Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Scientists Say
Ron Czapala
Posts: 2,418
http://news.yahoo.com/warp-drive-may-more-feasible-thought-scientists-161301109.html
EXCERPT
HOUSTON A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel a concept popularized in television's Star Trek may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.
A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A 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.
Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially brining the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.
"There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said here Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.
EXCERPT
HOUSTON A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel a concept popularized in television's Star Trek may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.
A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A 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.
Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially brining the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.
"There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said here Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.
Comments
Anyway, I look forward to the warp drive experiments. After all, they have already proved transporters, although minute. Pitty I won't be around when they get there
-Tor
What else is left to make come true from the TV series?
I think almost everything has come true... which is...remarkable.
Inertial dampers and artificial gravity to name a couple.
I understand we could get to stars light years away much quicker but are we actually travelling that fast or are objects coming to us quickly?
One thing I'd like to know - when we do get to the point of exploring space , when we meet up with another spaceship will we roll our ship so that we are facing it such that both of our "ups" are up? Maybe there will be an intergalactic agreement that ships shall always travel oriented with respect to the galactic plane.
Forget inertial dampeners, artificial gravity, teleportation, and mind melding. I just want to see a return of the mini-skirts!
-- Gordon
I'm waiting for a working food replicator...what a thrill to walk into your quarters and say, "Earl Grey, hot." and not end up with an angry English nobleman!!
-Tor
I firmly believe we will inhabit distant systems. Light is S-L-O-W as molasses in our universe - it takes 4.25 +/- YEARS for light to travel to the NEAREST star. We're never satisfied with slow... we'll figure this out. We'll do this. We're human, that's what we do.
- Putting the energy "in the Warp Drive Core" doesn't sound to me like it solves anything.. that's like answering "We'll put the fuel in the car's tank, no worry" when somebody asks "how do you create the fuel?"
- And even if we can go FTL, we still haven't found any faults in the current reasoning which clearly shows that if you could go FTL (or even just send your signal FTL) you can, by a not too difficult setup, receive a message from your future self (by courier or by ansible, depending). That invokes the whole causality problem and will stay even if someone figures out an even lower mass-energy equivalent requirement.
-Tor (I like the FTL travel methods in Ian M. Banks' Culture novels btw. Needs a 'preferred frame' universe though and that's the catch for just about every FTL scheme.)
The only problem is I would then be a few hundred years behind in knowledge.
That seems to be worse than having never left.
Now I see the reason the called it the WARP drive. Everything gets messed up. How did Captain Kirk ever know who was his commanding officer on Earth? They must have grown old and died every few weeks in spaceship time.
For Kirk, it was a 5-year mission, and do you remember how old Spock's father, Sarek, the Vulcan Ambassador, had become (and Vulcans live very long, around 200!). It depends on the length of the journey - long ones become interesting. If one returns back to the future far enough ahead in time, humans will have become half machine and half human. It would then be a relatively simple matter to update yourself, implant the machine brain into your body and quickly upload the instructions for getting along in a technologically advanced world. Agreed, if you don't upgrade, it will be difficult reading the super-iPhone with a screen the size of a tiny green pea.
-Tor
The home solar system would always be far into the future and have already resolved or accepted problems, while the guys on missions would spend all their time either getting back up to speed at home or trying to report about something that may no longer be relevant.
In other words, those that travel to other solar systems and galaxies may just go mad from trying to communicate with their home.
Certainly there is a good argument here for a girl in every port.
You're messing up the terms here.
WARP-drive is supposedly Faster Than Light(FTL), and probably without significant time-dilation.
(Time-dilation would mean travelling near the speed of light INSIDE the FTL bubble created by the WARP-drive. There's noneed to do that as it's the movement of the bubble that matters, and it's moving outside of 'Normal Space')
Basically, we have 3 methods of space travel:
1. Slowships.(Think Voyager, except huge generation-ships with population of tens of thousands probably, travelling forhundreds of years.) Alternately, cryo-ships if we can invent functioning cryo or stasis systems. They'll stillbe big, though, as return trips will be costly, and who wants to return to a society they can't even recognise, if it still exists.
2. Near-light ships. Load it up, point it at a star and hope it doesn't hit anything on the way... Won't need cryo for a one-generation trip, but crew will still face the same issues as in a cryo-ship.
3. WARP. All bets are off. How large can these ships be built, and how much energy will be needed? Is there a 'best size' compared to energy usage? (Economy of size)
1 is possible today. 2 was theoretically possible, if you were willing to toss nuclear bombs out the back...3 is still theoretical.
We also need a much cheaper and efficient transport from Earth to a High orbit. And I think that is going to be the most difficult task, really. (Cheap transport to orbit is what will really open the Solar system)
Interesting and optimistic view point.
What you are saying is that "All imaginable things can be made real".
But:
0) I assume your statement is true.
1) Then I might imagine that is possible to imagine something that cannot be made real.
2) That is to say I might imagine your statement is wrong?
3) Having imagined that (which I just did) then it can be made wrong in reality. According 0) above.
4) That is to say, you are wrong.
If your statement is right it proves it's own wrongness:)
I don't need to travel faster than light to confuse myself.
So it seems that with may never use near-to-light-speed travel. Warp drive, faster than light travel, may eliminate all the awkward time dilation problems.
I guess there would be a short acceleration period of near-to-light-speed travel as the space ship got to Warp speed or re-entered a lesser speed to approach a destination.
Warp drive works by compressing the fabric of space-time between us and the destination. The fabric of space-time, having no mass, can move at theoretically infinite velocity. So you squeeze the distance, "step across" that threshold, and allow the fabric of spacetime to re-expand "behind" us. We have travelled, but not actually ever moved very fast at all.
There was a kids book many, many years ago where someone described it by showing an ant walking along a tape measure. It would take a minute or so for the ant to walk the length, but the person explaining brought the ends of the tape measure together, and the ant simply walked from one end to the (now immediately close) other end. The person explaining then stretched the tape measure out straight again, and showed the ant to have "travelled" a great distance, but to the ant, it only took a few steps. A simplistic explication, but overall, it describes the experience pretty well. At least as I imagine it given the various theorems and metrics being tossed around on the subject, starting with Alcubierre and progressing to the most recent calculations...
Dave