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Star Trek's Warp Drive Not Impossible
Trunks writes "No doubt trying to ride the hype train that's currently going for the new Star Trek film, Space.com has a new article detailing how warp drive may not be impossible to acheive. From the article: '"The idea is that you take a chunk of space-time and move it," said Marc Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project. "The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it's not moving at all. It's the space-time that's moving." One reason this idea seems credible is that scientists think it may already have happened. Some models suggest that space-time expanded at a rate faster than light speed during a period of rapid inflation shortly after the Big Bang. "If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not for our space drives?" Millis said.' Simple, right?"
It's good to remind ourselves sometimes that such things may be possible. It's obvious from the articles length that it's publication is simply due to the movie coming out. How ever I think it's important not to simply shut our eyes and claim things impossible. Just a few centuries ago computers were impossible, as was flying and a great number of other things we think of as common now. The article though isn't much more besides an attempt to generate hits from the looks of things.
Summary of the previous article: Here's a technical problem, which no-one will ever figure out how to solve, therefore it's impossible.
Summary of the current article: Here's a tiny shred of scientific evidence that it may have happened before, therefore it is not impossible.
Note that the previous article was just a logical fallacy. The fact that you've identified a potential problem in a technology that doesn't even exist does not rule it out as a possibility.. it just shows that it is hard, duh, we knew that already.
Note that the current article is just wild speculation.. they're trying to say that if space warping happened slightly after the big bang then that might actually mean it is possible to do it now. And people tend to read what they want to read, namely, they confuse "possible" with "practical".
How we know is more important than what we know.
So which is it? Neither. It's viral marketing piggy-backing on the hype surrounding the new ST movie. No news here. Nothing to see.
Honestly, do you care what happens in 2303?
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"If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not for our space drives?"
You see that is where your going wrong, anything that involves trying to recreate big bangs is not a good idea.
I also though inflation theory was just a stop gap, its a model not as pure as the original big bang theory, yet doesn't quite close all the problems, so its a good starting point for progress but its defiantly not right!
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that sounds more like Guild Heighliner technology where they Fold Space.
"travel to any part of the universe, without moving".
It also avoids the acceleration/deceleration with WARP speeds :P
I was not here, I did not say this.....
If it does turn out that it is possible, isn't there the possibility that you would crash in to stars and space rubble, etc...
All we need to do is create an engine that generates as much energy as there was present in the entire universe a few nanoseconds after the big bang... D'oh! Yeah, coating the entire surface of the Earth with gold foil to increase its reflectivity and eliminate global warming is technically possible too -- but that doesn't mean it's going to happen!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There's no such thing as proof that something ISN'T possible -- only that it IS possible. If we could prove that warp drive wasn't possible, all of the atheists would be climbing over themselves to be the first to prove that god doesn't exist. Instead, they laugh and tell theists to prove that their god exists. There's a good, logical reason for that.
None of which is to say that good logic about proof or disproof means that atheists are more correct than theists.
So let's get this straight. It might have happened during the Big Bang. So, if we want to recreate it we're probably going to need to create a power source within a few magnitudes of the Big Bang. I don't know about you, but I don't feel comfortable using up significant percentages of the Universe's total energy. No need to accelerate the Big Freeze.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
they're trying to say that if space warping happened slightly after the big bang then that might actually mean it is possible to do it now.
Well supposedly space is warped slightly by ordinary particles, right? (gravity?) If there was a "big bang" then what happened shortly after the big bang would be more than "slight".
I think the point they were trying to make about the big bang was not that it's possible to warp space (which happens), but that it must be physically possible to warp space to such a degree so as to allow matter to travel faster than light. The theory is that, at the time of the big bang, space was expanding faster than light, so that one year after the big bang particles would be more than 1 light-year apart from each other. So that would mean that those particles were moving faster than light, and it would be an example of faster-than-light travel already happening.
Of course, I don't know how they know how fast things were moving after the big bang. Even if you were there to observe it, there wouldn't be anything periodic to compare the motion to (no sun for the earth to go around, and so no "year" measurement). But then even ignoring that, I'd think that an event like the big bang would distort time, too. But I guess some really smart mathematician must have figured it out, right?
IF I had a stick 100 Million light years long. With me holding the stick on one end, and a tiny model spaceship on the other end of the stick and I move that stick left or right, would the ship not move faster than light?
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Your nitpick is wrong. More than one light-year away from each other after one year would require a relative speed greater than light speed, which would be sufficient to demonstrate an exception to the general principle that light speed is the greatest possible relative speed.
I knew it was a mistake to give up trying to solve the Halting Problem!
I thought the Inflatinary Era what what happens in a few years when the trillions we've been printing catch up with us?
Actually, the Inflatinary Era is just a big WTF in current cosmology. Everyhting makes good consistant logical sense back to a certain point, with lots of hard evidence thans to the recent CMBR stuff. But then we have to invent a whopping great cosmological constant to makes sense of it all. I think that's probably as full of shit as each previous cosmological constant.
I suspect there are better theories for why the CMBR temperature is so uniform, and given the fantastic progress that cosmology has in recent years, the whole Inflatinary Era idea may be abandoned by cosmologists by the time it's a reality for economists!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
One can also prove that a god doesn't exist by showing that said god's defining characteristics are contradictory. Atheists do it all the time, but theists usually respond with the childish "that may be, but *my* definition of god is now such and such instead".
Idiot, that is why the LHC broke.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
The spaghetti bunny is one of the many incarnations of our noodly savior.
Debating the astrophysics of a warp drive tops that in my book. Now, where's that carburetor rebuilding thread?
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Schroedinger's cat must give you a serious headache.
The people which said that said it in the context that the engineering of such machine was impossible , and at the time they were right. Then came the brother wright and a few other which went on and USED SCIENCE and ENGINEERING from that epoch, got a bit of luck and a good deal of genius and put something together which worked. The problem is : most people use the brother wright as an example of science thinking something impossible and then it happens. IT IS NOT SO. What was thought is while the science allow heavier than air flight, the engineering would be impossible, so the BIRD FLIGHT is relevant, ESPECIALLY that the guy involved were all from the enlightenment period, most probably deist (so not really believing in god creator). And that was only a few individual mind you. Obviously other individual had another opinion. The wright brother example / flight is NOT an example of the limit of science, it is an example of the limit of expertise of individuals and that one should avoid making particular prediction on the possibility of ENGINEERING something. I bet a lot of people said the same things about calculating complex stuff with primitive calculation amchine in the 19th century.
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The reasoning in this article builds on the assumption that we can somehow rip out a region of space and move it along independently of the rest of space, which is of course nonsense. The geometry of space is basically equivalent with the gravitational field the permeates space, if you will. If we "move a region of space", we fundamentally change the geometry - just imagine a 2D coordinate system and move a region of that space around (0,0); you would either have to break the coordinate axes or bend them, both of which will have a huge impact on the geometry of the thing. If we were to move a piece of space along like that, we would see some really weird gravity distortions.
But apart from that, what Einstein's assumption was, was not that "it is impossible to do anything faster than light", but that it was impossible to transmit any signal that propagates through space faster than light. There are some unspoken assumption in this wording - like eg that a signal propagates through space in much the same way as through an elasic media; if one could find a way of not propagating through space in that fashion, perhaps things can move faster. Indeed, the famous "Ghostlike Action at a Distance" phenomenon must be of that category.
all of the atheists would be climbing over themselves to be the first to prove that god doesn't exist
Really? Because, you know, being an agnostic, I was pretty sure that's what atheists actually do.