5 ms·

Extremely infeasible.

stephengillie 12y ago
That's an extremely pessimistic reaction! I think such a device will at least be possible, and that we'll eventually engineer the energy density of it down to be comparably efficient. And we've got to power the warp field with something, so what are our most energy-dense options?
- 27182818284 12y ago
  >And we've got to power the warp field with something, so what are our most energy-dense options? The most energy to mass ratio is antimatter, which is why it is chosen as the substance for Star Trek TNG to power the warp core. Second place is helium-3 if you count helium-3 fusion.
- darkmighty 12y ago
  Storing antimatter is an engineering nightmare. It's hard enough to store chemicals that react with lots of things, imagine storing something which reacts releasing insane energies with all matter. You have to confine it perfectly using external fields. In other words, not an easy task. (CERN has a trap that was demonstrated to have formed just a few antihydrogen atoms) Not that we have any applications for it with the current production efficiency.
  - stephengillie 12y ago
    Are you implying that, with current technology, we may expend more energy confining antimatter than we could derive from a controlled annihilation?
    - BugBrother 12y ago
      Antimatter production/storage is an old subject. This is a book from 1988 by a favorite author Robert L Forward (the worst author from which I regularly bought books in hardcover; I just read them for the physics). http://books.google.ro/books/about/Mirror_matter.html?id=GS4bAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y http://books.google.ro/books/about/Mirror_matter.html?id=GS4... It was based on his report for NASA. I read the review: "He took the giggle factor out of antimatter"(!). The main point was that if machines were built to create antimatter (instead of Nobel prizes), it wasn't so crazy to produce. But as people are explaining to you, storage [of "large" masses like microgram] is still not solved. Afaik, at least.
  - al2o3cr 12y ago
    Perhaps more importantly, there's the messy consequence that those external fields only work on charged particles. You could (in principle) keep positrons and antiprotons together in a very hot plasma under magnetic confinement, but every pair that binds together into a neutral hydrogen atom can immediately escape and annihilate - turning carefully-stored fuel into gamma rays...
    - stephengillie 12y ago
      So you couldn't very well keep them together :)
  - jessriedel 12y ago
    To my understanding, this isn't correct. Storing anti-matter isn't really that hard. The Tevatron would store anti-protons in the recycler for hours, and I'm sure if it was important we could engineer much more efficient mechanisms. No, the hard part is creating the anti-matter in the first place and then cooling it down to a reasonable temperature at which it can be stored. All of our mechanisms for creating anti-matter generate anti-particles traveling at fantastic, highly relativistic speeds (and also consume much, much more energy to create then they contain in mass energy). Cooling them down without loosing them all to annihilation is very difficult. But once they're cool, it's not so bad.
    - darkmighty 12y ago
      Oh I'm sure you're right, didn't know that (my knowledge comes from years of exaggerated Scientific American articles :) ). I suppose the cooling is electromagnetic, the whole process must be really difficult! Cool it while keeping those atoms from interacting from stray particles if the vacuum isn't perfect.
sitkack 12y ago
I am going to cite Clarke's [0] first law. | When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
- kachnuv_ocasek 12y ago
  Well, I'm neither distinguished nor elderly scientist, so I may be right.
  - sitkack 12y ago
    May you grow old, earn awards and be proven wrong.

That's an extremely pessimistic reaction! I think such a device will at least be possible, and that we'll eventually engineer the energy density of it down to be comparably efficient. And we've got to power the warp field with something, so what are our most energy-dense options?

27182818284 12y ago
>And we've got to power the warp field with something, so what are our most energy-dense options? The most energy to mass ratio is antimatter, which is why it is chosen as the substance for Star Trek TNG to power the warp core. Second place is helium-3 if you count helium-3 fusion.
darkmighty 12y ago
Storing antimatter is an engineering nightmare. It's hard enough to store chemicals that react with lots of things, imagine storing something which reacts releasing insane energies with all matter. You have to confine it perfectly using external fields. In other words, not an easy task. (CERN has a trap that was demonstrated to have formed just a few antihydrogen atoms) Not that we have any applications for it with the current production efficiency.
- stephengillie 12y ago
  Are you implying that, with current technology, we may expend more energy confining antimatter than we could derive from a controlled annihilation?
  - BugBrother 12y ago
    Antimatter production/storage is an old subject. This is a book from 1988 by a favorite author Robert L Forward (the worst author from which I regularly bought books in hardcover; I just read them for the physics). http://books.google.ro/books/about/Mirror_matter.html?id=GS4bAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y http://books.google.ro/books/about/Mirror_matter.html?id=GS4... It was based on his report for NASA. I read the review: "He took the giggle factor out of antimatter"(!). The main point was that if machines were built to create antimatter (instead of Nobel prizes), it wasn't so crazy to produce. But as people are explaining to you, storage [of "large" masses like microgram] is still not solved. Afaik, at least.
- al2o3cr 12y ago
  Perhaps more importantly, there's the messy consequence that those external fields only work on charged particles. You could (in principle) keep positrons and antiprotons together in a very hot plasma under magnetic confinement, but every pair that binds together into a neutral hydrogen atom can immediately escape and annihilate - turning carefully-stored fuel into gamma rays...
  - stephengillie 12y ago
    So you couldn't very well keep them together :)
- jessriedel 12y ago
  To my understanding, this isn't correct. Storing anti-matter isn't really that hard. The Tevatron would store anti-protons in the recycler for hours, and I'm sure if it was important we could engineer much more efficient mechanisms. No, the hard part is creating the anti-matter in the first place and then cooling it down to a reasonable temperature at which it can be stored. All of our mechanisms for creating anti-matter generate anti-particles traveling at fantastic, highly relativistic speeds (and also consume much, much more energy to create then they contain in mass energy). Cooling them down without loosing them all to annihilation is very difficult. But once they're cool, it's not so bad.
  - darkmighty 12y ago
    Oh I'm sure you're right, didn't know that (my knowledge comes from years of exaggerated Scientific American articles :) ). I suppose the cooling is electromagnetic, the whole process must be really difficult! Cool it while keeping those atoms from interacting from stray particles if the vacuum isn't perfect.

sitkack 12y ago

I am going to cite Clarke's [0] first law. | When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws

kachnuv_ocasek 12y ago
Well, I'm neither distinguished nor elderly scientist, so I may be right.
- sitkack 12y ago
  May you grow old, earn awards and be proven wrong.