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A new model for faster-than-light travel that uses conventional physics
- baryphonic 6y ago> After studying existing research on warp drives, Lentz realized there were specific forms of spacetime bubbles that scientists had overlooked. These bubbles took the shape of solitons, or compact waves that maintain their whip while moving at constant velocity. Anyone else remember TNG's New Ground? That was the episode where the Enterprise helps test a soliton wave-based warp mechanism. If I remember right, Geordi is enthusiastic, while Data and Worf are skeptical.
- debo_ 6y agoI just watched this a few days ago. The soliton wave was sort of a magic carpet. They, of course, decided to test it by aiming it at a colony...
- baryphonic 6y agoHumanity has evolved so much by the 24th century that they have to make up contrived problems for the Enterprise to solve, otherwise the Enterprise crew might spend all their time on Risa (well, okay, maybe just Riker). It's not even like Q forced them to aim the wave at an inhabited planet, they just did that by themselves. Also, couldn't that have used this tech to send superweapons towards Borg space in the Delta Quadrant? Picard has no problem straight up murdering assimilatees in First Contact who are much less far gone than Locutus was in Best of Both Worlds, so I don't think there's much of an ethical issue at stake. Or they could have just used Data's adversarial image virus to wipe out the collective through Hugh.
- wcarss 6y agoAs far as Star Trek plot holes go, I've always felt it's a wonder that, upon encountering any seemingly impossible situation, as they often did, Picard didn't ever shout, "Q! Show yourself! We will not play this game for one instant longer!" And then Q, uninvolved but likely bored with whatever else he was doing, bullying some stardust or something, and omniscient enough to hear Picard shouting, would dutifully appear. He'd turn the whole impossible situation into an unfair but winnable game, gleefully taking credit for the whole thing, and having so much _fun_. I bet Picard could've pulled that about a million times!
- FridgeSeal 6y agoI don’t really remember this, but I know what I’m watching after work tonight...
- Touche 6y agoPaywall
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- zadler 6y agoSummary: new method of ftl travel proposed that does not require exotic negative energy source. However requires orders of magnitude more energy than provided by a nuclear power plant, methods to reduce this have been proposed.
- ant6n 6y ago...30 orders of magnitude more than a nuclear power plant.
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- witherk 6y agoWe just a need a moore's law of nuclear power and we'll be able to have lunch at alpha centauri and be back in home in time for dinner!
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoAt those energy densities, you'd need a Moore's law of matter too. But look on the bright side, with scrith we could build a Ringworld as well.
- henearkr 6y agoWhy, when you could just have your dinner sent through the Great Burritos Wormhole?
- jonathanraiman 6y agoLink to one of the referred papers « Introducing Physical Warp Drives» https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06824 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06824
- c1ccccc1 6y agoThat one, at least, doesn't claim to allow faster than light travel using known physics: "We show that a class of subluminal, spherically symmetric warp drive spacetimes, at least in principle, can be constructed based on the physical principles known to humanity today." (emphasis added)
- throwawayboise 6y agoI just went upstairs and moved closer to the sun.
- pc86 6y agoDepends on the time of day.
- phaemon 6y agoActually it doesn't. The difference between perihelion and aphelion is around 6 million km, and it takes approximately 6 months to cover. That means Earth is moving away or towards the sun at 1 million km per month. That's 33,000 km per day. So 1300 km/h or so? Basically unless you're really fast, climbing the stairs is overwhelmed by other effects. Haven't taken the Earth's rotation into account but it should be less of an effect.
- throwaway_4253 6y agoI could be wrong, but I think the GP was commenting specifically about time of day? At idealized midnight the vector between you and the sun goes through the center of the Earth, indicating that increasing altitude takes you away from the Sun, instead of towards it. At idealized Noon, the opposite is true.
- 8note 6y agoBut the speed at which the earth is approaching the sun makes a biggers difference than your flight of stairs?
- throwaway_4253 6y agoYeah, I guess that's one way of looking at it; I guess on my first read of the comments I saw it as a related rates problem where "the act of climbing the stairs adds a velocity away from the Sun", but yeah, the second comment makes the case that at certain times of year the sum of the Earth's velocity and your stairs could still be positive in the "towards sun" direction. (Sigh) this is why I'm poorly suited for Twitter...
- xyzzy21 6y agoNot when the system requires energy equivalent to many Jupiters. To create a useful system you'd need to consume a Sun-sized star of mass on a monthly basis. We aren't there and honestly I don't see us ever being there.
- papaf 6y agoMy feeling is that interstellar travel will be slow and require many generations of travelers -- or not done by human beings at all.
- rossjudson 6y agoWhich is easier? 1) Faster than light travel. 2) Extend lifetimes so 1) doesn't matter.
- papaf 6y agoGiven that human beings are very successful at breeding, I don't see the point of extending lifetimes so space can be explored by geriatric astronauts.
- gruez 6y agoThe problem with that is you don't know how willing the next generation is willing to continue carrying out the mission.
- kyriakos 6y agoPeople are willing to follow religions because of society, family and peer pressure,I take it they will be willing to do so under the same pressure and for something that can at least be scientifically proved to exist.
- steelframe 6y agoIf the year 2020 taught me anything, it's that an alarmingly large number of people can all as a group reject something that's scientifically proven.
- giantrobot 6y agoNo, it didn't. It got another paper about a magic doodad powered by unicorn farts.
- xupybd 6y agoI can imagine this type of reaction when people started to suggest time past at different rates for different observers.
- giantrobot 6y agoThat's something you can literally demonstrate with accurate clocks and a mountain. This is a mathematical construct that is interesting but it is zero percent closer to any sort of demonstration of the effect let alone an actual implementation. It's frictionless pullies and spherical cows in terms of actual demonstration. Once something requires more energy than fusion reactions can provide you are at energy levels that transmutes or obliterates matter. That's the point your space ship can't exist anywhere near the reaction site.
- kelnos 6y agoPretty sure when relativity was worked out we didn't have clocks accurate enough. IIRC several of the predictions made by relativity were only able to be tested years later, the Michelson-Morley experiment being the only one performed prior to Einstein's work.
- TomSwirly 6y agoThe proposed warp drive requires Jupiter-sized masses organized very precisely. Can you predict how long it will be before humanity can move that much mass around?
- xupybd 6y agoI expect this theory will need a lot more work before it becomes even remotely testable.
- sebringj 6y agoMy knee-jerk reaction was to skip directly to comments. It seems correct.
- valuearb 6y agoHow does this solve the causality paradox?
- willis936 6y agoThere is no causality paradox with warp drives.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoNope. Literally any method of getting from A to B faster than light would, has a causality paradox. it does not matter if you cover the miles between FTL, or pop out of a hypothetical wormhole gate: If you end up outside of your own light cone, no matter how, there's a causality paradox.
- willis936 6y agoWarp drives do not violate the speed of causality; they change the geometry of causality.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago> Warp drives change the geometry of causality. Those are all words, and that's about all there is to say about your comment.
- willis936 6y agoWhy are you sharing your opinions about a mechanism when you don't even have a remote understanding of the basics?
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoIndeed, why are you?
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- jl6 6y agoPlease Lord save me from this ridiculous clickbait headline.
- hikerclimb 6y agoThis is just theoretical.
- yborg 6y agoI remember a time when you could find out how a rotary engine worked from Popular Mechanics. Now I can find out how to raise the dead just by building a Dyson Sphere. How primitive and backwards we were in the 20th century! https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35788050/dyson-sphere-digital-resurrection-immortality/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35788050/dyson-sph...
- kyriakos 6y agoWhat's your opinion on this? Do you believe we are ready for such technology? Imagine at our current state of global politics are we ready to start venturing into space and possibly into planets with life? And I'm not even considering possibilities of Intelligent life.
- jamesgreenleaf 6y agoHave we truly been ready for any of humanity's technological developments? They tend to be very messy, and lead to all sorts of consequences few could predict.
- kyriakos 6y agoWe somehow managed to survive nuclear weapons (so far). But imagine things as simple as a pathogen or invasive species from space the kind of mess it will create when a year later covid is still not under control.
- simonh 6y agoI’m not scared of space bugs. Bear in mind from its perspective, Earth life are the space bugs. There’s no reason to assume the space bug will win. In fact it’s very unlikely. On Earth we have a planet full of the results of 4bn years of competitive evolution. Put that against one single species resulting from evolution. The chances are at least one species on Earth will eat its lunch. Furthermore Earth life is customs tuned to the Earth environment, but the space bug is most likely optimised for a different environment.
- bribroder 6y agoWarp drives, maybe not, but multigenerational space travel at slow speeds might actually require a certain amount of social cohesion and cooperative tendency, as well as a pioneer's ambitious personality--the rigors of the journey combined with those of establishing civilization on a planet without any humans to enslave and manipulate will add up to significant selective pressure on settlers.
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- nick_kline 6y agoInstead of negative energy this warp drive idea requires 10^30 more energy than the matter contained in Jupiter, so we aren't quite there ;-). The additional issue is whether something going faster than the speed of light violates causality, like a warp drive. I've never understood how to reconcile causality with the fact of so called 'spooky interaction at a distance'. If it's faster than the speed of light, and you can communicate even the info of a bit, isn't that going to violate causality? Recent experiment showed that it was communicating faster than the speed of light at the least. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/150207-chinese-physicists-measure-speed-of-einsteins-spooky-action-at-a-distance-at-least-10000-times-faster-than-light https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/150207-chinese-physicist...
- rubyfan 6y agoyeah good thing for dilithium crystals though
- greggyb 6y agoYou got your quote wrong by an order of magnitude of order of magnitudes. (; > requires roughly 100 times the energy contained in the mass of Jupiter, said Lentz. That’s about 30 orders of magnitude higher than the power of modern nuclear reactors.
- Ono-Sendai 6y agoFaster-than-light communication doesn't necessarily break causation, if there is an absolute reference frame (blog post plug: http://forwardscattering.org/post/36 http://forwardscattering.org/post/36) Quantum 'spooky action at a distance' is something else though, as you can't communicate info with it (see 'no communication theorem').
- asimpletune 6y agoYou can do things instantaneously, aka spooky action at a distance, you just are forbidden from using that to communicate something useful, so knowable causality is still bound at relativistic speeds. I’m not an expert but this is how I understand it.
- meroes 6y ago
- emrah 6y agoWhat is impossible in 2D (e.g. escaping from inside a circle) is possible and trivial in 3D. Is moving faster than speed of light a limitation that can be overcome in a higher dimension? Does it really require a lot of energy or is that only so under certain circumstances? There is a lot we still don't know
- howling 6y agoThe 3d equivalent of a circle is a sphere, which is also impossible to escape from in 3d.
- justinclift 6y agoPretty sure the parent comment was more meaning "go up a higher level of dimension", so to escape a "3d" sphere they'd point out you could probably do it from a(ny?) higher-than-third dimension.
- emrah 6y agojustinclift is right. The goal is to try to escape from a circle which is still a circle in 3D space. A 2D being may not be aware of the third dimension and might think it's impossible to escape it. Yet it is possible if they find a way to travel in the third dimension. This is just an analogy anyway. My main point is, or what I hope science can figure out is whether the speed of light is a true limitation of reality or just a limitation of our own perception/understanding
- postalrat 6y agoIf a 2d being escaped their 2d space would the universe disappear from their point of view?
- therealbilly 6y agoSince we have never been visited by aliens, or witnessed time travel, these things must not be possible. It they were, there would be proof and it would be documented. It's as simple as that.
- King-Aaron 6y ago> Since we have never been visited by aliens This is a rather large assertion to make.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoSo is the "if it's possible, they certainly would have done it to visit us" leap of (non)logic.
- King-Aaron 6y agoEh, I just feel that there's more "evidence" of ET's being seen than not - albeit just through religious texts, historical paintings, eyewitness accounts etc. Plus it's more entertaining to consider it as a possibility than to be a wet blanket and write it off completely.
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- NL807 6y agoIf the greys figured out how to achieve FTL, then they probably also have the means to be covert as well - assuming passive observation is their goal in the first place.
- stordoff 6y agoHand-wavey sci-fi explanation - time travel being observed causes a divergent reality (think many worlds), we're in the branch that didn't notice. Seems like not much more of a leap than aliens/time travellers would definitely visit us _and_ we would notice.
- alex_young 6y agoI really don’t understand why people are so hung up on the clocks back home. I mean, sure it would be nice to take a trip to Alpha Centauri, come back home, and boast about it to all of your friends, but really wouldn’t getting to see a few tens of thousands of years go by be even cooler? To the constantly accelerating interstellar traveler distances get really small after a year or so. You’d be able to make it to the edge of the universe and back in a lifetime. Well, ‘back’ is probably not going to have a lot in common with this place, so maybe stick to distances in our local group or something. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_acceleration https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_...
- r-zip 6y agoBecause by leaving on that journey you would be effectively dead to everyone you knew?
- vanderZwan 6y ago> To put this into context, we’ll catch you up to (warp) speed. The colloquial term “warp drive” comes from science fiction, most famously Star Trek. The Federation’s FTL warp drive works by colliding matter and antimatter and converting the explosive energy to propulsion. Star Trek suggests this extraordinary power alone pushes the ship at FTL speeds. I'm surprised that so far nobody here has complained that they got the Star Trek trivia wrong! I don't remember the details but there's plenty of exotic matter and energy involved in the handwaving that's supposed to explain how warp bubbles form in Star Trek.
- Doxin 6y agoAs far as I've gleamed from watching star trek the "warp core" is really just a power plant. It's the nacelles doing the propelling.
- vanderZwan 6y agoYeah but doesn't the warp core also require "dilithium crystals" to run? But still, fair point: that does suggest "warp core" is a bit of a misnomer. Then again, we all know the difficulty of naming things properly ;)
- Doxin 6y agoWell I suppose if a warp core is the only reactor powerful enough to produce enough of the right kind of power to power the nacelles it's probably still an apt name. I mean there's plenty of times in the series where the warp core stops working, but all the lights are still on. So presumably there's a primary power generator somewhere for everything that isn't warp drive.
- renox 6y agoI'm very doubtful that this paper is correct, otherwise it would mean that we can put things FTL with just enough energy..
- barry27 6y agoI've always had a significant problem with the notion that I wouldnt be able to go at/beyond the speed of light just because it would be a problem for anyone trying to watch me do it.