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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 )
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?
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.
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 thought that it was a cup of tea, not a donut, that led to FTL travel...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Agreed.
Other important caveats not listed are things like, duration of field perturbation, and effective field size.
If it takes 500kg of raw mass energy equiv, to send something the size of a football on an ftl hop for 1 sec, it is still very very impractical.
If we are talking something the size of manhattan island being shot at FTL for over a year for 500kg mass energy, things are difficult, but interesting.
This still doesn't sole several other noteworthy problems with the alcubiere metric though. Things like hawking radiation snowplowing on the event shock of the warp field, nuking the ship and everything around it when the field drops as the ship leaves FTL.
(Basically, the spacetime bubble the ship occupies behaves the same as the event horizon of a black hole, as far as virtual particle interactions are concerned. The pocket tearing past at ftl speed forces the particle pairs to become real, robbing energy from the warp field, and plastering radioative exotics all over the shock front. When the bubble collapses, that radiation gets released.)
If they can pull it off, alcubierre's metric would only be useful for short jumps, not continual cruising, making it impractical for visiting very distant objects. It would also be an energy hungy monster.
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/
guess you were travelling at impulse
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
I believe that is exactly what I said, when I mentioned that it was a caveat not addressed by the article. "Football sized" had no bearing on the verbiage of the article, and was instead meant to be taken as-is. Eg, an effective warp bubble big enough to barely hold a football is not practical in any sense at the energy cost listed.
In order to determine how far the ship could travel at 10xC with 500kg raw mass energy, we need to know how long (dialated ship time) that energy takes to be released, and how long (external observer time) the bubble will remain stable.
That information was not provided.
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..."
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.
That's what a tachyon is! (Well.. more or less...)
A tachyon is a "particle", forced to always travel at FTL velocity, because it has "imaginary" mass.
The alcubierre metric makes use of "negative mass energy" to negate 100% of the vehicle's effective mass, and a little more, causing the "vehicle + engine" composite to become essentially an enormous tachyon. (More or less...)
This poses the problem of how to escape the bubble once created; theoretically speaking, doing so would not be possible! However, interaction with the hawking radiation might provide the solution. As the particles intersect the field, they steal energy from the field, by making the pair real. (One of the particles gets glued to the front, the other gets lost to space.) This loss of energy depletes the field, forcing its collapse. When that happens, the ship returns to being causally connected.
(This however, makes the effect useless for anything but *really* distant objects, or with very very powerful fields.)
Will be cheaper to use Jupiter than paying the Apple lawsuit for using a Star Trek based device with rounded corners
I'll assume, for the sake of argument, that conservation of energy still applies to the discussion. That is, you can't move a chunk of the crust into orbit without expending more energy than the gravitation potential energy thusly imparted into said chunk.
Let's assume the energy to make the handwavium drive go is equal to the potential energy of a 500 kg mass, as it says in TFS. Presumably we've got matter-energy conversion or antimatter fuel to make this work, that's no more implausible than the handwavium required to make the FTL drive work in the first place.
How much energy is liberated by converting 500 kg into energy, say in the form of 250 kg antimatter to 250 kg matter? About two hundred and fifteen times as much as was released by the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. Make no mistake - that's a huge amount of energy, but nowhere near planet cracking levels. For another point of comparison, the impact that (probably) killed the non-avian dinosaurs was a couple million times as powerful.
Further, if we've got some way of supplying that kind of power, in a package small enough to fit on a spacecraft, wouldn't the power plant itself be a more dangerous weapon than a handwavium suicide run? Dangerous in the sense of city busting, not planet cracking.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.