Slashdot Mirror
Introducing the Warpship
astroengine writes "Dr. Richard Obousy, a guy who has put modern science into the warp drive, has designed his very own warpship. Now, for the first time, he's shared it with the world. It might not be the sleek Starship Enterprise, but its structure has been optimized to harness local 'dark energy,' generating a warp bubble so faster-than-light velocities are possible." Now, the only question is: will the ship achieve faster-than-light travel ... or will the company hit those speeds once it has enough money from investors?
How about we figure out how to warp time first and then figure out a ship to utilize that science for the sake of travel?
The physics behind the warpship is purely theoretical, however. 'Dark energy' needs to be understood and harnessed, plus vast amounts of energy needs to be generated, meaning the warpship is a technology that could only be conceived in the far future. That said, Dr. Obousy's warpship design uses our current knowledge of spacetime and superstring theory to arrive at this futuristic concept.
Translation: We have a theory based on a lack of theory.
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
I've been on the waiting list for one, like, forever.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
I'm sure they won't have any problems finding investors -- so long as they cater to the investors who have interest in flying cars, another technology that hasn't actually gotten off the ground yet. What was it someone said about "a fool and his money"?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You still end up with global causality violation if an object can communicate outside its light cone.
But I'm giving all she's got, cap'n!!
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
OMG, the usual crap! So let me get this straight. The big bang did occur (to say otherwise is heresy). It was driven, faster than the speed of light, by dark matter - which scientists do not know anything about at all.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was... well, that is as scientific as the Big Bang Theory!
Why is this kind of rubbish on Slashdot?
Reminds me of my preteen years making dozens and dozens of D&D characters, even though I had no idea (at the time) how to play the game. But man, making those characters sure was fun....let's just do that! What's 'psyche'? I don't know, but let's roll a d20 for it! WHEE!
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
And, if the ship does achieve faster than light travel, will an observer even be able to see it doing so?
A consultant, eh? Making the big promises, he is?
Well when he's done and had his turn, I've got some marvelous things to show you. I wouldn't show just anybody, it's our secret. Everyone will want one and we'll be rich and famous so get them while you can now!
It puts me in mind of an Outsider ship, which is odd when you consider how they prefer travelling at sub-light speeds.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
I can't see this venture returning capital on anything that remotely resembles "short term". As such, I envision only government entities or wealthy individuals uninterested in ROI funding a project such as this.
Honestly, what kind of question could there be about investors in this type of technology? I didn't see anything remotely relevant to a business plan in any of the links.
So, they are seeking funding from the same people that invested in the Moller Skycar, then?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
is that a Cardassian ship I see?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
we see "Obousy" Collectors? hehehe They won't exactly be "Broussard Collectors".
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
This article bothers me primarily because it simply recovers old ground on a theory of the possibility of warp travel. The idea of utilizing dark energy to create waves in space-time is hardly new or original and so what we end up seeing in front of us is a series of explanations about possible "space time bubbles" that we have no idea how to create, or even if they're technically feasible, supplemented by a few minor CAD renderings and a wonderful representation of a planar mesh. Pardon me if I'm not entirely enthused. There seems to be no real mention of any progress since this topic was last covered in the scientific press. In short, while a nice idea, it's an old theory and less than stellar (if you'll pardon the pun). This is more science fiction than science, in my opinion.
I like losing arguments, it just means that I can take your point and make it my own.
I'll be sure to buy my faster than light ship, once the nice man from Nigeria finishes transferring me the money he promised!
Do you have any idea how long it takes to dig graves for twenty-three oak trees?
I told them to say warship instead of worship. Stupid spiders.
(will be downmodded before anyone gets the reference.)
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
but this fully speculative article will only confuse people.
I can already hear my non-scientific-inclined friends assuring that it has been demonstrated by Dr. Blah that faster-than-light travel is absolutely possible and we even have the ship ready.
When Jules Verne wrote his masterpieces he made it clear that it was scientific fiction, and people thrilled shuffling the pages. He was later called a visionary, but he did not pretend to be a scientist, merely a very intelligent writer.
It bothers me when plausibly smart people make interesting points but place them in the wrong category - nothing wrong with being smart, creative, and wild but, please, let us distinguish science from speculation.
Aeroespacio.org
The Spacing Guild http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Spacing_Guild have been harnessing the Holtzman Effect http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Holtzman_Effect for ages in the search for Melange http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Spice_Melange so may well be a case of Prior Art?
"but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy dot dot dot"
Well, if we could manipulate astronomical amounts of energy, instead of sailing off to Alpha Centauri or Wolf 359, we could:
But we can't. I know this is a fun dream. But before you try to replicate the Federation, take a look at the world that they were based upon. The Earth of Roddenberry is VERY different than this one. Let us strive to achieve THAT before we strive for the fastest way off of here.
From TFA:
Apparently the Romulans threatened a patent infringement suit if our warp ships do that.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
...which is really rather tacky looking.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
...and if you believe that, I also have this wonderful bridge you can buy.
William Shatner: "You know, before I answer any more questions there's something I wanted to say. Having received all your letters over the years, and I've spoken to many of you, and some of you have traveled... y'know... hundreds of miles to be here, I'd just like to say... GET A LIFE, will you people? I mean, for crying out loud, it's just a TV show! I mean, look at you, look at the way you're dressed! You've turned an enjoyable little job, that I did as a lark for a few years, into a COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME!"
"The tricky part is that the ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. "
FTA
"I understand how the engines work now. It came to me in a dream. The engines don't move the ship at all. The ship stays where it is, and the engines move the universe around it."
Cubert J. Farnsworth
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
This sounds somewhat like the way the "Stargate" works in Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, the main difference is this is a bubble rather than a tube between locations that are generating the "extremely large amounts of energy". We just need to find a few Zero Point Modules. Problem solved!
Did anyone else have to do a double take to make sure this article wasn't introducing a Wapship?
Whoops, you spelled his name wrong, it should be "Zephram Cochrane".
first
Only if you mastered time travel.
To err is human. To arr is pirate.
That there's a flying saucer, if ever I saw one.
Ugh, every thing said in that article is basically a re-hash of the hit parade of technologies that "sounded really good at the time, but don't really work". Casmir effect, Alcuberre warp drive, extra spatial dimensions, etc. are just things that sound neat, but practical applications of them are impossible, misunderstood, or just plain useless.
I want a warp drive as much as anyone, but I'm beginning to tire of hearing people keep spitting out the same concepts that anyone who can read the Wikipedia entries for them already knows are not practical or are probably not possible.
Vacuum energy may exist in some form, but the apparatus to generate any significant amount of it would probably take orders of magnitude more energy to operate. No break even. Virtual particles are a hypothesis based on the logic of the Uncertainty Principle, but even if this logic is not simply explained away at a latter point, one needs to only look at what apparatus is needed to demonstrate the Casmir effect to get an idea how you would need to scale in order to get anything out of it.
The warp drive not only requires us to somehow warp space time, but to actually survive in those conditions. There's only one known thing that combines significant warping of space time with a small area. We call those... black holes. Also, Alcuberre also acknowledged a number of problems with his drive including the fact that it wouldn't be able to see where it was going.
As for extra dimensions, besides the fact that most places I have read indicate that those dimensions are probably extremely tiny, they would probably require the Planck energy to explore, which no one knows if it is even possible to attain. So, you would spend an incredible amount of energy to be able to go from one side of a quark to another, maybe even quickly.
Or not at all, considering that a spatial dimension isn't just what's on the other side of a magic wardrobe. Either our 4 dimensions couldn't fit in the smaller ones, or we could, but we'd end up like 2-D Flatlanders walking around in a 3-D world. How could we interact with such a reality? How would it benefit us at all, even if we could survive the experience?
In the matter of dimensions, there are benefits we can glean from trying to understand if they are real and learning about them, and maybe even the Casmir effect would be good for something like generating antimatter or something. Having said that, planning a spaceship based on these ideas is like planning a ship to sail the Phogiston. It's gibberish, and what's more, its stale gibberish.
We use cars now...because some guy decided at some point to hook up an engine to a belt to turn a wheel to make a cart go without horses.
At some point science has take the crap or get off the pot, stop endlessly theorising about doing and just try and do it.
I guess it's time for me to start drawing pictures of spaceships and claiming they are optimized for warp speed because I have just as much evidence as he does. I'm sure a meme is very applicable here and it involves PROFIT!
The Wood Engineer
Can anyone point me at a web site that explains why FTL travel violates causality? My understanding is that it doesn't matter what technique you posit for FTL travel ("warp drive", "hyperspace", teleportation, bloater drive, etc.), none of them are possible because FTL travel would allow causality paradoxes.
As I understand it, the basic problem is that there isn't a single frame of reference for the whole universe, and for observers in different frames of reference, FTL travel would look like traveling back in time. But I don't quite grok it.
I seem to recall that the physics permits a wormhole that connects two points in space and time, implying an instant travel from future to past; I think the handwavy explanation was that the math allows this but you would be destroyed by the wormhole if you tried to travel through it so there is no causality paradox.
I have also heard people point out that, if you stand on a rotating planet, it appears to you that distant galaxies are whirling around you at many times the speed of light, and given relativity, isn't it valid to say that from your frame of reference those galaxies are moving FTL? As little as I know about physics, I'm not touching this.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I think you're just stringing us along.
Can you imagine that when we make our first travel faster than light, a Vulcan spaceship(or any other alien except Borgs :P) will passing by our neighborhood and make the first contact with aliens...?
Noooo, I think I see too much science fiction
Until the skies turn blue...
Until the air of freedom strikes us...
"These calculations are based on some arbitrary advance in technology or some alien technology that would let us manipulate the extra dimension," said Cleaver.
What the scientists were able to estimate was the amount of energy necessary, if the technology was available, to change these dimensions: about 10^45 joules.
This is somewhere between blue sky scientific speculation and plain old mental masturbation. I suspect that beer drinking played a key role somewhere.
You've got the wrong last name, and are thus detined to failure.
Waiting for a Z. Cochrane to come forward.
"...there will be some practical issues to overcome, such as preventing the creation of artificial black holes, as well as catastrophic warp bubble collapse when the power is switched off."
Best practical issues to overcome EVER! Man, I wish my day job involved figuring out how to overcome the creation of artificial black holes.
I would like to know more about this supposed warp bubble, and what were to happen if the said warp bubble were to collapse in mid flight?
The words "Universal Inflation" sounds like what we are experiencing financially now.
Didn't this end up turning into a alternative reality drive and this trun in to a hard to shout down one that can draw power from the other side.
Man invented the wheel.... again.
Hope is the currency of fools
and is piloted by L Ron himself! Probably full of Thetans, too.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Just have the Federal Reserve keep the rate of the Universe's expansion artificially low for a few years.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This is really no better fleshed out than any idea bandied about in your favorite sci-fi novel.
It'd be nice to have an explanation of exactly HOW the design is optimized to exploit dark energy, ie. how the geometry and/or features of the ship would contribute to harnessing and/or channeling dark energy. Without an explanation, it just looks like yet another science fiction space ship.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
on the same day I play Duke Nukem Forever in HURD.
So if going faster than light equals going back in time? Then the Doppler shift one undergoes reaching light speed should reverse itself going faster than light. e.g. front is red, back is blue?
Let me know when Lint Speed is available.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Uh, is dark energy the ultimate alternative energy? What happens when you use up all the dark energy in a region of space?
[signature]
I always wondered about Faster-then-light travel and all the muck in the universe getting in the way whilst zipping through space.
Think about it.
That galaxy might be well out of our path when that path is calculated, but where the hell will it be when we are actually passing through that area, and just how, exactly, does our mucking around with time effect our spatial relationship to other celestial bodies, especially since some of them display complex interactions with both time and space?
Wouldn't that galaxy be in a different location in space since it is in a different location in time (assuming it was moving to begin with, as Big Bang Theory suggests)? One would think we would have to map all the trajectories, and not just locations, of damn near every celestial body simply to avoid crashing into them.
But hey, since we could go forward in time, we should also be able to go backward as well, right? If that is the case, it might as well be "Full speed ahead...and pass the bong." Anything goes wrong, you just go back.
But then, I could be wrong. Or could have been...or will be...man, my head hurts.
Is that what they call them? Wow.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The idea that FTL naturally makes time travel possible is tightly bound to the structure of relativity. Since time travel seems to lead to causality paradoxes (e.g., going back in time and killing yourself), the conclusion seems to be that FTL leads to paradoxes, and that makes physicists suspect that FTL isn't actually physically possible.
Either that, or causality violations can happen. The problem with allowing causality violations, as I understand it, is that it causes problems for quantum mechanics. Something like the information required to describe the universe at time T1 can't be extracted from the universe at any later time T2.
Damn I read it as "Introducing the Warship", that would be funnier who knows what lurks beyond the Kupier Belt
Anyway the ship looks nice, its a shame that warp drives or something like a Holtzman Drive are not going to be a reality in any predictable near future... in despite of that I also recall that in the nineteen century humans flying was still something absurd for most people... so maybe not so unpredictable.
Anyway I really would like to pay a visit to our Insect Overlords from outer space...
So never wondered why there are thousands of insect species on earth? Insectoid Overlords That's Why!
So what happens to the space that expands behind the warpship? Technically you would have a line of expanded space behind the spaceship as it travels the light years, and if you travel the same path multiple times, does warp drive stop working when you strain the expanded space-time to much??
I don't want to set the world... on fire.....
Now, for VATS
Wouldn't a Alcubierre drive violate causality? While locally you are not traveling FTL, IIRC globally traveling FTL is sufficient to violate causality and build a time machine.
Pics or it didn't happen!
I've got dibs on the Eldar Craftworlds!
Slashdot editors: So credulous they manage to asound even 9/11 Troofers with with their gullability...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
could somehow...harness this power...channel it,...into the Casimir Warp Drive...it just might work!
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
It was several years ago, illustrated by Larry Gonick in his cartoon science series, "Light Elements". Same premise, same idea, but the biggest problem that was mentioned in the cartoon, has not been mentioned in this article?
You can start the compression in front of the ship, and also start the expansion behind the ship, which will get it moving.
However, once you've generated the compression/expansion wave, its self-sustaining. That brings up the problem, just how do you get the forward compression to stop??? What sort of "signal" do you send ahead of the compression wave to nullify it and allow you to stop? According to the Discover article, it "involved some sort of 'anti-gravity'.", which so far hasn't been invented yet.
So what you've got is a one-way, warp-speed trip around existence for all of eternity.
[End Of Line]
The Professor: Where's the device that lets to speed up or slow down the passage of time?
Fry: [pulls out a bong] Under the seat.
The 4th image reminds me of the description of the gravity distortion field generated by Edenist voidhawk and blackhawk space ships from the Night's Dawn trilogy...
... wait, what?
If reverse time travel were possible it would have already happened in the future. Either we do not matter much to the inventors or they're too worried about changing their own past and vanishing, causing a global war, or preventing the invention of the sonic screwdriver.
So what I am wondering is: If you change the past, does the current time continue to happen in an alternate universe, or would it just change all of the events and update the same reality. Alternate universes would require an entire universe worth of energy to fork right? That has me leaning toward single reality updates. Unless that universe already existed and ... oh I've gone crosseyed.
Anyone read "The Dreaming Void?" Substitute universe with known-universe and you just need a gigantic simulator that eats galaxies when it needs to fork. They should've built in logrotate on that simulator BTW.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23292/
Quantum setback for warp drives
Include quantum mechanics in the calculations and faster-than-light drives become unstable
Bad news I'm afraid -- it looks as if faster-than-light travel isn't possible after all. That's the conclusion of a new study into how warp drives would behave when quantum mechanics is taken into account. "Warp drives would become rapidly unstable once superluminal speeds are reached," say Stefano Finazzi at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and a couple of friends...
... another one of those sales pitches at the Ferengi used starship lot.
Have gnu, will travel.
Hey, I'm all for manipulating dark matter and delving into the 11th dimension as the next guy...
But we can't even get operating systems to work as we want. And car gas mileage hasn't increased much in the past few decades. [No, I don't consider it to be an huge accomplishment that some tiny 1500lb car now gets ~33mpg on the highway when my 6 year old V6 Camry gets an actual 30mpg on the highway at 70mph. Should I be thrilled if you show me a car getting 40mpg? ].
I think we have much more pressing (easier) issues to solve before making a warp drive...
That said, given how people behave, it wouldn't quite surprise me if we have warp-drive spacecraft (including civilian inter-solar-system travel) before we have fuel-efficient transportation and decent operating systems.
Ha ha ha... the idea of a man flying is absurd!
We'll never travel faster than 20 miles per hour... anything faster than that and our bodies will break apart.
Ha... a man on the moon! Fantasy!!
A pot whole of good BC bud makes surfing those waves much easier as time slips into the future, into the future...
Slip sliding away.... slip sliding away....
I'm also not clear on what kind of radiation such a bubble would give off, but it's possible it would be intense enough to fry anything inside...
Also there isn't much talk about acceleration rates, which is for my money, a little more important that maximum speeds, since humans start dying in droves around 10gs...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Actually, acceleration is not an issue at all. If a warp bubble was ever made to work, the acceleration for the people on the ship would be zero.
Acceleration is a change in velocity. In a warp bubble, if you could make one, there is no change in velocity because the ship does not move. The space behind the ship is stretched and the space in front of the ship is contracted. The ship itself doesn't move.
In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. -T.S. Eliot
I suspect the paper is much more mathematically in depth than this, since the conversation detailed a couple links in indicates actual energy calculations have been made, indicating much less energy would be required than previously thought.
Keep in mind this has been simplified for the "average high school audience" for whom the major news outlets write.
I'd love to see the actual writeup, but think that would be too far to the other extreme of the qualification spectrum for me to understand.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
look more closely at this page it says in small print everywhere:
"SNL transcripts"
shatner never said it, it was a saturday night live sketch.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I think it is sad, really, and not so much something to laugh at. The guy is clearly intelligent, but deluded, is my guess - the other option being that he is simply a fraud, of course. I can't help wondering what makes a gifted person lose contact with relity like that; a large part of it is probably social isolation.
Warp Drive is soooo slow :-(
Stargates FTW.
(Sorry, just got a 14 day EVE trial and getting a bit too immersed).
This:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23292/
and
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/05/27/1215204&tid=14
So, warp travel IS possible, but, for the moment there is no way to stabilize the warpship. ;)
Paramount already holds the patent on faster than light travel through warp drive propulsion as well as the patent on the warp drive itself.
This guy had better have already built a functioning warp drive if he wants to stand a chance of raising enough money to fight off the lawyers.
But there's no real link to the actual paper or material. You're having to assume that it exists, which means it's poor scientific coverage. There are no references within the article which means no reliability.
I like losing arguments, it just means that I can take your point and make it my own.
So okay, we've got this FTL warpship design, yeah?
We can send a spaceship to the far reaches of the universe...
But we lose Jupiter?
Maybe the environmental lobby will have something to say about that.
Not to mention the practical difficulties of finding another spare Jupiter lying around for the second trip.
Sorry but fail. Most new sciences has to go thru alot of chalk or 3d modeling before anything is made up in the real world. Old science is much about emulating nature, new science is about creating or manipulating nature.
Comparing the action of jumping up and down to warp drive is completely moronic.
Sounds very Event Horizon to me.
Why side with the guy who says it's not possible rather than the guy who says it might be possible?
So Finazzi has some objections - the ship would be bathed in radiation....eh.. shields anyone??
Anyways you pessimistic dooshbag, Finnazi's model is based on semi-classical physics, has only been formulated for a 1 dimensional model and is valid only during the acceleration period. ...pessimists...(roll-eyes)