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NASA Testing Warp Theory For Possible FTL Travel
- Thread starter DrForester
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Omegasquash
Member
With what budget?
We need a kickstarter.
With what budget?
No idea.
Perhaps China will do something, they seem to be pushing their space program.
David Incorporated Esq.
Member
Give the first one a read, it's a decent introduction but, oddly enough, doesn't really get into the good bits of the space combat until right at the end (spends time on universe/character introduction). A big ass war kicks up in the next few books and shit goes cray.
It's usually available in major bookstores for $8, worth a read.
Fair warning, villains in his books are generally of the mustache-twirling variety and the stories really aren't all that great. His combat is fantastic, though, and once it grabs you never lets you go.
Also the main character has a sentient, six-limbed space kitty. So that rules too.
TestOfTide
Banned
Well, i've never much for characters, worldbuilding and details and immersion are more important for me usually.
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
As you note, we're really having to stretch a lot here to make any of this approach consistency. The tech definitely allows all of this stuff, even if the Reapers have XYZ safeguard against it. Conservation laws are straight out the window, perpetual motion is here to stay, yada yada yada. I'm kind of sorry this conversation spun out of control
The range won't be very large, but you want to use them in MEverse because of the nature of the weapon creating an almost particle-beam like effect. Globs of extremely fast, superheated plasma in a relatively narrow arc. Based on what we've seen, that should mean it's damned effective at punching through Mass Effect barriers while low speed torpedos are not.
Bomb pumped lasers would obviously work great too, possibly even better. But then again, ship mounted lasers should already carve up reapers and other ships at close ranges, or at the very least blind them. It's not clear how surface-mounted mass effect field emitters are supposed to survive laser or particle weapons raping them, even if the main armor of a given vessel is too tough for PD lasers to get through. Even ordinary close range nuclear explosions should be enough to hugely cripple the operations of any ship it doesn't outright destroy. We know that slow moving torpedoes can strike enemy ships including Reapers, so faster moving nuclear tipped missiles should have even better odds of surviving PD and detonating within 50 meters.
Ahh, that was a fun thread.
Trying not to think about perpetual motion etc. Too many unintended consequences and issues already.
Conversations start to spin out of control when people start splitting quotes to multiple quotes in order to go in-detail. At least, that's how it looks like.I'm kind of sorry this conversation spun out of control
Not helping any here...
Perhaps someone finds this conversation interesting, other than us (i presume we both are interested anyway, would we talk otherwise?).
ME Barriers don't make much sense... don't block lasers, block kinetics, mass-effect disruptor torpedoes make holes in them, but somehow particle beams (which are kinetic weapons really) go through them. Perhaps they create holes in them?
Anyway... spearing a target with nuclear fire, it would make very, very good cinematic moment.
Should have been used just for that.
Also, i notice you say "range won't be very large"... which seems to be what everyone says, but no one has numbers. And "not very large/long" is kinda vague, we're talking about space combat after all.
Nothing to add here
Yes, it was.
Wonder every now and then if i should bump it, hope someone else would have some input to re-ignite the discussion.
Zod the Bear
Member
I am disappointed there was meaningful discussion/actual posting instead of a first page full of itshappening.gifs
No.
The question is, SHOULD WE?
LITERALLY the first thing I thought of when I saw the thread title. Still exciting though.
WeAreStarStuff
Member
I wish I had the required intelligence to make something like this a reality now. Exciting as hell; who knows what humans will be doing decades and centuries from now.
Whatever we do, we won't be travelling faster than light, in any way.
Certainly not with Alcubierre drive, for it doesn't work (math works, but practical issues prevent it from working really)
WeAreStarStuff
Member
You certainly cannot say that we will not find a way beyond the light-speed limit. Humanity is in its infancy of understanding the natural world. A century ago we thought the Milky Way the only galaxy for example.
The problem is causality.
FTL travel would break that, allow timeloops, effects preceding the cause, breaking down the foundation of physics etc. as we know them.
EDIT relativity, causality, FTL. Choose two.
Relativity has been verified again and again, no exceptions have been found. Causality is the basis of everything we know.
So, no FTL.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php#id--Causality
EDIT Wormholes would have causality issues, right? One never exceeds lightspeed locally but it still has issues, correct?
WeAreStarStuff
Member
I've not read this argument before; I need to do some reading on it before gathering my thoughts. Will articulate a response when I've come to a more proper understanding - thanks for the link.
The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness.
The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its navigators, who the spice has mutated over 4000 years, use the orange spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space.
That is, travel to any part of the universe without moving.
The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its navigators, who the spice has mutated over 4000 years, use the orange spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space.
That is, travel to any part of the universe without moving.
It's possible in that it can "happen."
The energy required to sustain such a drive is ridiculously impractical.
Stuff like that kinda piss me off that I wasn't born in 2200 something. I'm really curious to know how far humanity is going to advance in the next 200 years... too bad we'll never know unless some super genius scientist finds a way to stop the aging of human cells in the next ~20-30 years before I become too old.
It's all relative. In 100 years they'll look back on all the innovations we made in the past 20 and marvel at how much our development accelerated in such a short period of time.
dutchguyjack
Member
No, you wouldn't be travelling at all. You'd be moving space-time around you, being able to reach your destination faster than light will without moving the spaceship itself at all.
I want to know how they're going to create a Casamir effect anyway. Seems they're using lasers for something...lasery. maybe they're using them to try and create a quantum space? Like have the lasers oppose each other to create a zero point? I don't know if that would even work.
While enjoying the fruits of hour labors. I wanna be frozed.
Talking about the drive itself, one formulation predicted that the bubble (and its contents) would be pretty inhospitable.The earth does not fry you, yet it moves at a faster speed than any conventional vehicle would. We would have to get a clue from nature on this one
http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.0141
Can't communicate with stuff within the bubble.
If the spacetime bubble is moving faster than light, then no signal can reach it. If it isn't moving at FTL, it is completly pointless.
Regardless, hitting the bubble with a signal is worthless, it twists the photons who knows where, impossible to say if they'd reach the spacecraft within the bubble. Same with trying to send a signal out.
Armoured Priest
Member
It came to me in a dream.
The engines don't move the ship. The ship remains stationary and the engines move the universe around the ship.
SquiddyCracker
Banned
What fun things could you do with warp theory non-FTL travel wise?
You essentially gain the control of spacetime, being able to compress/extend.
Could that not be utilized to compress spacetime so much that it collapses like with a black hole?
Or you could extend it so much, and I dunno what that'd cause.
You essentially gain the control of spacetime, being able to compress/extend.
Could that not be utilized to compress spacetime so much that it collapses like with a black hole?
Or you could extend it so much, and I dunno what that'd cause.
Buttermilk
Member
http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive
Here is a link that talks about it.
s_mirage
Member
"As we know them" are the operative words though when it comes to discussing what may or may not possible. I suspect that we probably know a whole lot less than we think. It has always seemed to me that our scientific explorations may be like trying to draw a map of the world just from the view out of your bedroom window. Everything in that view can be tested and verified, but it is a pitifully small frame of reference for drawing larger conclusions.
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
Uh huh, but the theory that suggests that this Warp travel could be possible is the same theory that suggests that FTL travel will violate causality. If you say that our understanding is wrong and that Einstein needs to be cast aside in favor of a more complete model, there's no reason to assume that we'll keep the FTL but throw out the causality violation except wishful thinking. You might think the odds are 50:50 lacking any other knowledge, but it's worse than 50:50 because time dilation and the relativity of simultaneity is experimentally supported, while negative energy and other exotic things for the Alcubierre drive are not. Then, we have actually-FTL quantum phenomenon that can never-the-less not be used to transmit information at FTL speeds (no communications theorem). It seems like FTL is something the universe prevents, even if we don't have the full picture.
MidgarBlowedUp
Member
This sounds like one of those Myth Buster episodes where you already know the myth is busted to begin with, but they decided to make the episode anyway.
SirIgbyCeaser
Banned
More power to the engines.
Try rerouting the trilithium crystals.
Hope this helps nasa. I'm an expert.
Try rerouting the trilithium crystals.
Hope this helps nasa. I'm an expert.
s_mirage
Member
I should have quoted another post as well as I do not mean to say that the Alcubierre drive will work, or that we can simply thrust past the speed of light. My post was really in response to the idea that we will never have FTL travel by any means. I'm not a physicist but I fail to see how we can assume so much is certain when the data we have available to us is only a microscopic fraction of the whole. We don't understand everything, that much is certain, and to claim that something will never be possible based on incomplete knowledge seems unwise to me.
SlickShoesRUCrazy
Member
I hope they succeed!
ConfusingJazz
Member
FUCK EVERYONE! IT'S HAPPENING!
ElRenoRaven
Member
See I was born 100 years too early. This is the cool shit that I always dreamed of seeing. I'll never get to either unless we get on the ball with cloning or the fountain of youth is found.
The problem with FTL is that practically every single idea conceived can and will break causality.
Warp drive (warping space time like this Alcubierre drive), hyperdrive (going outside our universe), jump drives (teleportation)...
Even wormholes, since those can be arranged in such a way that allow response to arrive before anything was sent.
Well. There is chronology protection conjecture. If wormholes are possible to create, and time travel is impossible due to something (CPC) blocking it, then could have form of FTL.
But then it would hinge on whether wormholes are possible to create. Which is another can of worms.
Energy requirements for Alcubierre drives are something aking to the amount of energy in the universe.
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
There's a thing called the "Correspondence principle". It's explicitly about the relationship between quantum theory and classical mechanics, and it says that when dealing with large energies and on large scales, Quantum theory must produce classical mechanics. The principle is generalizable - it basically means that if something is confirmed by experiment, some other theory that seeks to supplant it must also be able to explain those outcomes. In a concrete example, Relativity produces the same results as Newtonian physics does when dealing with objects that are low mass and moving at low speeds. This has to be true because Newton's principles were thoroughly tested with such objects and worked flawlessly.
In the same way, relativistic principles have been confirmed by numerous experiments. Time dilation, gravitational and relativistic, has been tested and confirmed. Essentially, the principles which produce the "FTL = time travel" relationship are grounded in very solid empirical research. Future experiments are not going to invalidate them, although they may supplement or provide different explanations for why they are occurring than what we currently believe. Relativity is NOT wrong, it is incomplete. The reason I mentioned quantum phenomenon previously is because although QM has no rules explicitly forbidding superluminal information transfer, it still actually seems to forbid it in practice. Why would that be?
The attitude you are putting forward here, that we should never fully discount something, has merit. But at the same time, there is no compelling reason to think that FTL travel ever will be possible, and several good reasons to think that it never will be. We can and will still test principles surrounding theorized drives, and physicists would love nothing more than to overturn the status quo and win themselves a Nobel prize in physics. But it is SO unlikely that future theories will permit FTL drives. And I'm not talking about just accelerating past C either - I mean teleportation, warp drives, wormholes or any other drive that is supposed to get around the limit on the top speed of information in the universe. Keep in mind that while new theories provide new opportunities, they usually impose even more limits on things. Prior to thermodynamics, there was no reason to believe that perpetual motion machines couldn't be made. Prior to Einstein, there was no limit on top speed! You could go thousands of times faster than light if you wanted, just by accelerating! New theories are, then, more likely to make dreams of a space opera future seem less and less possible, rather than facilitating any of the necessary technologies.
Next theory will make up will limit acceleration to some multiple of G, max, for some reason. Or something like that. Just to spite humankind.
Yes, yes, i know my example doesn't make any sense. But whatever we find, it will do something annoying like that.
Nuts, forgot that aspect. Robots out, brain spliced fleshbots in.
Serious question: when travelling at faster-than-light speeds, what would prevent even the tiniest particle lying dormant in space from penetrating the hull of the ship as it moves through it's location?
Wouldn't any space debris, no matter how small, punch holes in the ship as it moves at that incredible speed?
Wouldn't any space debris, no matter how small, punch holes in the ship as it moves at that incredible speed?
SquiddyCracker
Banned
Because it's not moving through space.
It's making space, move around it - so those particles would just move around it along with the surrounding spacetime fabric.
Kinda removes the need of sci-fi "energy" shields and such.
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