Slashdot Mirror
The Downside of Warp Drives: Annihilating Whole Star Systems When You Arrive
MrSeb writes "The dream of faster-than-light travel has been on the mind of humanity for generations. Until recently, though, it was restricted to the realm of pure science fiction. Theoretical mechanisms for warp drives have been posited by science, some of which actually jive quite nicely with what we know of physics. Of course, that doesn't mean they're actually going to work, though. NASA researchers recently revisited the Alcubierre warp drive and concluded that its power requirements were not as impossible as once thought. However, a new analysis from the University of Sydney claims that using a warp drive of this design comes with a drawback. Specifically, it could cause cataclysmic explosions at your destination."
It's not the destination that matters, it's how you get there. Nothing stresses this as much as blowing up your destination when you get there.
Downside? Sounds like a perfect weapon system for interstellar conflict.
This is old news, discussed in March:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/03/02/1741252/warp-drives-may-come-with-a-killer-downside
Warp drive becomes warp weapon.
That's why you drop to impulse _before_ you go into the star system
If we have enough tech to make a warp drive we can probably disperse energy on route as opposed to all of it at the end of the trip.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
FTA:
"Although we often think of space as empty, there are loads of high-energy particles shooting through the void. The University of Sydney research [PDF] indicates that these particles are liable to get swept up in the craft’s warp field and remain trapped in the stable bubble."
And
"All the energetic particles trapped during the journey have to go somewhere, and the researchers believe they would be blasted outward in a cone directly in front of the ship. Anyone or anything waiting for you at the other end of your trip would be destroyed."
Looks like SOMEONES never heard of Bussard collectors....
That's right. You have to slow down first.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This will GUARANTEE it will be made. It is now a military project, warp cruise missle, set it to the destination via a nice long route and have it drop out of warp near the other planet or star...... KABOOM!...
Freaking A, take that Omicron Persei 8!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"it’s the stopping that’s going to ruin your day" showed up complete in the preview...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
BULLSHIT. Stop, I order you STOP!!!!
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
for visiting the mother-in-law.
The simple solution is to point the ship slightly above the galactic plane when accelerating and slightly below the galatic plane when landing,. The damaging wave leaves the galaxy and dissipates before doing damage. Well except to any possible intergalactic ships.
Than turn around and come back. As long as the energy has the room to dissipate between the stars nothing should be hurt.
Seems to me that genocidal (in that any intelligent life in that star systems is wiped out) deceleration qualifies.
Advanced civilizations might have this drive, and prevent too much particle buildup. It might not be perfect though, so every once in a while a handful of particles come along for the ride. How else do you explain a proton with the kinetic energy of a pitched baseball?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So, THIS is what's preventing warp drive from becoming reality. OK.
The dream of faster-than-light travel has been on the mind of humanity for generations
I'm guessing that that's 1, 2, 3, or 4 generations, since we've only known that the speed of light is a problem for space travel for about 100 years.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Weir: You destroyed three-quarters of a solar system!
McKay: Five-sixths, but it's not an exact science.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
That's right. You have to slow down first.
Kind of like when you fall off a building.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
http://mimg.ugo.com/200902/14768/Spaceballs.jpg
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The "Vin Diesel."
The "Chuck Norris."
The "Houseguest."
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
From TFA
That's why you have a deflector dish! Don't these guys even _watch_ Star Trek? ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager's_Return
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Ether all Intelligent Life is aware of this problem and thus conclude they should't, or they use it wiping out so much potential life that no one can spot each other. Since the Earth hasn't been wiped out and Colonized in what... almost 700 million years... I'd say it's more likely they don't use it. Then again we might just be lucky.
I swear there was supposed to be a planet here...
It's not the fall that hurts, it is the sudden stop at the end.
Well it used to not be one, anyway... Let's go home, Porkins.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
. The ring would have to be made of an as-yet unidentified kind of dense exotic matter capable of bending space-time.
You can always warp somewhere where there isn't a star or planet in front of you, I thought sci-fi reiterated this fact on a per series basis, but here it is one more time. Warp outside the galaxy > discharge your beam of death into the void > fly into the galaxy. Now about that material... does Wal-Mart carry it?
>All the energetic particles trapped during the journey have to go somewhere, and the researchers believe they would be blasted outward in a cone directly in front of the ship.
At that energy levels particles will be converted to gamma radiation, expelled outward in a burst. Maybe sombody already invented those ships.
Did anyone else notice that they used a football as their central "pod" for the ship in the article's graphic? It looks like a bad copy/paste job involving circa 1998 Bryce 3D, MS Paint, and a TI-83.
...it's nothing compared to Ludicrous Speed!
Man wonders what lies just beyond the horizon. Man develops ability to travel beyond horizon. Man annihilates whatever was over there.
is a short story by Randall Garrett. The crew of the first starship narrowly escape the supernova from their destination star by escaping back into warp. They realize that this isn't a coincidence: their warp drive blew it up on arrival. (They eventually realize that it blew up their origin star too: the Sun.)
The word you are looking for is jibe, not jive.
To one man this collection of energetic particles is a bomb that must be defused and destroyed. To another man this collection of particles is a source of energy.
Would it not be cool to have a vehicle that starts the trip with half a tank and ends it with the full tank? The energy can be used on non-FTL vehicles or permanent installations.
Maybe that's what these gamma ray bursts we observe are all about.
You could just stop a few months / years ahead of your actual destination, and then continue using traditional propulsion for the last leg of the journey? Would still be much faster.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
I'm surprised nobody brought up the ram scoop yet. It looks like that'll actually kill two birds with one scoop if there's a way to use the collected particles as fuel.
Nothing is enough for whom enough is too little - Confucius
Just stop and start again every lightyear or something. No big deal.
If this were true, then aliens would have wiped us out if they had ever visited us.
As some others have noted, you could always hook into your destination and cause all those hitchhiking particles to be shot into the nearest black hole. Then no one gets huts unless that cross in front of that traffic while its heading to the black hole.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
......THAT's not very neighborly....
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Join the Interplanetary Navy, where you travel to new star systems..... and blow them up!
sudo make me a sandwich
http://what-if.xkcd.com/
It talks about matter smacking into a planet at different energy levels.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
We cant stop. We're going to fast.
Shoot, now I'll have to go someplace else for Thanksgiving.
This isn't really such fresh news. And, I already fixed it for you: simply take shorter warp jumps, so not as much energy builds up. You're welcome. Patent pending.
1) I wonder if perhaps that explains life being hit here over and over.
2) Perhaps that might explain the asteroid belt
Not likely for either, but perhaps another civilization(s) have visited and made mistakes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not a physicist here, so maybe someone who is (or knows more than me could answer) - could we find a way to absorb the energy from these particles, and maybe pump that energy into the warp drive? one of those "the faster you go, the more energy you collect" kind of things?
"Attention, Schrodinger's Cat is possibly arriving at gate 42 in five minutes..."
Table-ized A.I.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun."
http://schlockmercenary.wikia.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Maximally_Effective_Mercenaries
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Since we are talking future science here it would make sense to harness the incoming blast way and convert it back to energy that can be used for the next flight. The problem is building the infrastructure to do this at the destination, but if they can figure out how to go faster than light I'm sure they can find a way to make this a reality too.
jibe
verb (used without object), jibed, jib ing
to be in harmony or accord; agree: The report does not quite jibe with the commissioner's observations.
jive
verb (used with object)
Slang. to tease; fool; kid: Stop jiving me!
I for one welcome our new interstellar overl..[KABOOM!]
A nice idea, but the physics does not work that way.
Think about it this way:
In front of the ship, you "compress" spacetime with an artificial gravity well. At the rear of the ship, you create an inverted gavity well. (Imagine, a gravity "hill"). The hill pushes the ship forwards, and the gravity well pulls it forwards. The two phenomena are perfectly cancelling. (Well is just as deep as the hill is "tall")
The combinaton of these two fields creates the warp bubble.
The warp bubble is necessary, because the ship simply cannot travel faster than light speed, using normal forms of propulsion. Special relativity makes it impossible to achieve lightspeed. (Requires infinite energy!)
Instead, the "massless" bubble gets accellerated, while the ship stays stationary inside! The spacetime bubble has no imposed speed limit, and can easily go FTL.
The problem cited here, is that any particle that comes into contact with the high velocity spacetime bubble will quantum tunnel inside the warpfield, and get carried along. This includes "virtual particles."
Virtual particles are not really particles at all, in the literal sense. They have measurable effects, but cannot themselves be measured. They are really random energy anomalies that form and disapear out of the vacuum of space. (Another, more accurate term for them is "vacuum fluctuations") basically, these events occur as mutually exclusively charged waves, that exist for tiny fractions of a second before cancelling each other, giving spacetime a rough, or "foamy" texture at the quantum mechanical level.
A curious effect of these virtual particles, is that if they can exist long enough to be directly observed (and not just their effects), they gain energy, and become real particles. (This is the basis behind hawking radiation)
Much like the event horizon of a black hole, the edge of the warp field acts as a barrier for quantum tunneling. There is a nonzero chance that some of these quantum virtual particle pairs will have one of their members become trapped behind the bubble's edge as it zips by, preventing mutual annihilation, and forcing the captured particle to become real. The longer the bubble stays up, the more particles will get trapped.
(Quantum tunnelling is what results from the "fuzzy" probability clouds of a particle wave intersecting a thin barrier. The more the fuzzy probability field intersects with the barrier, the greater the chances the particle will suddenly be on the other side. This phenomena is real, and has been scientifically verified. Quite literally, the sun would not shine without quantum tunneling, because nuclear fusion would be impossible without it.)
When the warp bubble drops, those captured particles are released as a dangerous energy wave.
Because the capture occurs as a direct result of the warp bubble's very existence, no amount of "aerodynamic shape" will prevent the steady accumulation of this radiation in the event shock.
The effect would be greatly exacerbated by the ship flying through a nebula, or other gas cloud. The mass energy of those particles is immense, and even small traces like those of interstellar clouds, would result in unbelievable releases of energy when the bubble is turned off.
"Deflectors" are not an option, because they would have to be projected from the starship. The warp bubble causes the starship to cease being causally connected to the outside spacetime, where the gas and dust particles exist. As such, it is impossible for any effect generated by the starship, other than the warpfield itself, to interact with those particles. The ship will simply have to plow through them.
Once the captured particles are tunneled inside the warp field, it might be possible to capture some of it, but more than likely the particles become photons, which can't be herded that way, making en-route collection unlikely.
This leaves the "deadly gamma ray flash" when the ship returns to being causally conncted with the rest of the universe.
Do the math!
E=MC^2
For every atomic mass unit that intersects your warp field, that mass unit times the square of the speed of light is how much energy will be added to the "flash".
Now.. fly your starship through the greater megellanic cloud, or through the crab nebula.
How big a boom indeed....
There's no reason this needs to blow up the arrival (or departure) port; it's loosely analogous to supersonic travel producing sonic booms from stacking pressure waves. Supersonic aircraft don't blow up the airports or home cities.
Besides, we need to figure out negative mass before this is a big deal.
Of course, maybe that just means the universe is acausal. Weird, and a bit troublesome for our puny simian brains to wrap themselves around, but I suppose the universe doesn't care.
Crap, now the Environmentalists are going to get involved. It will never be built now.
Awesome.
Build it, and if the environmentalists don't want you to use it, volunteer to meet at their place to discuss their concerns.
paintball
Someone in the middle ages conceptualized the modern car. Others thought it can't possibly work because it would destroy the gate when the driver arrives home. They didn't think it would be possible to park _near_ the house and walk a bit of distance, rather than crashing into the gate. It'a just as inconceivable that an Alcubierre spaceship aimed at slightly off of the destination, and after deceleration, slowly and carefully arrived at the spaceport from an angle.
Or perhaps just delusional...but I love the fact that we have progressed from 'Can't go faster than light' to 'could in theory but too much energy' to 'let's do some lab experiments and work out the practical engineering details'.
I guess Zefram Cochrane was wrong - the Warp Bomb is a reality
... with a few fireworks to let folks know you've arrived?
Anyway, it's not clear whether they looked at a pure Alcubierre warp, an Alcubierre-Broek thin-bubble warp, NASA's latest, or what.
In a 2006 paper by a whole laundry list of authors (Hart, Held, Hoiland, Jenks, Loup, Martins, Nyman, Pertierra, Santos, Shore, Sims, Stabno and Teage), "On the Problems of Hazardous Matter and Radiation at Faster than Light Speeds in the Warp Drive Space-time" (which begins with the monumentous understatement: "A warp driven vehicle travelling at a speed faster than light may collide with objects in front of the ship, which would be hazardous to the ship and its crew") had this to say: "the gravitational gradients in Broek regions will disrupt hazardous objects in the ship's neighborhood. This is a property of Broek space-time, any natural object will be disrupted and deflected" (bold added)
Certainly worth looking into further, but it's still too early to say exactly what the properties of an actual warp field will be.
-- Alastair
This could be repackaged as a weapon, and the military industrial congressional complex would want to get involved.
Let me know when we get to Iscandar.
Yeah, but what happens if something goes wrong and you don't end up stopping at the angle you intended to? It might be you can safely pull of the move 9999 out of 10,000 times, but it only takes something going wrong once. . .
"We'd like to come visit your star system. Don't worry, we've visited thousands of star systems and only obliterated 2. We're *very* careful to aim the wave of destruction out into the intergalactic void."
Unless the particle buildup actually affects the craft itself, this isn't an issue.
It's a reason for navigational protocols.
If, as the article suspects, it gets blasted out in a cone?
Simply orient your arrival point so it doesn't have your destination directly in its path. You arrive and the particles get blasted out into interstellar space.
Or, if they're wrong, and the particle accumulation is omnidirectional? Simply take the trip in two stages.
The first stage has you arriving out of range of your destination and shedding the particle buildup.
The second stage is a shorter hop from the waypoint to your destination. You may still build up a few high energy particles, but far less than, but far fewer, and something that can be ameliorated by simply "popping out" in a safe orbit in the system so you don't destroy anything nearby.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You call it a bug, we call it a feature. Every warp drive is sold with a handy dandy star system sterilizer so that when you arrive at your destination you know it will be clean and tidy, not infected with any despicable life forms!
This is why you have to decelerate gradually.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
...you can make an omelett without breaking some eggs...
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
You can't go home again.
A little understanding of the blue shift phenomenon will lead you to see how a perfectly doable sublight vessel that got near to the speed of light, which is what you'd need to get from star to star without FTL, upon aiming the drive forward in order to decelerate would bombard the destination with enough hard radiation to sterilize it good.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
this link will bring you to the specific one in question, the above link is only for most current.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/20/
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.