Is warp speed possible ?

[Abyssdnb Profile]

The Theory of Relativity states that it's impossible to move through spacetime faster than the speed of light - and many, many things have been observed which confirm this fact. Almost all of them, in fact. So the "simple" solution (for a sufficiently radical definition of "simple") is to move the spacetime instead. Then you're not breaking the lightspeed limit, you're just picking up a piece of reality and throwing it faster than anything can ever move.

Which may already have happened. Some models suggest that the universe's early rapid inflationary period may have included such superluminal speeds, so scientist Mark Millis says "Why can't we do the same?" And despite how modern physics is almost entirely composed of reasons why we can't do exactly that, it's still a great question.

"If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not space drives?" ponders Mark. Mainly because our drives don't conjure realities out of their exhaust ports, but we will be the first to say that incredible breakthroughs always sound insane before they actually happen. We are totally behind Mr Millis and his attempts to evade reality's restrictions; we'd just prefer people sounded more sensible when they discussed it.

Any discussion of Millis's admirable aims tends to degenerate into "wooboowubwub DARK ENERGY! wubwub" or "If collapsed stars can bend spacetime, couldn't future engines?" Sure, as long as the universe agrees that reducing decades of cosmological math into an analogy is a valid method of design.

We're all in favor of realizing there may be some incredible breakthrough (in fact, that's kind of our entire job), but waving words you got off the cover of New Scientist around is not the route to credibility. Will we ever get off the Earth? We hope so - but if people here would smarten up a bit, we wouldn't actually have to.

However, should we ever develop a workable warp-drive ship, don't jump to wire your deposit. A major roadblock to warp speed travel was just presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society by Dr. William Edelstein from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Edelstein claims that near-light speed space travel may actually be impossible due to the detrimental effect that randomly floating hydrogen atoms would have on the spacecraft and astronauts inside. Even if we were able to accelerate a spaceship to near-light speed, Edelstein claims that hydrogen atoms, or as he calls them "unavoidable space mines," would penetrate the hull of the ship and deliver a radiation dose that not even water bears could withstand.

According to the NewScientist, in order to travel the distance to the center of our galaxy, a spaceship would have to be moving at 99.999998 percent of the speed of light. Protons moving that fast (everything being relative, of course) would have an energy of 7 teraelectron volts, right about what the Large Hadron Collider can generate. At this speed, Edelstein calculates that a 10 centimeter thick aluminum shield would reduce that energy by less than one percent, meaning that anyone inside will turn into a death-rayed power bar of subatomic particles.

[Terrac1de512 Profile]

great image, I love that movie! so what does moving through space at the speed of light have to do with wormhole drives space folding or quantum teleportation?? All of which are viable theories in the worx?? It seems to me that the warp drive is a passe concept anyway. Folding space or teleporting vast distances via "stardrives" or "jumpgates as it were seem like much more feasable concepts.

[Crunchy Profile Website]

according to these guys we have some of the tech required already
the z-machine to be specific

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu/index. ... ce-travel/

We’re going to step into the middle of a nifty science and engineering controversy. Today. On Engineering Works!

If you’ve ever taken a physics course, you know that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. A hundred-86-thousand miles a second. Seven-hundred – million – miles an hour. Everything physicists know says you can’t go faster. But some physicists and engineers think they can do an end run around the speed-of-light limit.

They say that ideas developed about 50 years ago by a German scientist named Burkhard Heim suggest that we could use a very strong magnetic field to push spacecraft into another dimension. A dimension where the physical laws that make the speed of light as fast as anything can go, don’t exist.

The idea sounds like science fiction. And a lot of top physicists say that’s all it is. But if it’s real, it could mean traveling to Mars in three hours or to a nearby star in three months. The interesting part is that the Department of Energy has a device – the Z-machine – that could produce the kind of ultra-powerful magnetic field we’d need to see if the idea might work. If it does, researchers could be testing a working engine in five years.

Even if everything turns out the way the visionaries think it will, it’ll be a long time before you can buy a ticket for a day trip to Mars.

So, beam us up, Scotty. We’re through here for now.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too.

[Timewarp Profile]

Sci/Tech

Warp drive possible.





In Star Trek, the USS Enterprise is powered by what is called a "warp drive" and at the moment only Paramount Pictures know its secrets.

But new, highly mathematical research may have brought us one step closer to being able to explore the Universe in a starship capable of travelling faster than the speed of light.

The analysis of the concept of a warp drive by Chris Van Den Broeck of the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium means that building a starship Enterprise is a little closer.

The fabric of space

Dr Van Den Broeck was reanalysing ground-breaking calculations made five years ago by Mexican mathematician Miguel Alcubierre.


Alcubierre said that it was possible to imagine how a warp drive would work by distorting the fabric of space. Starships would ride along waves in so-called spacetime, like surfers do along waves in the sea.

The idea relies on the concept that, to physicists, space is not empty. Strange as it may seem, space has a shape that can be distorted by matter. In fact the force of gravity is actually due to the curvature of space - recognising that was the greatest triumph of Albert Einstein's career.

So you could use matter to distort the space around a starship to create a "ripple" in spacetime.

The starship would have to be microscopically small on the outside but large enough on the inside to carry passengers, just like the Tardis in the British sci-fi series, Dr Who.

'Warp bubble'

Miguel Alcubierre came up with the idea of expanding the space behind a starship and contracting it in front of it. The starship would rest in a "warp bubble" between the two spacetime distortions. The result would be a wave in spacetime along which the starship would surf.

It was a fantastic idea. There would be no limit to the velocity that a starship could attain. It could travel faster than the speed of light because the starship would, strictly speaking, be stationary in the space of its warp bubble.

Also, the starship and its crew would be weightless and would therefore not be crushed by the enormous G-forces of acceleration and deceleration.

What's more, the passage of time inside the warp bubble would be the same as that outside it. The crew would not suffer from Einstein's "time dilation" effect where time passes at different rates for people travelling at different speeds.

The time dilation effect means that anyone travelling to the stars at speeds approaching that of light would experience a journey of a few years. But when they came back to Earth they would find that thousands of years had passed and all their friends were long dead.

Massive energies

Alcubierre's idea was a good one, but his work seemed to suggest that building a warp bubble would be impossible in practice. More energy than the entire universe could supply would be needed to create the spacetime distortions.

However, Dr Van Den Broeck's analysis suggests a far lower amount of energy is required, reduced by a factor of one followed by 62 zeros.

This is not to say that it is time to go out and start building a warp drive. As Dr Van Den Broeck says in his forthcoming paper in General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology: "This does not mean that the proposal is realistic."

Building a warp drive is currently far beyond our technological abilities and there are severe theoretical arguments that say it may never be possible.

But it just might be. Dr Van Den Broeck concludes his analysis by saying, "The first warp drive is still a long way off but maybe it has now become slightly less improbable."

[Mansouryar Profile]

This idea is quite possible. I am working on it:
Gravity Control by Laser
BTW, I liked this thread too:
Introducing the Warpship

[Towelie Profile]

Hopefully one day it will be possible, but, theres a long long way to go untill that day arrives, theres a lot of debate about this subject lately and not realy anything close to a definitive answer........personally i think/hope it will be achieved, but, our technical capabilities are just no where near what would be necessary to reach FTL(Faster Than Light) speeds.

[Harryjackson Profile]

No,but Ludicrous is.

[Mansouryar Profile]

I don't know why some people think that's impossible?! According to this paper, that's quite feasible:
On a macroscopic traversable spacewarp in practice

[Harryjackson Profile]

No,but Ludicrous is.

Ludicrous speed go !