in science were 'predicted' before actual discovery. It's important to make a distinction between an informed prediction, using mathematical proofs and thought experiments and the type of predictions found in the pages of 'popular science' mags (Flying cars, personal jetpacks, household robots, etc.)

Robot technology is moving at an incredible rate, especially in Japan. They're dealing with their aging population by investing in robotics.

robots could survive not having an atmosphere in a ship and will probably be the first to go.

Last edited Thu Jun 12, 2014, 03:02 PM - Edit history (1)

... nothing goes slower than light either.

We are all surfing along at the speed of light; what we perceive as velocity and time are merely measures of divergence and interference on an everlasting present. Past and future are both fuzzy and shifty things, and we can only track the "past" of our own present existence.

Mine's not the holographic universe of the string theory cosmologists, rather, just as a two dimensional bit of photographic film can represent a three dimensional image in a hologram, a three dimensional surface of light projects an illusion of both time and velocities less than c. But the analogy fails in the sense that the universe is in-and-of-itself, there's no separate "bit of film" containing it, no God's Star Trek holodeck running a simulation of us, no background aether upon which we are projected.

I'm not bothered that Star Trek style "warp drives" or any kind of faster than light engine is impossible. A lot of alchemists, including Isaac Newton, were disappointed that they couldn't turn lead into gold with spells and potions.

Star Trek style exploration is fantasy but we exist in a reality that's still very much unexplored, with even greater unknowns to discover.

But as a so-called "responsible" adult with wife and kids I do try to stay out of trouble.

Not like my irresponsible teenage years when I once had to ask my brother to pick shrapnel out of my back and we told our mom I fell on a cactus. She knew we were liars somehow, but she didn't push it.

Nevertheless observers have never troubled me much. I continue to continue within an unsettled, undetermined, "don't care," state. I'm not in the place where Matilda strikes the Earth.

"I'm not bothered that Star Trek style "warp drives" or any kind of faster than light engine is impossible."

You seem to have some understanding of physics, so I don't see how you can proclaim this. Why accelerating an object directly to those speeds may not be possible, it is most certainly possible to move "space" though space at warp speeds - as demonstrated with the inflationary phase of the universe, where it expanded far faster than light speed.

NASA's math shows that in theory, it should be possible to warp space with a reasonable amount of energy, which would allow warp speeds.

Exactly what part is it you think is impossible? Warping space or space warping occurring faster than light?

Take it up with Isaac Newton.

This guy invented a calculus and "classical physics" but he was still an alchemist who was wrong about many things.

Some things really are "impossible."

Clarke's law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," is true but we can't know what that magic will be.

But we do know some things are less likely to be, especially in the nearer future or nearer past.

This is not the only "reality."

Lead into gold is possible through other means that don't break any known laws.

It seems that FTL travel is possible in some theories, but there's not universal scientific consensus...and this leaves aside the question of feasibility.

We are about as close to space ships with warp drive as Newton was to transmutation. As in, not at all.

On the other hand maybe we could build a fission or fusion powered magnetically shielded ship with electric engines capable of exploring the entire solar system. Or better yet, artificially intelligent explorers who don't need to carry all the extra baggage of life support systems.

...several thousand atoms of gold from bismuth.

So what? It's just gold. The only thing sillier than gold lust is gold as "money."

Gold is a pretty metal, it conducts electricity well, but it's useless as food.

major point is today we have the ability to change one element in to another, this could apply to creating all sorts of exotic and useful materials currently unknown to us at the present time.

Furthermore science isn't static, they will become more efficient and proficient at this with practice and new discovery.

Who's to say what can be done 500 years from now, perhaps they will be able to create food and look at our understanding or ability to do things as we look at what Isaac Newton tried to do 300 years ago.

I think we as humans, if we are lucky, we might create intelligences that are able to surf the universal light more directly.

I'm a terrible surfer, a danger to myself and others. Nobody wants me sharing their wave. Reaching the beach, their faces bloodied by crashing into my klutzy self or board, they sometimes punched me in the jaw and I fell down.

This explains my naked body surfing on empty beaches under the "high noon" of a full moon. Maybe.

One of my siblings has the surfing gift. So does my wife, and she occasionally teaches graduate courses in medical statistics too. A few more distant relatives of mine are champion surfers.

Last edited Fri Jun 13, 2014, 07:32 PM - Edit history (1)

Waikiki Beach and they had minor waves, I went under the water, my board flew in to the air and just as I came back to the surface, the board came down and hit my head, I saw stars and had to fight to keep from blacking out.

Nothing is actually moving faster than light in the Alcubierre model. The "warp bubble" bends spacetime around the vessel. It expands and contracts spacetime around a local spacetime field which remains unaffected.

Recent discoveries have also reduced the amount of energy required to create such a field.

work without the hyperinflation proposed by Alan Guth- namely that in the period following the big bang, space and time itself expanded much faster than the speed of light.

To put it simply, there is no other way to explain the large-scale homogenity of the observed universe in light of the inevitable quantum fluctuations that must have been present in the early outlay of the universe, without hyperinflation.

That does not mean there couldn't be other explanations, but it's the only logically consistent one we have right now, and it matches the observational data.

Mr. Alcubierre's "warp drive" is based upon the same mathematical framework- the starship exists inside a "bubble" of flat spacetime, with spacetime inflated behind it and compressed in front- so the ship stands still but the spacetime itself is what moves FTL, which is permissible in relativity.

It would inarguably involve technological achievements which are mind-bogglingly beyond anything we can accomplish right now, AND it requires the existence of "exotic matter" which may not even exist, however, "the math" is based upon actual physics and an understanding of the Universe which is logically consistent with what we believe about the cosmos now.

I find the others more interesting.

Your mileage may vary.

It's a very big universe and we are very small.

By observation, experiment, theory and the scientific method. I think that universe - one where we can learn real truths about what is really going on- (or more prescisely, the potentially infinite self-replicating, budding and eternal fractal multiverses implied by Guth and the further work of Andrei Linde, as well as the multiple multiverses potentially implied by string and quantum theory) is EXTREMELY interesting. I mean, sure, YMMV, but what more do ya need?

This thread is about a theoretical proposal based upon internally consistent, albeit highly speculative, extrapolations upon what might be possible under a current scientific understanding of the universe and the mathematics of relativity.

If one wants to say "well, fine but I choose to live in a world that is 6,000 years old or sits on the head of a turtle or is run by indigo light friends from the magic galaxy of Oprah's secret", sure, that's awesome. You can't argue with that logic.

But those arguments don't really work in a scientific discussion.

From my perspective time travel and warp drives are not possible. It's a hunch, an educated guess.

So far the experiments and observations are not definitive, and the math is, as you say, highly speculative.

The effectiveness of science is that it doesn't shift around to accommodate our beliefs, it shifts around to accommodate our experimental evidence and observations. Belief doesn't enter into the equations.

Nevertheless, science as practiced by humans is still driven by hunches, intuition, and alas, money and funding decisions made by people who do not know anything about science.

My own hunch is that in a universe with warp drives we'd all be Borg, or dead...



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_%28Star_Trek%29

However, "unlikely" and "improbable" or "highly speculative" are also of course not the same thing as "impossible".

Also, your earlier point about the speed of light.. like I said, our current favored most popular cosmological framework not just allows, but is fundamentally and inherently dependent upon hyperinflation, i.e. spacetime expanding FTL in the early stages of the universe. The recent gravity wave results seem to corroborate this framework, as well. (and yes, others have challenged those results, which is of course science working exactly as it is supposed to)

This is about expanding and contracting space faster than light. The speed of light does not apply to the expansion of space itself (this is why light can be farther away than the universe is old.

This idea calls for contracting space in front of the spacecraft, and expanding it behind the spacecraft. In effect, the spacecraft doesn't move - where you want to go comes to you.

No talk at all about how one goes about precisely bending space. There is no theoretical way to do that except with huge amounts of mass, like a few black holes stashed away in the engine compartment somewhere. Even if another way were found it would undoubtedly require inconceivable amounts of energy.

That's not to say whatever theoretical work they've done on Alcubierre's work isn't correct or meaningful, only that there is absolutely zero talk about actual engineering. It's also useful to think about what an interstellar craft might look like - aside from the drive, how it needs to function to carry humans to the stars, protect them from radiation and interstellar dust and so on. All interesting stuff that is worth exploring. Plsu, as a fan of 2001 and Space 1999 I've always been a sucker for cool model spacecraft.

Just let's not get carried away. There are zero ideas here how a warp drive might actually be constructed.

see how advanced we can get without involving weapons?

Imagine a world where the collective goal is to build that ship and achieving NLSl...

Imagine a world where science, not religion, is the driving force...