NASA looking into Warp Drive development
Oldbitcollector (Jeff)
Posts: 8,091
http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive
please, please, please... sometime in my lifetime..
please, please, please... sometime in my lifetime..
Comments
A: Rome, likely womanizing! http://www.facebook.com/zefram.cochrane.5
Same here, although I did have to check the date to be sure I hadn't gone through a time warp and ended up on April 1st.
like they say, a fool and his money are soon off to alpacenturi!
Dave
I don't want to see this technology developed as the right or wrong people will screw up the universe with it. Look what we "humans" have already done. Perhaps I need to just accept the fact we are the ones that are going to collapse the universe.
I don't see anything good coming from this kind of research!!!
Well, I am just saying; there are some foolish people out there and I am one of them. Sort of like putting me in a chocolate store and expecting me not to make a mess - seriously!, lol.
1: He may have found a loophole in General Relativity, but Special Relativity still stands in the way. If he can travel to Alpha Centauri faster than the time it takes for light to travel there, you'll be able to break causality and I don't see how you can handle that. You'll have to break Special Relativity and every test so far has just confirmed it, not the other way around.
2: The Enrico Fermi paradox: "Where is everyone?" If FTL drives can be built we should have seen visitors everywhere. And we just don't (despite what UFO nuts claim).
-Tor
The way I read the article it's suggesting doing this in small increments in front and behind the bubble but oscillating fast, to go back to the curtain analogy, you are pulling the curtain in front towards you at the same time throwing the curtain behind away from you but to an independent observer you yourself are not moving.
-Tor
Somewhere along the way, physic began using metaphor and analogy rather loosely. This items are localized discontinuities, not holes.
This assumes that other intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe (lets not get into a discussion re earthly 'intelligence' or lack thereof ...). Highly probable but just as possible that we are it. Damn!
That is my understanding too! I tried to locate another article in space/time folding which clearly explained this. Will keep looking and provide a link.
And when they find the solution to the energy requirements ....
But they'll find that it's the slowing down part at their destination that's a problem.
1) Bill Joy's hypothesis - that we eventually develop high tech that exterminates us through our own incompetence. My money is this one at for us at least. We're very, very clever but not very wise.
2) The others are so advanced they just have nothing in common and sure as heck are not going to share tech with a race that has tens of thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at itself. Kinda like the Prime Directive thing.
Could also be there's a telepathic way to communicate and once you get it, it's so darn easy, nobody else out there even bothers doing anything else. Why send semaphore signals to Sumatra when all you gotta do is type an email or use your cell phone?
Not quite sure you're actually breaking causality by arriving at a place faster than the light can get there. Sure - we go to Alpha Centauri (or probably Beta, more likely), and then we break out the super cool telescope and look back at Earth, and we see ourselves as we were 4.5 years before we left (damn good telescope!) But are we really "existing simultaneously" - no, we're just seeing the old reflected light that bounced off of us back then. If we now hoped to hop on the space-time surfboard and catch a wave back and talk to our previous selves, we'd find that when we arrived, we'd still be arriving at a point after we had initially left.
This is sort of like if we travelled faster than the speed of sound, we could arrive at a place before the sound of our departure reached us. And people travel faster than the speed of sound frequently. Yes, overly simplistic analogy, but isn't our seeing of our apparent arrival being before our departure quite a different thing from the actuality of it? The space-time fabric still registers a finite positive time interval between our departure and our arrival, just the light can't catch up, because compared to stellar distances, light is slow as molasses. Furthermore, light isn't the event itself, just an echo of what was there when that light got reflected off of the participants in the event. So maybe I'm just dumb, but I don't see a real causality violation there.
My understanding of an example of a causality violation is the idea of travelling backwards in time, ie., if you go back and accidentally kill your great grandfather, then you would never have been born to travel back, etc...
But in the warp case, you're never travelling backwards, you're just getting ahead of a light beam that only carries historical imagery, not actual events. As soon as you jump back to the origination point, it's still been a positive, finite time interval since you initially left and came back.
Or look at it this way - a lot of the stars we see out there went supernova a loooong time ago, but their light is still travelling to us. They're still quite thoroughly dead, though, and if we "warped" to them (at a safe distance), we'd see their remnant nubula, but not the star as we saw it back on Earth. Warp back to Earth, and look back, and we'd see the star again, as it was prior to it's demise.
Make sense to anyone?
I agree with xanatos, "old" light is the same as an echo, it doesn't violate anything any more than looking in the mirror would. Yech! I should take better care of myself.
In any case, we won't know till we try, I nominate OBC as first explorer. As long as he leaves someone to tend the shop while here's gone. I don't know about the next two volenteers, but I'd like be the forth person that tries.
Geeze, that was hard to work in.
It would might grow into becoming the AAA towing services to the Universe. Lots of opportunity to travel and lots of paid overtime. Of course, you might have to eat a lot of cosmic radiation along with your work. But every jog has something.
We don't have any sort of propulsion or life support systems that can take man beyond the Moon.
There is so much in the way of basics that need to be addressed before we have a real space program it's not even funny. The sad thing is, the U.S. is a economic pygmy today compared to the 1960's and we cannot afford a robust Space Program that is the equivalent of Apollo. We could if we reformed a few domestic programs and cut out a few useless Stealth fighters but that won't happen.
In some respects NASA is a gem much like ORNL, Bell Labs. Logically we should be funding it to the tune of $30 billion a year to for basic research. It's a low cost way to keep the country's scientific standing strong. It won't happen. The problem is our political elite only looks ahead to the next election and bulk of the populace only cares about Dancing with the Stars and reality TV. You can't talk to these people about technical subject with them going into a coma.
Yes, telepathic communication is a bit like safe sex. If you keep your barriers in place, you might actually survive exploring. And if you don't, you never quite know what your are going to come home with.
It's hardly an indictment against the quality of the engineers - but says more about the society in which those engineers live. If a society cared more about exploring the mysteries of the universe vs. getting Liked on Facebook, then those engineers et al would get funding to actually do things, get to work solving global problems, and help inch the worm of humankind a little higher out of the dunghill of poverty, endless warfare, and mindless gaming apps.
Not that it's particularly easy to grasp though. Had to see graphs and explanations for years before I could start to wrap my head around it. Here's a site that tries to explain how it works: http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html
-Tor
Folding space is a 2 dimensional metaphor applied to a 3 dimensional space. Writers can write about it, but it is a bit like Esher's 2D drawing depicting paradoxical 3D pictures. Entertaining, but when you fold space, how do get ahold of it to do so. When you go in a hole in space, how do you make or find the hole.
It's loose language creating stuff that is fantastic, but not about to happen.
Or course accidentially flying into a supernova could be a real nasty hazard along with a lot of other nasty hazards. Nobody knows where you are going or how to bring you back.
I'm not that into the "Spcecial relativity" to know if that has to be true, which I really hope it isn't.
Anyway, WARP drive isn't FTL as the ship isn't travelling FTL even if the region of space its in happens to skip around a bit.
Supernovas.
Astrophysicists can tell you a long time in advance if a star is going to blow. and even if not, I'd expect someone who sends a ship that far into the unknown to take certain precautions such as stopping well outside of the target star system to observe.
(Might also be useful for avoiding planets, moons and pesky asteroid belts during final approach)
-Tor
If you assume the universe is made from Plasma - instead of spacetime, then it potentially functions as a Newtonian warp drive - and utilizes the published Gravitational Magnus Effect (2018), instead of gravity.
I have open-sourced it for Parallax Community consumption. All source articles & patents are included.