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Warp Drive Might Be Less Impossible Than Previously Thought
runner_one writes "Harold 'Sonny' White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium that warp drive might be easier to achieve than earlier thought. The first concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy, studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter. But recent calculations showed that if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring the warp drive could be powered by the energy of a mass as small as 500 kg. Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more."
Eject the core!
Gotta be fast.
Engage!
To all those anti-warp drive downers.. HAHAHAHA!!!!
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
I'll believe it when I see time travelers from the future who have used their warp drives and FTL travel to come backward in time to tell us about it. (According to special relativity, the ability to travel faster than light is equivalent to the ability to travel backwards in time.)
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
So this is about 100 times human energy consumption.
Still that's a shocking reduction from the mass of Jupiter.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Cause this just seems like - wow.
Yeah, for science. I could almost cry.
BTW: what is exactly ment with: warp drive could be powered by the energy of a mass as small as 500 kg In what time frame? I guess if you "annihilate" so much mass instantly ... you get indeed warped pretty hefty.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes, that's only the entire world's yearly electrical production in energy required. Much more possible. 10^19J.
Does this theory at all reduce the chance that when the Warp Drive ship arrives at its destination that it will emit a huge gamma ray burst? This planet destroying side effect would sure put a damper on any kind of arrival party for the warp drive ship.
use the Naquadria drive
I'm simply convinced that there is no way this massive universe is here without there being a practical way to travel it. There absolutely has to be a way.
I thought that it was a cup of tea, not a donut, that led to FTL travel...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
...only takes 1.21 gigawatts...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
to travel back using the gravitational pull of Earth's sun to perform the slingshot in time to this post and make a "First Post".
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Now if they can just nail transporter / replicator technology we'll be set!
I call first member of Starfleet!
Look, I'm no scientist, but I am a top technician/engineer. I would be happy to be the test monkey and keep GOOD notes!
This all relies on exotic matter than nobody has actually been able to prove the existence of. As usual, this is only an example of bad science reporting.
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936_2011016932.pdf Follow-up: http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/daydreaming-beyond-the-solar-system-with-warp-field-mechanics/
Please.
Dog is my co-pilot.
did the star trek ever explore the mechanics of his first warp flight? I remember one really bad movie where the crew of TNG met him but it was entirely superficial in regards to the technology.
"Harold 'Sonny' White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium"
After a line like this there needs to be math, lots of math, it's the whole "extraordinary claims require..." bit.
/. apparently), but i thought this was about testing our ability to confirm relativity (warp up space-time), rather than breaking it (FTLT, that would be excellent if we had infinite energy, if so we would have infinite time so the energy would be negligible?)
I'm probably the layman here (i still have some faith in
Even a little bit impossible is still entirely impossible in my book.
While this formulation puts energy requirements within practical reach, actual use for FTL travel still runs into the problem of effectively censoring the ship out of existence on account of an inability to pop the bubble once formed, never mind the Hawking Radiation.
Call me when they get the demand down to the output rating of my Mr Fusion.
Have gnu, will travel.
That's great news, but there were a number of other difficulties with the Alcubierre drive, iirc. I don't see how this gets around any of those, like the spacetime "bubble" becoming filled with lethal radiation or the inability to create a bubble with a pre-existing non-superluminal mass inside it.
So, more possible... but still impossible. Alrighty, then. :)
I love it when people say things are impossible. Then they go whizzing backwards into forgotten history as the impossible becomes the norm. Tomorrow will be like today. The future will be surprising.
I remember reading a somewhat later paper on an analysis of the Alcubierre warp drive that pointed out that a side effect of the space-bending was that there was no reason that the inside of the "warp bubble" had to be smaller than the outside, reminiscent of a certain blue box, so that you could conceivably fit a starliner (or a star for that matter) within an atomic-scale warp field, radically reducing its cross-sectional area and the hard radiation resulting from the annihilation of matter that enters the warped space. They don't mention anything about the size of the theoretical ship in the article, which makes me wonder if the energy requirements scale with warp bubble size, and if so if they factored in asymmetric dimensions. If not, well then I could see a future for planet-movers...
Regardless though 500kg of mass-energy is *nothing* for something like this, only 4.5e19 J, or about 10% of annual global energy consumption. Though one problem I remember was that it's impossible to stop the "warp drive" from within the bubble, requiring instead some outside mechanism to return the contents to normal space, which could be a challenge considering that you won't be able to see a FTL vehicle coming to catch it. And heaven help you if you miss, though they didn't mention anything about steering so perhaps it would be possible to loop around for another attempt.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The power requirements for warp drive will diminish by a factor of 23 every year.
if compressing the space in front of you ALSO compresses the time dimension of spacetime, causing you to travel faster through time as well, keeping you in your light cone. Travelling this way would not be any different from the conventional way (and enjoying lorentz time contraction while you do so), except instead of rocket propulsion you have wave propulsion.
they are used to control the oscillation of the field.
this reduces the energy use, and the Star Trek tech stuff did specify large amounts of anti-matter to power the ship for it's 5-year mission :-)
I know that a warp drive is exciting and all, but after they figure how to move an entire spaceship faster than the speed of light, they'll have 500 more problems before they can get anywhere near interesting with it. Transmitting data, on the other hand, is probably a lot easier, and there's a lot of cool real world uses for it. For example sending back images of astronauts hanging out at that Earth-like planet that is 20 light years away.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
There's about 1 hydrogen atom / proton per cubic meter. Even at sub-c speeds, they create seriously radioactive friction. And running into a grain of sand at some % of c would have the effect of a large bomb. So, you not only have to warp space, you have to move the matter IN the space, and do it at >c velocity. Since matter can't move >c, you can't get the protons and occasional neutrons and sand grains and other interstellar detritus out of the way. A grain of sand hitting anything at 10c would be catastrophic, and within a few hours of colliding with the interplanetary and interstellar medium would turn the ship into a glowing radioactive dead thing.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Ultimately it may require making custom atoms to do specific tasks and possibly have very unusual configurations of subatomic particle. Just look at how different nano particles react compared to natural forms of the same elements. It may mean building atoms with opposite spins of particles or configurations of quantum particles that don't occur in nature. They've managed to build atom by atom but this would be orders of magnitude more difficult. We don't even have a science for affecting quantum particles let alone building them like tinker toys. It's a little like building a gravity drive that doesn't require mass. With current science it's impossible but when you start hand fabricating sub atomic particles all bets are off.
The article doesn't explain what the warp drive actually does. As far as I can tell the idea can be roughly phrased as "rather than making a long journey, cause the road in front of you to become short, then make a short journey". The drive would contract spacetime between the object and its destination to make it really small. Apparently to do this, one has to also affect spacetime behind the object, expanding a region of it. Once spacetime is distorted appropriately, the long journey becomes short. Seems vaguely plausible - as much as physics ever does.
On the other hand, the process of distorting space time should propagate at the speed of light at best. So the ship would spend a standard amount of time bending space-time and not moving, then move a short distance and arrive at the destination. And then after the trip, we'd still have all this distorted space-time to either fix or leave stretched.
In other news ....
Water Might Be Less Impossibly Wet Than Previously Thought
Stop with the "migh", "should", "could" headlines that say nothing factual.
Please.
I think something is either impossible, or possible. It's binary, and like a binary system, you can't have something between 0 and 1.
You could argue that maybe the possibility is unknown (tri-state logic), but then the value is null, to indicate unknown.
Nearly not untrue!
Give me a little more non-fake false hope, and I'll use the slingshot effect to go back in time and uncancel the original series!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The picture in TFA looks like it could be the prototype of a vulcan ship!
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
People have used metamaterials to achieve results that seem to violate the laws of physics (such as materials having a negative refractive index). Speculating that such an exotic material could be produced is not hand waving. Just because we don't know how to do something today doesn't mean we'll never figure it out.
And no, the energy argument was not secondary. Before you could argue that even if we could make the materials necessary it would require a prohibitive amount of energy to work. Now the argument is only about the materials needed.
Yes, you did.
Not very FAR in the future, though.
A unicorn shitting cheeseburgers would be more economical.
White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory. ...
"We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said.
I can imagine how it might go:
White: "More ... power! We ... have ... got ... to get that ... table up ... to ... warp factor ... 0.00000001!"
Technician: "Aye, professor, but I'm already given 'er all the power we've got. She can' take no more"
Grad student: "My calculations indicate a slim chance of success if we reverse the polarity."
Technician: "I canno' do it. You'll blow the whole rig fo' sure!"
White: "We ... have ... no other ... choice. Reverse ... polarity!"
(All occupants of lab now alternately grab railings to the left then to the right.)
The final shape should actually end up looking not like a toroid, but a disc, or... "flying saucer" if you will. The absolute first thing we should do with them though is send them back in time and play mind tricks on generations past, otherwise we'll miss many decades of inspiration on Hollywood films which ultimately serve to desensitize the populace towards first contact.
In fact, I propose that anti-matter has negative mass, not opposite charge as generally accepted. This is not my idea of course, IIRC Dirac predicted it but when it was discovered they said opposite charge instead. As I see it there are a few possibilities for gravitational forces when mass is allowed to be negative. But we should wait for experiment to see how gravity works with anti-matter before getting all crazy with speculation.
There's no such concept as "less impossible". That's like saying "less dead".
It's either impossible or not impossible.
however, once I learned that the American public collectively spends more on new cell phones each year than they do on NASA's budget, NASA spending money on silly things like this bothers me a lot less.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
dark matter is a form of exotic matter. maybe there are other forms already available in nature that we can capture and put to use
500kg mass-energy sounds like an awful lot.
That's about 4.5e19 J, or about 0.5% of the world's oil reserves. Might be actually doable.
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
Interesting, but I would love to see a buildable design for a real ship that simply approaches the speed of light. Baby steps.
Call me picky but I believe "Impossible" is one of those binary things like "pregnant". It is or it isn't and you either are or you aren't, respectively.
Its not like infinity where there are at least three types, each bigger than the one before. ( Aleph 0, 1 and 2). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number
There is only one place to build the launch pad - Fantasy Island . As I understand it the energy required to accelate even a tiny bit of matter to light speed is probably in excess of all the energy in the observable universe. About the only hope that i can imagine is to somehow drill a hole out of the universe and re-enter at some controlled other place. But I also have no reason to believe that matter or energy as we know it can exist at all outside of our universe and time alos probably does not exist so setting a timer for re-entry might in itself be impossible. A more immediate issue might be how many layers and how many types of layers exist for the mysterious fabric that undelies space. The mind numbs.
Okay, raise your hand if you didn't know already that the shape of your warp field has to be precisely perfect for it to work efficiently? That was on 3 if not 4 star trek series multiple times :-P
TFA said they're going to try to construct a tabletop version. Only thing is, the whole concept rests on constructing (and containing) a ring of exotic matter. They don't have any of that, do they?
So we just need anti-gravitons? I'm on it.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
"In fact, I propose that anti-matter has negative mass, not opposite charge as generally accepted."
That might have been a viable theory half a century ago or more. But antimatter has been observed to have positive mass.
Step 1: Maths says maybe, if one ignores lack of negative mass
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Engage at Warp 2
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
I think it can have negative mass, but to make the observations work it would also have to have negative time.
As evidence that less impossible is still truly impossible, there is Fermi's Paradox. If it's possible for living things with minds like ours to have evolved elsewhere, and if practical interstellar travel is just out of our reach, we have to wonder why they aren't visiting us.
What you all take for granted is that the 500Kg was exotic matter. I know something you do not. I know the truth. It's 500Kg of the Spice Melange!
Bless the Maker in his comings and his goings. May his passing cleanse the world.
You can do all sorts of crazy things if you start allowing random theoretically-possible particles to exist in your systems. For example, tether a charged ball of negative inertial mass to a same-charged one of positive inertial mass, and they both take off accelerating indefinitely toward c with no energy input ;) The negative inertial mass ball experiences an attraction toward the positive ball, while the positive one experiences a repulsion.
The sort of craziness that comes out of most imaginary particles is, to me, highly suggestive of their nonexistence. Most seem like the sort of thing that could end up destroying the universe or at least leaving some pretty darned big signs of their existence. And given that the universe has built some pretty massive particle colliders on its own...
No, she's fine. My associate is vomiting for a totally unrelated reason.
Season 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The episode was call "Where no one has been before" and it required the presence of a Traveller to make it work.
But incidentally, Wesley reconfigures the wave to a donut shape.
Or once a solution seems apparent.
And here is where you lost credibility with me. We don't require FTL travel in order to achieve interstellar travel. Consider advances in medicine, nanomaterials, nuclear pulse propulsion, asteroid mining, multi-generational ships, etc. along with perhaps artificial alterations to the human genome.
Are there cost and engineering challenges? Sure, but the idea isn't fantastical. Within sixteen light-years are 53 stars. Kepler is pointed at these stars. We need just one to have a habitable planet and then the question becomes, "When?"
When you assume that FTL is required to become an interstellar civilization, I have to wonder what else you're assuming in your rejection of FTL. FTL is not the prerequisite to becoming an interstellar civilization, will is.
"less impossible" ? Does that sound a bit like 'slightly pregnant'? Possibility is a binary state- on, or off; no shades of grey allowed.
As often happens, the /. blurb is a poor reflection of TFA, which says that warp speed "may not be as unrealistic as once thought".
TFA seems a bit optimistic in posing a possible method for faster than light speed. The slashdot response tends to be antagonistic. The heartwarming thing is that all are excited about the idea. Deep inside we want to defy the rules, like Capt. James T. Kirk, and find a way. Who knows- that silly inner child in us may find a solution some day. Then what?
...omphaloskepsis often...
Actually from what I've read antimatter has negative time. I'm going to guess the gravity is positive. There is a well known Physicist who just recently published a very interesting book. One of the things he proposes is that there is no dark matter or energy. He proposes that at the instant of the big bang, the polarity of the birth caused matter to go in one direction and antimatter to go in the other. That we are on a toroidal arc and at just past 7 billion years we hit the apex of our trajectory and that we are now accelerating towards the antimatter universe and its accelerating towards us. That in a couple billion years it will hit us and there will be a massive explosion as all matter is annihilated. And this will be the start of the next big bang. Cool idea, eh?
For more information you can look up the "Big Bagle" theory
While you're at it sparky, how about a little ice from the replicators, eh? Priorities puhleez!!!
Sounds like someone has peered into the storage room of his local McDonalds...
#DeleteChrome
I think it can have negative mass, but to make the observations work it would also have to have negative time.
And you have a problem with that? Honest question. :-)
Have you noticed all those guys over there fiddling around with Planck size Superstring stuff, and you're hesitant to consider negative time?
It's all just a bunch of big, complicated equations that we plug values into hoping the Universe doesn't blow up when we do it, or $DEITY doesn't smack us down for testing it, yeah? I say we try it. Whatta we got to lose?
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Will be cheaper to use Jupiter than paying the Apple lawsuit for using a Star Trek based device with rounded corners
Isn't that the whole point of needing the Higgs boson to be real for travel? Photons of light be they particles or waves only travel so fast because they don't interact strongly with the Higgs boson field,
so it's a question of surrounding a vehicle with particles that have this property - so there would be no drag.
The problem I see is that the vehicle itself would need to be internally flooded with these particles as the higgs boson can't be removed - it's the fabric of space/time. Such a vehicle would need to be completely bombarded with these light weight 'photon-like' particles so that the heavier particles that interact strongly with the higgs field can't do so as there's no way in.
Maybe neutrinos could do it - they permeate all matter, and have no real mass like light. #`, could you bombard a Higgs field with neutrinos to the point of saturation, thus preventing the higgs field from interacting with the ship
Sorry, CompSci guy here! :)
... what are you waiting for? Build one already!
But what is "one"? The actual concept of a number one is entirely fictitious and depends heavily on how we think - seeing numbers, alphabet, base, all in terms that allow us to invent and innovate in this paradigm. Maybe there isn't actually such a thing as one. Maybe there's only many, maybe it's quantum in nature preventing it from ever truly being one - it could be x and y at the same time relative to our plane of view in this place. Perhaps Quantum theory makes a better contained class for a theory of "everything" than general relativity for this reason.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle seems to back this up - it's probably one or probably not one, but it's never one.
Knew it, Star Trek was real ;-) and Geordi did visit the 21st century to leave that piece of advice for cases when inverting the polarity of shield emitters wasn't enough.
Actually, It's not inverse mass. There are several pieces of strong evidence for inverse charge. The amount of energy it takes to push around a positron using magnetic fields is the same amount it would take to push around regular electrons. The fact that anti-matter can be trapped using fields of opposite polarity used to trap regular matter proves that antimatter has inverse charge to matter.
Also, there are some interesting (calculated theoretical) behaviors to inverse mass objects. An inverse mass object will fall towards a massive object of equal absolute mass, but the regular mass object will fall away from the inverse mass object. There are also weird things that happen with infinite gravitational potential energy, and none of the effects have been observed as yet.
Just remember that mass and charge are not interchangeable, and they have distinct effects when inverted. Electromagnetism is roughly 10^36 times stronger than gravitation, so a single particle with inverted mass but normal charge is unlikely to interact any differently at currently achievable energy scales than a particle of normal mass and normal charge. Especially when most of the experiments today use electromagnetism as the only input force to manipulate where particles go, and what they do.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/8239/vulcanships.jpg
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Doghouse's modification to Clarke's First Law:
"(Numerous recent studies demonstrate that the limitation 'but elderly' is overly restrictive and inconsistent with observed data.)"
Light is light. If I see old light, that doesn't mean I can touch those things, that means my eyes see incorrect information. I imagine that if you went faster than light you would either see no light, or the light in the area you went to.
Why is light some magic force that binds the universe? Dilation happens with sound, but we know something faster than sound, so we know things can go faster than sound. We don't know of things that move faster than light, but maybe that's just because we don't know of any things that move faster than light. That doesn't mean they don't exist.
I think once we really learn how to break the speed of light, a lot of you will look awfully silly. Most of you know more about science than I do, so I may be wrong, but I'm using common sense here.
Where can we buy shares? This opens the universe for trading. The return in investment could be one over a small infinity. Much better than one over a large infinity!
Oh I say - unicorn burgers - now that's a good idea!
Not really. Electromagnetic charge can be positive or negative, but (except of course on Voyager) there are no anti-photons. Or better, photons are their own anti-particles.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
So does this mean in theory we could strap a FTL drive on the planet, and jump to a different solar system? :D
An analogy - the average /.er may be less unvirginal than previously thought.
Great to see improvements in warp-drive fuel efficiency - there are only so many jupiter sized planets available to us!
Coincidence? I think not.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Presumably the Hawking radiation would bleed energy out of the warp, shrinking it. Cosmic friction, what?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
'I'm sorry I broke your hip, Mrs. Henderson.'
And how was this observed? Again, I said we need to wait until its gravitational interactions are measured before speculating. Has that been done and I missed the news?
Yep, and if anti-matter gravitationally repels itself AND regular matter, then it would form an intergalactic gas pushing the universe apart like "dark energy" and also producing a bunch of gamma radiation emanating from the edge of the galaxy. But again, we need to know how it actually interacts gravitationally rather than make stuff up.
Nice way to hijack someone else's idea. I think it was 1966 and it was Gene Roddenberry who came up with the idea of the warp drive. He also surmised that it would take only 500kg of energy to due the job.
Now, all we need to do is find 500kg of dilithium crystals.
If going 99.9999% C, it would take you an outrageous amount of (outside) time to flick the switch. The universe could end before then!
Still, assuming you did indeed flick the switch, it would be the same as with sound propogation. An ambulance travelling at 99% speed of sound with sirens blaring will emit a higher frequency sound, until after it passes, and then the tone will be dialated the other way.
The light won't move faster. Instead, the frequency will be insanely high. Your infrared emitting tungsten filament bulb will be emitting gamma ray photons.
If you are going 100% speed of light, you will *never* succeed in toggling the switch.
Here is where the whole FTL thing becomes unnecessary:
If you are taveling 50% of C, the degree of seperation between internal and external clocks will be sufficient that even though it takes you 400 years to reach that star 200 light years away, a considerably shorter time will be recorded by the ship's onboard clock.
The closer to C you travel, the less "time" you experience. So, FTL is not necessary. The crew will be alive and well, and feel only a few months have passed on their 400 year journey. Everyone they left back home will be dead and buried, but for them, only a few months will have passed.
If all you care about is *your* lifetime, FTL is not needed to explore the universe.
I never understood this time travel story. I've studied the relative theory when I was on college, as anyone else having a degree in engineering have, and I never concluded that from what the theory says. So If someone could enlight me I would be grateful because I really want to understand why for everyone this 'Time Travel' thing is so obvious.
This is why it isn't obvious for me:
- I see light as data representation in transmission.
- I reflect light, I'm not light.
- My existence as a group of atoms is universal, I cannot be materialized in two places at the same time.
Therefore, if I actually managed to go FTL and I looked back, I would see my past data representation on a t equal to the time it took to arrive there.
But that is still my data representation of myself in a medium that my eyes understand.
Picking on the scenario described by the OP:
If you are taveling 50% of C, the degree of seperation between internal and external clocks will be sufficient that even though it takes you 400 years to reach that star 200 light years away, a considerably shorter time will be recorded by the ship's onboard clock.
The closer to C you travel, the less "time" you experience. So, FTL is not necessary. The crew will be alive and well, and feel only a few months have passed on their 400 year journey.
On a voyage from A to B, assuming that clocks are perceived differently on the different observation systems ( what would take hundreds of years on one, took months on the other), I have still only covered a huge amount of distance in a really short amount of time.
On that moment, everyone on earth is as alive as I am. And I am looking to their 400 years old data representation meaning that they don't even exist yet. And when their present data representation arrives to my location, they will be 400 years long dead. But that's because that representation will only arrive to me 400 years later! Just because the 'space internet' is slow.
What am I missing here? I don't want to sound rude or anything but I cannot reach this concept.
So how is this time travel or messing with time?
OK. Let's accept that we can produce the exotic materials required, and that we can perfect a drive that gets us to "Warp 10"; it is still going to take a very long time to get anywhere. Figure five months to get to the nearest star, which isn't going to gain you much. A year or so to get to any others, none of which appear to be very interesting. Maybe they should shoot for at least Warp 1000.
"Thanks Wesley! We couldn't have done it without you!"
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I think you miscalculated the worth of a warp drive. Sure, it'd be cool. But think of this:
1) Where would you go with it? You don't know, do you?
2) If you knew 1), what would you do when you got there? How would you breathe? Eat? Set up a new civilization? We can't even set up self-sustaining habitats on *earth*.
3) How would you support your life while you're traveling, assuming it's not so fast as to be trivial?
4) If you got a "working warp drive", d'you think you could figure out how it worked without 90% of humanity? Or is "warp drive technology, and all required technologies to reproduce warp drive" what you really meant?
Personally, I wouldn't trade 90% of humanity for a warp drive unless it came with solutions to all the above and more. And I'd think of it like this, is it worth a 90% chance of me personally dying immediately to assure that no single planetary disaster can ever cause humanity's extinction? Would my wife and other dependents go for that deal?
--PM
is it not possible we can not go faster than light because we can not observe annything faster than light?
it seems too me we need light too touch an object in order too see it when the light bounces off this object
and reaches the observer. now if we scale this down to the
molecular level.. if an object moves faster than light this means light can not reach us back so therefore
is not observable by us..
I would happily throw 90% of the human race under a bus for a working warp drive.
Discard the rest of the male population and keep just the top quintile of the women.
Hmm, on second thought you can keep your warp drive, I'm staying here!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Too bad IBM isn't sponsoring this research.
I think I still have an IDE drive with Warp on it somewhere around here.
Not happy now!
With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.
For reference, the nearest star system, Alpha Centari, is 4.2LY away. With a ship or probe equipped with one of these drives, in theory it could go there and back in less than a year. The next closest system would take a year to get to.
'Harold Sonny' White is actually an alias for Zephryn Cochrin.
What happens if one throws 90% of the human race under a bus ?
You mean that the "science consultants" from DARPA, JPL, CALTECH, MIT, and even NASA, and various other places that advised the Creator of Star Trek (Gene Roddenberrry) as well as the writers were RIGHT???? Wow, that is truly an AMAZING COINCIDENCE!!!! Next thing you know we will have communicators, Mr. Spocks data tablets, and selective lethality weapons!
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
Donuts....Is there anything they can't do?
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
If you set the subspace carrier wave to 7.1 terahertz and realign the di-lithium matrix with the deflector dish we could in theory achieve warp 9.5.
I have a new favorite material - it used to be unobtanium, but for discussions like this, handwavium is much more accurate!
Re:Warp Drive Might Be Less Impossible Than Previously Thought
Unfortunately, proper English will always be imposssible.
Doughnut? Seriously? I was thinking Munchkin shaped field if anything.
Ah, so there's a chance that I can put some distance between me and those trying to take all that I have?
Something is either possible, or impossible; hence, it does not make sense for something to be "less impossible." That's like saying that something "exists less" than another thing; things either exist, or they don't. For example, my barber exists, whereas barbers who shave all and only those barbers who don't shave themselves don't exist.
Once again, science fiction writers have stretched our imaginations and helped make the impossible likely.