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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."
Duh
>thisfuckingguy.jpg
Yup.
... May the force be... uh... ummmm... so, sorry!"
Open Standards Portal
They came to that conclusion now? Every newly certified spaceship pilot knows that you must drop out of warp no less than an AU from destination.
So you drop out of warp outside the Van Allen belts and everybody gets a nice light show.
Worst case you only use Warp Drive as far in system as Mars and use more conventional means from there to Earth.
Hell using Warp drive through the Oort cloud or Asteroid Belt might be troublesome if you just start picking up crap when passing through dense matter. You slow down and all of the asteroids and comets you picked up are on a colission course for Earth. I suggest some different approach vectors might be the first precaution.
This is what the deflector array is for. Like, the original purpose, not the solution-of-the-week it usually gets jury-rigged for.
Makes a visit to the Mother-In-Law worth while now!
"Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
You mean, as in:
Data: Geordi, in my experiments to become more like a human, I seem to have lodged Captain Picard up my positronic rectum
Geordi: Wow, Data, I mean, um.... Maybe I don't want to know. But I tell you what, we'll set up a tachyon burst through the deflector array and that should cause your mechanical sphincter to open. If we're lucky, it will also fry his brain so he won't remember you stuffing him in there.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
More like needing the radiation equivalent of a Catalytic Converter...
If one knows that some undesirable trait will manifest, look at ways to mitigate that undesirable trait.
Or, use that trait beneficially. If the act of dropping out of warp releases a fuckton of energy, find a way to harness that energy.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Sent from a long distance, nearly undetectable, essentially unstoppable. When it arrives, its arrival is itself a weapon, plus whatever payload it is carrying.
What's that smell? Ah, that's my karma burning...
If this is our biggest barrier to developing one tomorrow, then why don't we have these already?
Because nobody has figured out exactly how one would warp space, only that it's theoretically possible.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
This is a great thing! Now we know how to wipe out all our alien competition!
Not sure about the theoretical effect of stopping, since the original theory postulates that once riding that warp bubble there's no way to stop...
Urban renewal?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Did you post this from your quantum computer???
Unless the resulting burst is a Gamma Ray Burst we should already have seen other aliens using this kind of tech.
In the case of forward-facing particles the outburst can be very energetic — enough to destroy anyone at the destination directly in front of the ship. “Any people at the destination,” the team’s paper concludes, “would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for [forward] region particles.”
I do not see anywhere where it is mentioned how far in front of the ship the blasted into oblivion effects will occur. How close is directly in front of the ship?
Except in Star Trek: 90210 they went to warp only a couple hundred meters from space dock and dropped out in Vulcan orbit. Don't get me started on what else was wrong with it.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
What happens when someone comes in behind you in the arrival lane? Since any FTL communication would by necessity be based on this unless yet another way to break the speed of light was discovered, you can't even send a "get the fuck out of the way, I'm coming in!" message without killing everyone in the arrival lane.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I hate to be the party pooper, but:
All the energy for those high energy particles has to come from somewhere, which means that it'll take ridiculous amounts of energy to create an Alcubierre drive, it it's possible at all.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I thought that it was impossible (theoretically) to go faster than the speed of light.
It is easy to theoretically go faster than the speed of light. It's darn near impossible to actually do it.
Except that in the 23rd Century way back then, Pluto was a PLANET!!!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
sure exactly the thing we want for first contact with an alien race
alien: i like these humans! they keep sending us these tasty frozen dinners and microwaving them upon arrival so they are nice and toasty warm upon delivery!
Can injure boarding/deboarding passengers with the intense amount of static electricity that builds up on the rotors. Getting fried by discharge of built-up charged particles is not a new downside to travel methods.
There was essentially one thing wrong: it was written by the same retards who did Transformers.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Jet engines (theoretically) allow large metal objects formed into a lifting body to fly though the air at great velocities. This causes them to accumulate great momentum. This is bad news for family and friends waiting on the runway for the aircraft to arrive, as this momentum will cause the aircraft to run into them and kill them.
Actually using Mars as a dumping ground to add more Mass and Heat, that was in Red Mars right?
More like, every time you park your car, everyone within a half mile of the car gets hits by tires flying off the car at 50 mph.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
...every single thing discussed here is based on theory, which tends to make me scratch my head as to how much we're spending funding research like this. Kind of hard to put the cart before the horse when you haven't even invented the wheel yet.
I've heard about this kind of ignorance, but I'm a bit astounded to find it on Slashdot.
Basically, we still haven't found the Higgs boson. Yet physics has advanced far beyond that point, leading to several breakthroughs that we are enjoying the benefits of. And with time, we're eventually going back to prove the Higgs boson. I could name similar "theory points" in almost every science where something has not been proven, but the evidence is enough that we can move forward making assumptions and make other breakthroughs. And we can enjoy the benefit of those breakthroughs long before we verify the 'unproven'.
I weep for the mindset that you have where, if something is not yet proven, you believe that we shouldn't be funding anything beyond that point. That strikes me as very penny wise, pound foolish.
So basically, Asimov was right when he predicted that any interstellar travel would require death. See I, Robot chapter "Escape!" (or short story "Paradoxical Escape") http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape! He was just wrong about whose death it would be.
Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kilotomb bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law?
First Recruit: Sir! A object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
First Recruit: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this husk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you're ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Second Recruit: Sir, yes sir!
More specifically, they've figured out all the neat things they can do with warped space, but just not how to accomplish it in the first place. Gravity, energy, magnetism, and mass all can warp space, but not in useful ways yet. I'd bet magnetism is going to be the way we do it, if ever.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Remember when the Millennium Falcon jumped out of hyperspace and Alderaan was gone? What we now know is that the dust on the leading edge of the ship is what actually destroyed the planet, arriving just before the ship, leaving it in the middle of an "asteroid field". However, this would have been mighty embarrassing for the Rebellion, so they made up this myth of destruction by the "Death Star" (which wasn't even operational yet!) as the killer. Who do we have to prove otherwise, Leia? She's from the planet that got destroyed and head of the Rebellion; of course she'd lie to protect it (remember, she'd never consciously give it up)! Let's stop the propaganda in its tracks!
Oh, and when Kenobi felt that disturbance in the force: it was a premonition of what they were about to do, but Mr. "I've seen a lot of crazy things" didn't believe in some "force"
Actually, my ex wife can create an enormous bubble of negative energy with only a moment's notice...
You know. There has to be something in DSM IV to describe the sort of neurological malfunction that can lead someone to watch, let alone like those fucking awful movies.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But you see, the Transformers universe is occupied by humans with Shia LaBeouf's intellect. People like that would have a hard time not picking up a stick and doing themselves real harm long before they could ever stick it in an exposed cog.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Why do you think all warp capable vessels in Star Fleet have deflector arrays? Gosh, kids today not paying attention in interstellar physics...
Actually, they never really said exactly everything that the Bussard collectors did. They very well could have also been used to suck up said particles just before exiting warp. I'll be in my parent's basement if anyone would like to discuss this further.
Proposing to use your ex as fuel is taking it a bit far...
I'd rather get rid of useless wars and defense funds, to be honest.
yep, I'd agree, gravity certainly is an attractive Earth feature
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The big difference between this and KERS / a catalytic converter is that the energy you're trying to collect cannot be collected from inside the vehicle at all. A better analogy is an aircraft trying to collect the energy from its own sonic boom.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Actually, oddly enough it seems to me that much of science fiction is actually limited to a one-dimensional view of the solar system, much less a 2D view. The reference to Pluto is a good case and point.
Everyone seems to think of the planets in such a fashion that they're strung together along a (long) straight road such that to travel "out" of the solar system from Earth you would have to pass along each planet in turn. Who's to say for any given year which planet (if any) you'll pass heading outward (opposite the sun) from Earth even while staying within the ecliptic plane.
One may retort that this usage is just shorthand for each planet's orbit. But the problem is deeper than that. For one example, consider Tony Daniel's Superluminal. The entire series is about an inter-planetary war. The "geography" of the solar system is intrinsic to the plot - which planet can attack which, etc. And it's all wrong for the year of 3017. The book describes a group heading towards Triton for an attack with half the group "continuing on" to Pluto. Trouble is, from the starting planet during that year Pluto and Neptune are in very different directions (almost opposite).
With regards to the warp drive, the ecliptic plane seems hugely relevant. For any inter-stellar travel, just plan things for one (or more) midpoint stop(s) such that your final leg has you heading relatively perpendicular to the ecliptic plane of the destination star system. Then pop out of warp slightly beyond the ecliptic plane (presumably near your destination planet) to dump the energy.
This drive gives the old saying "you never really can go home" a whole new meaning.