Geordie LaForge: "How do you do that?"
Q: "How? You just do it."
Posted on 03/08/2006 9:05:34 AM PST by SunkenCiv
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... 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... 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... 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." ...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."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
"Capt'n, that's all I can give ye!"
My pleasure.
Some years ago there was a goofy fraud going around claiming not only that time travel was possible, but that he'd built the machine to do it, and had in fact tried it out, going back in time, then returning (presumably remembering to take along one of his devices, plus a power supply). He said (with a straight face) that it was made possible by something he called the flux capacitor. :')
Well, tell them to hurry up already. Lazy engineers anyway...
:')
"One eyed, one horned, flyin' purple people eater" ping.
Were you saying something? I was on my break....
Hey, this story is 7 years old!
And they still haven't built the damn thing?
:)
Remember that it took over 100 years from neuton's therories of splitting atoms until Einstein cracked it and we build the bomb. Warp drive is probably only 60-100 years away from us.
Actually, it was just built and tested. Turned out they were wrong about the time dilation stuff, and wound up back in 1999.
:') Before some public scold turns up and berates you in an inappropriate manner... a quibble... Newton died in 1727, and didn't have anything to do with splitting atoms; Einstein wrote his papers on Relativity about 100 years ago; and controlled and uncontrolled nuclear reactions were arrived at by other people (Einstein meanwhile doubting that it was possible, although he did agree to put his signature to the letter sent to FDR) working in a different part of physics. :')
Unt zoe zimple. Vee substitute energy for matter unt matter for energy. Unt use gravitational energy to distort space. Zimple! :o)
Foorst vee haf to fint oudt vot gravity energy iss. Den dis varp stuf iss zimple.
Star trekking...Across the Universe...
Totally going foward, cause we can't find reverse!...
C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, let's go space truckin'...
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