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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
Yup.
This is what the deflector array is for. Like, the original purpose, not the solution-of-the-week it usually gets jury-rigged for.
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.
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 just that, but probably determine how to collect it as usable energy. Many articles like this don't bother thinking any deeper than one.
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.
Star Wars uses hyperspace, not warp. Get off my lawn!
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!
There are many patches of earth in my back yard that I have not set foot on. There are no doubt many living things in those patches of dirt. The fact that I have not interacted with he insignificant life forms in the out of the way places of my back yard in no way implies that I don't exist.
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"
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
After reading the "bad news" I immediately thought of how even Star Trek had already addressed this: the Bussard collectors at the front of all warp drives are designed to scoop up interstellar particles and radiation for fuel replenishment.
Obviously Trek is a work of fiction, but the collectors are based on actual theoretical Bussard ramjets/ramscoops proposed in 1960.
And yet 52 years later, with Star Trek providing at least speculative options and real-life regenerative braking on electric and hybrid cars around us, the write-up didn't even think to speculate about somehow collecting and using that energy.