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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)."
Depends on whether we can engineer ourselves to live 50 years in a tiny spacecraft with a bunch of strangers.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
From the article... "strongly implies that such a bubble would be unstable." Sounds like proof to me! Right. Just like it was proved impossible for planes to fly. It might indeed - eventually - prove to be impossible, or impossible to do meaningfully / reliably, but it's pretty unlikely we're in a position to make that call at this time. That's why we do research.
=cjs
Please note the submission date:
Semiclassical instability of dynamical warp drives
Heck, after 8 weeks of army basic training none of the 50 or so people in my company were strangers.
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It doesn't really matter if we cannot travel faster than the speed of light so long as we can live long enough to get there.
Who cares if it takes 50 years to fly to Alpha Centauri if we can engineer ourselves to live for a thousand!
Either that, or we can just figure out how to get really close to the speed of light, and reap the benefits of time dilation to make the journey only last hours from the traveller's point of view.
Why make the ship tiny?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Right. At about one G acceleration you can reach any point in the universe in a few years of ship time.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
You're still thinking binary. In Quantum, there are lots of possibilities in between possible and impossible. Only the extremes of which are possible and impossible.
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The very people who should be aware how little they know compared to what is possible. They come up with these statements, and they forget that for every problem, there IS a solution, even if they can not figure it out themselves.
The question their current "findings" should be asking is "what makes it unstable?". They may not know, but that is the key to solving the problem.
People forget that scientists used to think that it was impossible to break the sound barrier for various reasons. Then they came up with the idea that the speed of light could not be broken. Time has proven again and again that the only thing stopping ANYTHING is not having the knowledge to do it. Not having knowledge does not make something impossible, it just means a CURRENT inability to do something.
People do not want this world to be disposable, but they want the option to get off this crazy panet, in the hopes that there will be some sanity once you get away from the current cultural stupidity we see from terrorists and those who support terrorism.
There is also the concern that the stupidity of a few may destroy the world, so getting off the planet is also a survival instinct for the species at this point.