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?

Comments

Let's not put the cart before the horse

[ikirudennis]

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?

Re:Let's not put the cart before the horse

[T Murphy]

Because we all know from Douglas Adams that it takes so long to learn how to perform time travel you need time travel in order to do so. I don't recall what we're supposed to do instead, so just write 42 on everything and we'll be okay until we run out of towels.

Re:Let's not put the cart before the horse

[gnick]

Yeah - Here's the kicker, found on Page 2 of TFA:

Exactly how the 11th dimension would be expanded and shrunk is still unknown.

Sounds pretty similar to the way I walk - I move my feet and the Earth rotates beneath me. I'm planning on starting to fly instead, it's just maintaining altitude after lift-off. But I won't let that small detail stop me from making travel plans - I'll work that out after jumping.

Re:Let's not put the cart before the horse

[ground.zero.612]

Mine varies by alcohol consumption.

Re:Let's not put the cart before the horse

[gnick]

"Honey, does this warpship make my ass look fat?"
--
Just because you aren't asking the question doesn't mean you aren't going to get the answer.

If those are at all related, I'm guessing you're single. If you're going to tell your wife that her ass looks like it's bending space-time, at least let her ask the question first. That's not the kind of thing you volunteer.

Re:Let's not put the cart before the horse

[c6gunner]

So. Are they selling electric motors or perpetual energy devices?

That's a false dichotomy. The great thing about pseudoscience is that it's "experts" can sell you anything you want!

Is it powered by bovine excretions?

[whiledo]

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.

Re:Is it powered by bovine excretions?

[Red Flayer]

I have a warpship, and the design doesn't need to rely on

our current knowledge of spacetime and superstring theory to arrive at this futuristic concept

Instead, the design relies upon our future knowledge of spacetime and superstring[1] theory. That's the nice thing about it... warping space time in a bubble around the ship can result not only in FTL travel, but also time travel. So why should I constrain myself to the currently available theory?

[1] Also a little bit of sillystring theory, but it gets messy at that point, so I won't go into details.

Re:Is it powered by bovine excretions?

[The_Wilschon]

I actually know this guy (he was a grad student where/when I was an undergrad). He's not crazy and at least mostly not a crank (I only say mostly because it's never possible to judge that sort of thing perfectly). The article, like most crappy science journalism, doesn't really go into details, so I'll try to recall for you all the contents of a talk I heard him give to a small group once.

The basic idea, which you can probably get from the article, is to construct an Alcubierre bubble or Alcubierre warp drive. The Alcubierre bubble is a genuine solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity; it is a spacetime metric which could conceivably exist. Part of the trouble with making one is that you (at least naively) need exotic matter of some sort (tachyons, negative mass, etc) in order to do it, but we obviously don't know of any exotic matter at all presently. What you really want is to make spacetime contract ahead of you and expand behind you. Well, we do know of something that makes spacetime expand: dark energy! So, if we had some way of manipulating the local strength of dark energy, then we could make spacetime expand behind us faster than normal and expand in front of us slower than normal (or maybe contract, I can't remember exactly how far that side of things went). There are apparently some suggestive features of superstring theory that indicate that we might be able to use the Casimir effect and/or cause an expansion or contraction of string theory's predicted extra compact dimensions to affect the local strength of dark energy. Here's another failure in memory, as I remember that the Casimir effect and extra dimensions were both involved, but don't remember which one was supposed to affect the other and which was supposed to affect dark energy. This is about all I can remember. My apologies that it is not more complete.

Now, all this is of course very speculative. It depends on some things being true which might or might not be true. The existence of dark energy is at least strongly indicated by astrophysical data, whether or not it has a local strength is not known at all. The Casimir effect is quite well established. Compact extra dimensions and the rest of string theory remain a very good candidate for physics, but are of course notoriously difficult to test. If all of these things eventually work out, then Richard's ideas should work quite nicely. If any of them don't, then all bets are off; I don't know how his analysis would change then.

Of course, even a few years ago when I heard all this presented, it was much more thoroughly developed. You have my poor memory to blame for a very incomplete and fuzzy account. I have no doubt he's been developing it further in the last couple of years.

Something about that...

[hardwarejunkie9]

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'm not against thinking outside the box

[juanergie]

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.

Re:Venture capitalists

[EvilToiletPaper]

What was it someone said about "a fool and his money"?

... are my best friends

Hrmph

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're just stringing us along.

Obligatory Futurama Quote

[baKanale]

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.