Real "Warp Drive" soon.

[NinkobEi]

You wouldn't travel back in time, but you would offset the universe by arriving before you SHOULD arrive. In a way that is time travel I suppose... Though who knows what implications it may have. I guess it will make people really, really early for inter-spacial meetings.

[Benetanegia]

BTW according to wikipedia the Voyager weights 773 kg.

E=mc^2= 299,792,458 m/s^2 * M = 89,875,517,873,681,764 J/kg * 773 kg

E = 69,473,775,316,356,003,572 J

E = 19298270921210000 wh = 19,298 TWh

So almost nothing.

Wiki again:

In 2008, total worldwide energy consumption was 474 exajoules (474×1018 J=132,000 TWh).

"Feasible" tho, unlike with the mass of Jupiter, which I will not calculate but it's billions of billions times bigger.

[D4S4]

i'm kinda mad at myself now for dropping out of physics college (never had the discipline to tackle maths, probably still don't, could've been working on my doctorate now had everything went well lol) so i could understand the principle behind the alcubierre drive a bit better. i just can't wrap my head around how it can move ftl through the pinch in space-time it creates - let's say you take a brick (your ship) and shrink one meter of space to 0,5m. wouldn't the brick occupying that shrunk region simply become shorter (shrunk) and take the same time to travel through as if it were in normal space, like looking at the objects pass in front of a lens?

[Benetanegia]

Originally Posted by D4S4

i'm kinda mad at myself now for dropping out of physics college (never had the discipline to tackle maths, probably still don't, could've been working on my doctorate now had everything went well lol) so i could understand the principle behind the alcubierre drive a bit better. i just can't wrap my head around how it can move ftl through the pinch in space-time it creates - let's say you take a brick (your ship) and shrink one meter of space to 0,5m. wouldn't the brick occupying that shrunk region simply become shorter (shrunk) and take the same time to travel through as if it were in normal space, like looking at the objects pass in front of a lens?

The brick is within a bubble that is safe from the distortion. At all times it travels through normal space.

[Aquinus]

Jump into the DeLorean! I just replaced the flux capacitor, so we shouldn't miss the time this time.

Also, even if it is physically possible to travel FTL it doesn't mean that we know how to make something satisfy those conditions. So in other words, FTL travel is not coming soon we just think that we know how it all works.

[NC37]

Warp drive may be a future but there is another tech which can be seen even in the natural right now. Just hasn't been studied. They have documented portals in space from the Sun to Earth. Forget now how they found out about them or what type of energy it is. But they found micro portals where stuff was jumping from the Sun to Earth almost instantaneously. Some didn't last very long while others longer. There is an actual probe mission scheduled to study the phenomenon. Wish I had bookmarked the info on it. NASA did a vid on it too. Tried to explain it. Watched it but I had to view it a few times to really take it all in and even then they weren't really sure what caused it.

I imagine if studied and they found they could create them you might have a form of jumpgate tech. Bet you'd need a stable gate at both ends to make it work. So someone would have to go to the exit point and build the connection point. So that would be a downside.

[D4S4]

Originally Posted by Benetanegia

The brick is within a bubble that is safe from the distortion. At all times it travels through normal space.

yes, but how does that part of space move the ship within space? you can take a stretchy piece of cloth, put your finger on it on a table and by moving it, the cloth would expand behind and contract in front of the finger (finger is the ship) but there's still the same length of cloth (the same length of space to travel through) on all sides, the only difference is it's now distorted. when the distortion's gone, that point where the finger was will end up in the same place where it was.

my conception is most likely wrong so i'm looking for an explanation to how would this actually work.

[Benetanegia]

The way I see it, I think that the closest analogy to how it works is an airplane wing. As you might know a wing creates a low pressure region above the wing and a high pressure region below the wing and this difference of pressure creates the force that lifts the airplane.

With the warp drive instead of pressure, we're talking about contraction of space-time. What it's in front of the drive is contracted and expanded behind. Since the ship is moving in the direction of space-time that is contracted, space in that direction is forced to be "closer" to the ship while the space left behind is farther away (isn't that by itself the definition of motion??). And since the drive that distorts space-time is part of this motion, in the next infinitesimal time unit (dt) a new infinitesimal region of space will be contracted in the front and expanded behind, accelerating the ship. It's kind of like running against a conveyor belt, though the latter is not an analogy for what the warp drive itself does, it does kind of represent the resulting interaction between the ship (more properly said, all of what's inside the bubble) and the space-time around it.

[NinkobEi]

Originally Posted by D4S4

yes, but how does that part of space move the ship within space? you can take a stretchy piece of cloth, put your finger on it on a table and by moving it, the cloth would expand behind and contract in front of the finger (finger is the ship) but there's still the same length of cloth (the same length of space to travel through) on all sides, the only difference is it's now distorted. when the distortion's gone, that point where the finger was will end up in the same place where it was.

my conception is most likely wrong so i'm looking for an explanation to how would this actually work.

Simple. What happens when space/time is distorted is a thing we like to call Gravity. Essentially the space ship will be falling at 10 times the speed of light, hopefully without feeling anything! And god forbid they hit a spec of dust!

[Nergal]

That´s were the shields and the Heisenberg compensator come into play!

[Mussels]

"Scientists"

[Inceptor]

Originally Posted by W1zzard

it's like saying

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery : real nuclear power plants soon

^This.

Admittedly, I haven't kept up with this, but it was my understanding that there was something wrong with Miguel Alcubierre's idea... this has been around since 1994:

Difficulties

Significant problems with the metric of this form stem from the fact that all known warp drive spacetimes violate various energy conditions.[8] It is true that certain experimentally verified quantum phenomena, such as the Casimir effect, when described in the context of the quantum field theories, lead to stress–energy tensors that also violate the energy conditions, such as negative mass-energy, and thus one can hope that Alcubierre-type warp drives can be physically realized by clever engineering taking advantage of such quantum effects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

'Exotic matter' is not an engineering reality or possibility, at this point.
A lot of interesting propulsion ideas are possible with 'exotic matter', like Robert Forward's Negative matter propulsion. The problem is that it's all impossible for us to create, regardless of what the equations allow for. The exotic matter thing is always the answer when the raw energy requirements tend to approach or exceed the power output of an average star... it's understandable, look for a physical-material loophole that circumvents the need for massive power output. The problem is that the loopholes always require materials we have absolutely no idea how to create or find (if they even exist naturally). More importantly, the materials have to be 'creatable' without applying massive amounts of power that approach or exceed the power output of a star, otherwise they're not loopholes at all.

[HalfAHertz]

Wasn't there something about a huge gamma-burst every time the spaceship would come out of warp speed?

[saknid]

I am Not Saying that this whole "Warp Drive" is not possible but yes I am more concerned with the continuity of time means if we exist here in the world where we work on space-time connectivity then I am sure using (in other words opening) the gate through space-time (supposed to be faster than light) will surely going to effect the environment (in other words space of space-time) the problem is not only doing the whole thing but also taking care of the "Post Event Effect"...while on other side the problem would be managing the energy which will be transacted (transacted for in & out both). being more simple with the words doing this thing will surely generate "Distortion" in the space-time continuity of the environment 2nd thing is that making a whole ship of the size (as per told) is a really a hard deal and after then making such a magnificent engine who can produce and manipulate that much energy is a big deal in it self and after that what I think (While I have'nt been to touch the speed of light with my byk ) but s I am sure running higher then light speed may effect the whole structure of body as the BODY(MASS) & VELOCITY both internally related with each other in the space-time frame.

So for Now I think this is little bit impossible..but what physics says there is nothing like IMPOSSIBLE. SO WAIT AND WATCH......

[Mussels]

saknid: and thats why in Sci Fi shows, they never, ever use warp drive in a planets atmosphere, without the intent to screw that planet right over.

[saknid]

Originally Posted by Inceptor

^This.

Admittedly, I haven't kept up with this, but it was my understanding that there was something wrong with Miguel Alcubierre's idea... this has been around since 1994:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

'Exotic matter' is not an engineering reality or possibility, at this point.
A lot of interesting propulsion ideas are possible with 'exotic matter', like Robert Forward's Negative matter propulsion. The problem is that it's all impossible for us to create, regardless of what the equations allow for. The exotic matter thing is always the answer when the raw energy requirements tend to approach or exceed the power output of an average star... it's understandable, look for a physical-material loophole that circumvents the need for massive power output. The problem is that the loopholes always require materials we have absolutely no idea how to create or find (if they even exist naturally). More importantly, the materials have to be 'creatable' without applying massive amounts of power that approach or exceed the power output of a star, otherwise they're not loopholes at all.

@Inceptor

Some cmnt there you are totally right when physics says something as "x" (as Exotic Matter) than it must utilize the IDEAL CASE terminology of physics while on other hand physics it self say that in the real world nothing is IDEAL....

So simply the whole funda is not applicable in the real world but physics is physics....

[saknid]

Originally Posted by Mussels

saknid: and thats why in Sci Fi shows, they never, ever use warp drive in a planets atmosphere, without the intent to screw that planet right over.

@Mussels
that is the problem if we talk So called outer space we think that the space-time continuity is not existing there but that is the deal Continuity word is used to show the relation of the whole things made of matter(say like Dark Matter) with the space-time.

And yes it is the matter for which I am doing overtime in office ha ha ha so interesting matter to talk...ttul guy's keep it alive