13 ms·

Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel

87 points by mrrazz 6y ago

tobmlt 6y ago
I presently have no time to get into GR, but surely wish I did. Here instead of comment I offer two papers: Erik Lentz (underlying the work in the press release here): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.07125.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.07125.pdf And similar seeming work by another group at something called the “advanced propulsion lab” (who are they?) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.06824.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.06824.pdf It’s interesting that they both claim positive energy solutions that, eh hem, do the trick.
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
  Is there any physical proof that theory is sound in those papers? I mean have they tried to send anything electron, atom or anything small that would confirm FTL speed ?
  - tobmlt 6y ago
    No they just wrote it down. These are not experimental papers. A smallest possible scale experiment would the logical follow up, unless some GR expert shoots holes in the models on paper first. Edit: ftl is not the experiment in question. Simply demonstrating some minuscule effect due to manipulated spacetime curvature would Be quite enough! (Enough to be a huge deal, even if it’s not even useful practically, for the foreseeable future)
monkeycantype 6y ago
We don’t need hyperexotic negative energy to travel to the stars, we just need to live a lot longer, and we need our friends and family to live longer too so we can comeback and see them again.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Unless some really freaky physics discovery is made (allowing FTL travel), and I don't believe at this point that that'll ever be done (or if it will that it may cause a sudden cataclysmic event), I don't believe we'll ever become interstellar travelers. More viable at this point is that we'll develop Von Neumann probes. But that depends on whether we manage to develop computers smart enough to fully independently harvest resources and self-reproduce. Before that, it'll be projects like Voyager, deep space probes that contain fragments of our knowledge and culture. If there's other intelligent species out there, there may be a slim chance that they'll be found, eventually. But the chances are slim. Maybe if there's a lot, they get sent to start orbiting distant stars, and can start broadcasting. But given that it takes tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest stars, it's unlikely that the probes will be anything but dead chunks of slag by the time they arrive.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    But given that it takes tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest stars, it's unlikely that the probes will be anything but dead chunks of slag by the time they arrive. You're not exactly saying meteorites are the remnants of alien probes, but you're not not saying that either.
- dreen 6y ago
  I agree but the nearest star is (only?) 4 light years away. If we only managed to travel close to the speed of light, we surely live long enough today. Time dilation will cause our friends to be older by a few years than they should be, but not by that much right?
  - koolba 6y ago
    > Time dilation will cause our friends to be older by a few years than they should be, but not by that much right? Technically they wouldn’t be older, you’d be younger.
    - dangirsh 6y ago
wolfram74 6y ago
It is early in the morning, so I'm still irritable, but this line is pretty egregious -- The energy savings would need to be drastic, of approximately 30 orders of magnitude to be in range of modern nuclear fission reactors.” He goes on to say: “Fortunately, several energy-saving mechanisms have been proposed in earlier research that can potentially lower the energy required by nearly 60 orders of magnitude.” -- Say the fission reactor they have in mind is a collection of the biggest in human history and is a whole terawatt (1E12 watts). Another 30 orders of magnitude less power brings you down to 1E-18 watts. For context[1] a typical human cell consumes ~1E-12 watts. You could take a morning coffee poop and put it in a jar with a thermocouple and power your warp drive with the decomposing biomatter if those results are right. If the energetics are that favorable I would really like an explanation why we haven't encountered space whales, let alone rapidly expanding alien civilizations. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)#Below_1_W https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)#Be...
- alanbernstein 6y ago
  It currently requires 1e42 (say), and 30 orders of magnitude less brings it into the realm of possibility with a large power plant.
  - wolfram74 6y ago
    Continuing with the assumptions, it takes /us/ 1E42 watts, but the authors speculate that the universal lower bound is indistinguishable from 0. Much like how we can't make a useful fusion reactor, the universe at large has made loads of them because. If their suspicions are right and the lower bound is so low, it would need to be some incredibly contrived collection of events to not occur naturally with some regularity.
    - unclewalter 6y ago
      An improbable drive?
- riggsdk 6y ago
d_tr 6y ago
I wonder whether evolutionary algorithms could be of some use here, to help find good "shapes".
klingon78 6y ago
Does “Craft using an inertial mass reduction device”[1] use the same concept as described?: I don’t know if there’s a difference between this and the Alcubierre drive. Perhaps the tic-tacs were prototypes, given the patent and claims made by others. They may not be FTL capable, though, at least not within Earth’s atmosphere[2]. If the technology were to exist, it would be seen as a serious weapon and threat to security as much as a tool for colonization and exploration, so why a patent would be filed and left as much is beyond me. I don’t want to legitimize make-believe things, though, if that is what they are, which is tough to say with much certainty. [1]- https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en [2]- https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-and-a-with-navy-pilot-chad-underwood.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-...
person_of_color 6y ago
protip: ET is already here.
IHLayman 6y ago
I am not a physicist by any means, so this may come off as a dumb question, but: If gravity waves have been discovered, and they move at the speed of light (speed of causality?), being thrown off by the most energetic events in the universe, how can something like an Alcubierre drive even work when essentially it is also a gravitational wave generated by far less energy?
- rrmm 6y ago
  It usually requires exotic matter with negative mass which isn't normally found.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    This one supposedly doesn't, which is why it's so newsworthy.
nynx 6y ago
If warp drives actually are feasible (either sub or super liminal), that'd be great. However, it seems to me that it's much more likely we'll travel between stars as digitized minds that are recorporialized at the destination.
- apocalyptic0n3 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what is the state of this research? That's the Takeshi Kovacs solution, but I haven't seen any real jumps in that regard other than some new tech allowing the brain to control computers to some degree. And even if we do have that tech, we'd still have to be able to reach those destinations in the first place so we could establish outposts where our digitized minds could travel to. At the moment, the only way to do so is a generation ship capable of surviving the ~1000 years it would take to get to a new location with current technology.
  - nynx 6y ago
    There is foundational research being done on destructive brain scanning and emulation. It is decades—at a minimum—away from being more realizable. You don't need to send a generation ship, just solar sails powered by massive laser installations that have enough tech on board to convert an asteroid into a receiver. To be fair, 1000 years is not very long when you have digital immortality.
    - tgv 6y ago
      Is there even an electrolytic cap that survives a 1000 year space trip?
      - nynx 6y ago
        Probably not right now, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. Anyhow, a laser propelled solar sail would make the journey to, say, alpha centuri in more like 20-40 years. There's really not much point in slow travel if you can, instead, launch a self-replicator, wait a few decades for it to get there, and then just cast on over.
Gatsky 6y ago
Star Trek TNG: New Ground [1]. [1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Soliton_wave https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Soliton_wave
dsqrt 6y ago
Coincidentally, Alcubierre recently posted a review article on warp drives: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.05610.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.05610.pdf. It looks like a good introduction to this topic.
Delk 6y ago
I'm not qualified to judge the paper or its contributions, but this particular paragraph in the press release quoting the author smells of way, way too much faith on part of the author himself: > “This work has moved the problem of faster-than-light travel one step away from theoretical research in fundamental physics and closer to engineering. The next step is to figure out how to bring down the astronomical amount of energy needed to within the range of today's technologies, such as a large modern nuclear fission power plant. Then we can talk about building the first prototypes," says Lentz. While I'm not a physicist, calling anything in the paper's area even a single step towards engineering rather than belonging firmly in the realm of theoretical speculation is an astronomically huge claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so on. (FWIW, I'm totally fine with research producing only theoretical speculation as long as it's sound.) While I (again) cannot judge the paper, that kind of a blurb by itself makes me automatically feel much more skeptical about anything in the study. I know it's from a press release, and press releases are a kind of marketing, but they should still be somewhat proportional.
rurban 6y ago
All fine until he cited the Proxima Centauri problem. He cites 50,000 years to reach it with conventional rocket tech. But this nearest star is only about 4.2 lightyears away, so there's no need for exotic warp-drives. Conventional 1/5 (20%) lightspeed rockets could do it also in a lifetime, i.e. in 25 years. Soliton stuff is entirely unpractical, conventional tiny rockets are in our reach.

87 points by mrrazz 6y ago

I presently have no time to get into GR, but surely wish I did. Here instead of comment I offer two papers: Erik Lentz (underlying the work in the press release here): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.07125.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.07125.pdf And similar seeming work by another group at something called the “advanced propulsion lab” (who are they?) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.06824.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.06824.pdf It’s interesting that they both claim positive energy solutions that, eh hem, do the trick.

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
Is there any physical proof that theory is sound in those papers? I mean have they tried to send anything electron, atom or anything small that would confirm FTL speed ?
- tobmlt 6y ago
  No they just wrote it down. These are not experimental papers. A smallest possible scale experiment would the logical follow up, unless some GR expert shoots holes in the models on paper first. Edit: ftl is not the experiment in question. Simply demonstrating some minuscule effect due to manipulated spacetime curvature would Be quite enough! (Enough to be a huge deal, even if it’s not even useful practically, for the foreseeable future)

monkeycantype 6y ago

We don’t need hyperexotic negative energy to travel to the stars, we just need to live a lot longer, and we need our friends and family to live longer too so we can comeback and see them again.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Unless some really freaky physics discovery is made (allowing FTL travel), and I don't believe at this point that that'll ever be done (or if it will that it may cause a sudden cataclysmic event), I don't believe we'll ever become interstellar travelers. More viable at this point is that we'll develop Von Neumann probes. But that depends on whether we manage to develop computers smart enough to fully independently harvest resources and self-reproduce. Before that, it'll be projects like Voyager, deep space probes that contain fragments of our knowledge and culture. If there's other intelligent species out there, there may be a slim chance that they'll be found, eventually. But the chances are slim. Maybe if there's a lot, they get sent to start orbiting distant stars, and can start broadcasting. But given that it takes tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest stars, it's unlikely that the probes will be anything but dead chunks of slag by the time they arrive.
- onion2k 6y ago
  But given that it takes tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest stars, it's unlikely that the probes will be anything but dead chunks of slag by the time they arrive. You're not exactly saying meteorites are the remnants of alien probes, but you're not not saying that either.
dreen 6y ago
I agree but the nearest star is (only?) 4 light years away. If we only managed to travel close to the speed of light, we surely live long enough today. Time dilation will cause our friends to be older by a few years than they should be, but not by that much right?
- koolba 6y ago
  > Time dilation will cause our friends to be older by a few years than they should be, but not by that much right? Technically they wouldn’t be older, you’d be younger.
  - dangirsh 6y ago

wolfram74 6y ago

It is early in the morning, so I'm still irritable, but this line is pretty egregious -- The energy savings would need to be drastic, of approximately 30 orders of magnitude to be in range of modern nuclear fission reactors.” He goes on to say: “Fortunately, several energy-saving mechanisms have been proposed in earlier research that can potentially lower the energy required by nearly 60 orders of magnitude.” -- Say the fission reactor they have in mind is a collection of the biggest in human history and is a whole terawatt (1E12 watts). Another 30 orders of magnitude less power brings you down to 1E-18 watts. For context[1] a typical human cell consumes ~1E-12 watts. You could take a morning coffee poop and put it in a jar with a thermocouple and power your warp drive with the decomposing biomatter if those results are right. If the energetics are that favorable I would really like an explanation why we haven't encountered space whales, let alone rapidly expanding alien civilizations. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)#Below_1_W https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)#Be...

alanbernstein 6y ago
It currently requires 1e42 (say), and 30 orders of magnitude less brings it into the realm of possibility with a large power plant.
- wolfram74 6y ago
  Continuing with the assumptions, it takes /us/ 1E42 watts, but the authors speculate that the universal lower bound is indistinguishable from 0. Much like how we can't make a useful fusion reactor, the universe at large has made loads of them because. If their suspicions are right and the lower bound is so low, it would need to be some incredibly contrived collection of events to not occur naturally with some regularity.
  - unclewalter 6y ago
    An improbable drive?
riggsdk 6y ago

d_tr 6y ago

I wonder whether evolutionary algorithms could be of some use here, to help find good "shapes".

klingon78 6y ago

Does “Craft using an inertial mass reduction device”[1] use the same concept as described?: I don’t know if there’s a difference between this and the Alcubierre drive. Perhaps the tic-tacs were prototypes, given the patent and claims made by others. They may not be FTL capable, though, at least not within Earth’s atmosphere[2]. If the technology were to exist, it would be seen as a serious weapon and threat to security as much as a tool for colonization and exploration, so why a patent would be filed and left as much is beyond me. I don’t want to legitimize make-believe things, though, if that is what they are, which is tough to say with much certainty. [1]- https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en [2]- https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-and-a-with-navy-pilot-chad-underwood.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-...

person_of_color 6y ago

protip: ET is already here.

IHLayman 6y ago

I am not a physicist by any means, so this may come off as a dumb question, but: If gravity waves have been discovered, and they move at the speed of light (speed of causality?), being thrown off by the most energetic events in the universe, how can something like an Alcubierre drive even work when essentially it is also a gravitational wave generated by far less energy?

rrmm 6y ago
It usually requires exotic matter with negative mass which isn't normally found.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  This one supposedly doesn't, which is why it's so newsworthy.

nynx 6y ago

If warp drives actually are feasible (either sub or super liminal), that'd be great. However, it seems to me that it's much more likely we'll travel between stars as digitized minds that are recorporialized at the destination.

apocalyptic0n3 6y ago
Out of curiosity, what is the state of this research? That's the Takeshi Kovacs solution, but I haven't seen any real jumps in that regard other than some new tech allowing the brain to control computers to some degree. And even if we do have that tech, we'd still have to be able to reach those destinations in the first place so we could establish outposts where our digitized minds could travel to. At the moment, the only way to do so is a generation ship capable of surviving the ~1000 years it would take to get to a new location with current technology.
- nynx 6y ago
  There is foundational research being done on destructive brain scanning and emulation. It is decades—at a minimum—away from being more realizable. You don't need to send a generation ship, just solar sails powered by massive laser installations that have enough tech on board to convert an asteroid into a receiver. To be fair, 1000 years is not very long when you have digital immortality.
  - tgv 6y ago
    Is there even an electrolytic cap that survives a 1000 year space trip?
    - nynx 6y ago
      Probably not right now, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. Anyhow, a laser propelled solar sail would make the journey to, say, alpha centuri in more like 20-40 years. There's really not much point in slow travel if you can, instead, launch a self-replicator, wait a few decades for it to get there, and then just cast on over.

Gatsky 6y ago

Star Trek TNG: New Ground [1]. [1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Soliton_wave https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Soliton_wave

dsqrt 6y ago

Coincidentally, Alcubierre recently posted a review article on warp drives: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.05610.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.05610.pdf. It looks like a good introduction to this topic.

Delk 6y ago

I'm not qualified to judge the paper or its contributions, but this particular paragraph in the press release quoting the author smells of way, way too much faith on part of the author himself: > “This work has moved the problem of faster-than-light travel one step away from theoretical research in fundamental physics and closer to engineering. The next step is to figure out how to bring down the astronomical amount of energy needed to within the range of today's technologies, such as a large modern nuclear fission power plant. Then we can talk about building the first prototypes," says Lentz. While I'm not a physicist, calling anything in the paper's area even a single step towards engineering rather than belonging firmly in the realm of theoretical speculation is an astronomically huge claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so on. (FWIW, I'm totally fine with research producing only theoretical speculation as long as it's sound.) While I (again) cannot judge the paper, that kind of a blurb by itself makes me automatically feel much more skeptical about anything in the study. I know it's from a press release, and press releases are a kind of marketing, but they should still be somewhat proportional.

rurban 6y ago

All fine until he cited the Proxima Centauri problem. He cites 50,000 years to reach it with conventional rocket tech. But this nearest star is only about 4.2 lightyears away, so there's no need for exotic warp-drives. Conventional 1/5 (20%) lightspeed rockets could do it also in a lifetime, i.e. in 25 years. Soliton stuff is entirely unpractical, conventional tiny rockets are in our reach.