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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!
To all those anti-warp drive downers.. HAHAHAHA!!!!
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
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.
use the Naquadria drive
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.
guess you were travelling at impulse
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
(Gigglesnort)
I am reminded of various tougne-in-cheek jests by physicists about the universe hating the LHC.
Perhaps if you activated the alcubierre drive, you could only ever travel outside the vehicle's light cone, but never return back to It, because "mysterious, seemingly random events" will always, without fail, prevent you from pressing the button?
Now there would be a funny thing to put in science fiction!
"Hey look. An earthlike planet, with nobody living on it. What a coincidence."
"Signal the colony ship."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
But that's the point of how warp drive works - you bend space so that you don't travel faster than light.
You locally don't. The warp ship doesn't actually accelerate at all. This is how you get around the relativistic energy equation.
However, someone will observe you traveling faster than light.
So you use stealth technology. Duh.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
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..."
But hey, maybe it's not a causal universe!
Dang.
I was really looking forward to Causal Friday.
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.
Religion had to have the right answer to something.
A PhD physicist invented the Alcubierre Drive, and physicists at NASA are now working on this warp drive concept, but a couple of armchair physicists on Slashdot think they know physics better than the experts.
Why should physics be different than any other topic?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That explains why I rode her all night long. (I kid, I kid. Your grandmother is a very nice lady, who says you should call more often.)
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
Will be cheaper to use Jupiter than paying the Apple lawsuit for using a Star Trek based device with rounded corners