Posted on 05/18/2021 12:11:52 PM PDT by Red Badger
Military first, then hand-me-downs to police later?
Flying cars. Get yours here: https://www.ehang.com/ehangaav/
Warp drives, well, the physics hasn’t gotten much past the point of hopeful misunderstandings.
I wonder what these guys talk about in the bar after bowling on Friday nights?
Relativity gives me a headache.
You can only measure velocity relative to some other object, not relative to empty space itself, and you cannot move faster than the speed of light relative to any other object. So if you launch two spacecraft, each going 90% of the speed of light relative to you but in opposite directions, how fast are they going relative to each other?
I know there is a mathematical formula to calculate it (which is far beyond my recollection of my 40 year old college calculus and physics classes), but conceptually it makes my head hurt.
There are lots of discussions about building spaceships which accelerate at just one G (or less), and approach light speed in a reasonable time. Problem seems how much fuel is required to maintain that acceleration that long; remember, it takes rockets a starting load of around a million pounds of fuel just to push a few G for a few minutes. After that first push, spacecraft just coast (taking clever advantage of orbital/gravity mechanics for further acceleration).
Military would have no use for them. Your problem with a flying car is it’s a worst of both worlds scenario. In car mode you’re going to have these inconvenient wings to deal with, so either your vehicle will have a huge footprint or you’ll have to fold them up like the worst rag top ever. Either way they’ll add weight and drag. As a plane because the car body isn’t aerodynamic in the right way your lift will be limited and its carrying capacity will be low. Then of course you gotta find room for all that gearing to have the engine either turning wheels relatively slowly or a propeller really fast. That will take up space and weight. Rich collectors of oddities would be about the only market for the crappy plane/car.
“Problem seems how much fuel is required to maintain that acceleration that long”
With our current understanding of physics the best way to get to the stars would be an array of solar powered lasers on the moon. They would be focused on light sails of a space craft. The craft could then steadily accelerate to a significant portion of light speed.
More importantly, why do you exist?
Yes, he most certainly did. I believe he stated it in one of his New York Times articles, which they like to lock up behind a paywall, but I’ll try to find a link to it for you when I get a chance.
You may be confused because of course he talks about “length contraction”, but there is a very good reason that although he called the correlating effect “time dilation”, he did not use the term “space contraction”, but rather “length contraction” instead. That was a very deliberate choice on Einstein’s part.
No problemo. All you have to do is steal it from neighboring universes. But you can't just take big bites out of people's universes without making a lot of enemies. So be prepared for that.
Bingo! This planet has spawned a bunch slugs compared to the intelligence needed to engage beings in other parts of the universe, should they exist.
-PJ
Eventually, you’ll need to slow down and stop.
Correct, that is the big unsolved problem. The good news is once you launch you will have several years to figure that part out.
------No he didn’t.
Well considering it was all at one time smaller than a BB wouldn't that be compressed and what it is now, be expanded? Where was space then since it wasn't needed?
There is a really cool freeware program out there called “Celestia” that allows you to travel around the universe with your computer. It is most excellent, though of late there seems to have been little development on the project. You really do not have any idea how freaking huge the universe is, until you start traveling around it, even going at hyperluminal speeds.
I did some experiments were I set it up to travel to one of the nearer stars at 1AU/sec. That is an insane speed, but it still took weeks.
Celestia is HIGHLY recommended for anyone with kids.
Light sails are interesting, but precision is presumed problematic.
“So if spacetime is just a combination of time and space, and the space itself cannot be warped, then that only leaves the time element. That is the thing that is actually being warped to produce the effect we see as gravity. Gravity is an effect of warped time, not warped space.”
This is absolutely false. The three dimensions of length are altered by gravity just as surely as the fourth dimension of time; in special and general relativity, the only difference between length and time is their opposite signs in the distance metric.
Couple this with all the UFO stuff leaking out and I’d bet a big reveal is on the way.
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