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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.
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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.
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.
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.
Resistance is always futile, especially if a woman is involved.
In my other life, I eat cats.
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 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
"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.
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!
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.
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.
I didn't either, but I do see a catastrophic sense of humor failure in your post.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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.
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...
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
and there it was all along..
on the same day I play Duke Nukem Forever in HURD.
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.
Problem is the definition of FTL is assumed. Faster than light travel and even scientists think that you are talking of a speed greater than C.
it MEANS travelling to a point in space faster than travelling to it than you can at the speed of light.
If I punch a hole through space via a wormhole and travel at 45mph on a moped through the wormhole to travel a normal space distance of 600 light-years... I just traveled FTL. and THAT does not violate causality.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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.
Warp Drive is soooo slow :-(
Stargates FTW.
(Sorry, just got a 14 day EVE trial and getting a bit too immersed).