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Quantum Setback For Warp Drives
KentuckyFC writes "Warp drives were generally considered impossible by mainstream scientists until 1994 when the physicist Michael Alcubierre worked out how to build a faster-than-light drive using the principles of general relativity. His thinking was that while relativity prevents faster-than-light travel relative to the fabric of spacetime, it places no restriction on the speed at which regions of spacetime may move relative to each other. So a small bubble of spacetime containing a spacecraft could travel faster than the speed of light, at least in principle. But one unanswered question was what happens to the bubble when quantum mechanics is taken into account. Now, a team of physicists have worked it out, and it's bad news: the bubble becomes unstable at superluminal speeds, making warp drives impossible (probably)."
Or is it *both* Impossible and not Impossible?
is this where the improbability drive comes in?
yeah, someone had to say it.
We all know what happens when you try to travel that fast!
Just do what the Planet Express Ship does and use a Dark Matter drive to move the Universe around us instead... :)
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
So you mean to say my brand spanking new SSDs have become obsolete already???
Any warp engineer knows that.
That's it, cancel the Star Trek Movie. Now that I know it's all fake it just ruined it for me.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
Don't they remodulate the shield frequency (or reconfigure the emitter array), and that keeps the bubble stable just long enough?
Oh my.
This is why we need women in the army to stop that nonsense.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It always works.
Darn, it's from 2009. I was expecting the submission date to be from in future.
With magic, you can ride a unicorn.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It ends with Sam Neill plucking out his own eyes and telling you, that you will not need them where you are going.
Perhaps this is why, despite our best efforts, no other civilization has contacted us. It's simply too hard to bridge the huuuuge gap between the stars.
More likely, they've just chosen not to. Like why we tend to not talk to people from Alabama.
A bit solipsistic are we?
No, it's just you.
My people are taught that it's a fluid, not a fabric. When particles pop into existance, or exist as matter, in our dimensional space their probability function becomes highly localized and creates a "void" between dimensions and a pressure density gradient at that point in space. This pressure forces the fluid of space to flow into these voids and it's this flow of space fluid that creates and explains the drag known to us as gravity.
We are also taught that if enough matter is brought together in a region of space the flow of space fluid into other dimensions becomes so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape the currents. We call these objects deep blue holes. Technically they are black because no light escapes, but we're smurfs and we think we're cool, so since cool blacks are bluish blacks we call them deep blue holes.
I'm pretty sure I got that explanation right. Brainy lectures on and on about it but it's hard to pay attention when the discussion is about deep blue holes... Smurfette sits next to me... droooooool....
I smurf everything and everything I smurf is perfect.
The problem with traveling faster than light is that my wife would never go with me on a trip:
"Traveling that fast is going to make my ass look big."
(Hmm, leaving her behind might be a good thing... )
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
3 years 205 days is 31,200 hours. so yes the trip will only last for hours, 31k of them.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
it needs to be of a sufficient size that you don't go bugshit loco crazy
...
Inadvertently, a Slashdot poster stumbles upon the reason that aliens, intersteller travelers who travel in very small ships, abduct people on Earth and stick things up their butts.
And then
nah, 8 weeks of basic training doesn't generate THOSE kinds of issues....
the real problems, and a closer analogy, (pun? what pun?) would be the Navy....
500 men leave on the ship, 6 months later 250 couples return
"Traveling that fast is going to make my ass look big."
Just figured out my reply: "Dear - it's all relative... "
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.