Warp Drives May Come With a Killer Downside

An anonymous reader writes "Alcubierre warp-drives (theoretically) allow rocket ships to travel faster than the speed of light, while staying within the rules of Einstein's general theory of relativity. New research (PDF) has shown that as such warp-drives zip through the universe, they gather up particles and radiation, releasing them in a burst as the warp-drive slows down. This is bad news for family and friends waiting for the ship to arrive, as this intense burst will fry them."

Comments

Apparently these guys never watched any Star Trek

[guspasho]

This is what the deflector array is for. Like, the original purpose, not the solution-of-the-week it usually gets jury-rigged for.

Queller Drive

[kharbour]

In Space:1999, the Alcubierre warp-drive was known as the Queller Drive. There was an episode about this exact subject (the drive killing everyone) in the first season episode, Voyager's Return: http://www.fanderson.org.uk/epguides/spaceyr1eg3.html#Episode%20Twelve. In an almost unbelieveable coincidence, I happened to be watching it at the exact moment this Slashdot story came in. Spooky.

Re:Fermi Paradox

[Daniel Dvorkin]

If you use the same logic, not observing God interacting with the world does not imply that God does not exist.

So many of the same arguments apply to both proving the existence/nonexistence of God and proving the existence/nonexistence of extraterrestrials.

The difference is that "God," as generally defined by believers, is a being who specifically does interact with His creation. There is not (and probably will never be) any evidence either way on the hypothesis of a "watchmaker" who set the universe in motion and then left it alone, but that's not the God people pray to, either. If you believe in the power of prayer, or in the Bible as a moral rulebook, or any of the million and one other things which believers are constantly pushing, you have to believe in a God who should have left evidence of His active involvement all over the place, and yet has mysteriously failed to do so. There are people who believe in active involvement in human affairs by aliens too, of course, but they're a fringe minority rather than being in the mainstream of those who speculate on the possibility of extraterrestrial life.