Posted on 11/24/2012 1:33:34 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The first steps towards interstellar travel have been taken, but the stars are very far away. Voyager 1 is about 17 light-hours distant from Earth and is traveling with a velocity of 0.006 percent of light speed, meaning it will take about 17,000 years to travel one light-year. Fortunately, the elusive "warp drive" now appears to be evolving past difficulties with new theoretical advances and a NASA test rig under development to measure artificially generated warping of space-time.
The warp drive broke away from being a wholly fictional concept in 1994, when physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested that faster-than-light (FTL) travel was possible if you remained still on a flat piece of spacetime inside a warp bubble that was made to move at superluminal velocity. Rather like a magic carpet. The main idea here is that, although no material objects can travel faster than light, there is no known upper speed to the ability of spacetime itself to expand and contract. The only real hint we have is that the minimum velocity of spacetime expansion during the period of cosmological inflation was about 30 million billion times the speed of light...
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmag.com ...
On the grand macroscopic level what makes the bend in the paper is the gravitational properties of matter which curves space and time to its limits in a singularity or Black Hole. Singularities do not necessarily need to be the size of collapsed stars, but can be in the sub-atomic ranges of sizes. Some of the speculative areas of physics envision how space-time is a constant ferment of these singularities constantly coming into and out of existence all of the time, and creeating a wormhole bridging distant parts of the Universe or perhaps eveen different universes in related branes is a matter of expanding some of these quantum mechanical singularities.
One of the intriging questions is whether or not one of these hypothetical warp bubles would exhibit any physical dimensions within normal space-time or would it appear to disappear into a dimensionless point or singularity until the shutdown of the warp bubble?
I was working on my grocery list, that was the missing item.
Willie Green, is that you ?
...just when you think you are somewhere no one has ever been before there is some SOB in a pickup truck...
Why do all that mucking around with hyperspace when a bistromathic drive is far more simple and efficient?
The Irish have brogues, Scots have burrs.
(Red background bumper sticker)
If this sticker is blue you are driving WAY too fast!
A major problem with traveling at these speeds is a simple one: while space is almost all vacuum, there is debri in space, and the higher the travel speed, the more likely of, in time, colliding with a piece of something in space......
And the technology to detect such debri in time to alter course at such high speeds I believe will be impossible.
Who is willing to spend years traveling in space only to be wiped out by a small piece of space debri that would demolish a vessel traveling as such speeds?
Acceleration won’t be an issue as one inside the bubble would be stationary. Collisions with debris could be a serious threat, though, since hitting a speck of dust at such speeds would make Fat Man look like a firecracker.
I believe the dust and debris would simply go around the outside of the bubble.
“And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.” Matthew 24:31
Makes you think, doesn’t it....
” Mind you, we don’t know how to get that quantity either, but it feels a more likely prospect.”
End of story
How will this be tested? You turn it on in a lab and the lab folds up on itself along with half a city.
Heck, The Asteroids could be made into ships themselves, Just make very large hollow cylinders and they can fly among the stars gathering resources as needed pretty much as fas as the universe goes using not much more than the technology we already understand.
And that could happen after we have inspected every nook and cranny of our own solar system.
Oscillating between the null locations of the Lagrangian Points of the solar system, as they wind their clockwork way around, there is a natural path between the planets that has been called the Interplanetary Superhighway. It is the equivalent, by comparison to Hohmann Transfer Orbits, of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System.
We cam move cargo and colonies around, once we get into orbit somewhere. As Heinlein said, "Once you're in Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere."
Once we're well settled into the Solar System, we're halfway to the stars.
Humanity colonized all of Earth at a walking pace.
bump
I’m just not sure getting the 1% to pay their fair share will fund colonization of the solar system.
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