Warp drive looks more promising than ever in recent NASA studies

GizMag ^ | October 3, 2012 | Dr. Brian Dodson

[WhiskeyX]

It was 1965 when a Liberal professor of chemistry at the university invited the public to an evening seminar, and the topic of the seminar was human interstellar space travel. Our teacher, a combat B-29 veteran of the 10th Air Force raids on Japan in WWII went to no little trouble and expense to take a couple of us to this seminar, because he knew it would interest us. Unfortunately, this Liberal professor spent the first ten minutes of the seminar ridiculing the very idea that humans could ever travel the vast distances of interstellar space and then changed the subject to discussions of Boron and other chemistry topics having no relation whatsoever to the topic of the seminar for which we traveled so far. The professor had the bad manners to refuse to hear from us or anyone else anything whatsoever about the multi-generation asteroid based interstellar spacecraft we knew were already becoming hypothetically possible with 20th-21st Century technologies. The teacher was highly amused when we answered his question about our impression of the university and its professor when we remarked how we had just seen an ill mannered and educated idiot in its natural habitat.

[Greysard]

I may need to go out and sit on a rock in my back yard to ponder this.

A backyard is a good place to do the following experiment.

Take an infinitely stretchable rubber thread and tie it to two fence posts. This is your space. Then grip the thread near one post and drag that point all the way to the other post. That's how the FTL spaceship would travel within a very small time. Note that if there is an ant sitting on the thread where you gripped it, the ant is not in motion relative to the thread. If you ask the ant, he will tell you that suddenly the space in front of him compacted, the space behind him stretched, and he was propelled - without moving - all the way along the thread.

Another experiment - that requires an oceanfront property - is the wave. Water rises, forms a wave and then falls. The wave itself is moving, but the particles of water do not. If you ride the wave you can move pretty fast, even though the water itself is not moving (other than vertically.)

Alcubierre drive compresses the space in front of the bubble and stretches it back after the bubble passes. In essence, the bubble is riding the wave:

As things are, there are a few small difficulties remaining, such as the need to have considerable mass of exotic matter. Some calculations put it to be larger than the mass of this Universe; but other calculations say that a few milligrams will suffice. To make things worse, nobody on this planet have ever seen exotic matter; nor anyone knows how to make one.

[blueunicorn6]

Can you imagine the stop-spike-strip the Highway Patrol would have to have?

[WhiskeyX]

That has never been the idea or the way to colonize the Solar System. The permanent colonization of the Solar System can be accomplished only by self-sustaining economies. The costs are simply too astronomical for such an effort to be sustained by any form of deficit government spending imaganiable. The Earth’s gravitational well is simply too expensive in energy to permit very much transport out of the gravitational well. Human colonization of space will become sustainable only after the off-planet presence has become a net exporter of goods and services to the Earth and itself. Necessarily, this will begin with very small numbers of humans providing extremely high value products and services to the Earth. Later on humans will produce goods and services for the extraterrestrial industries and economy that will in turn expand the extraterrestrial human populations, infrastructures, economies, and habitats. After the extraterrestrial human population reaches the point where it outnumbers the human population of the Earth, you will find the extraterrestrial population’s ancestors come from only a very small number of original space emigrants who were the pioneers of the colonization of the Solar System. More than 99.9% of Earth’s present day population would never have any descendants among the extrateresrial populations.

It was once observed that if there ever were a hypothetical instantaneous trasporter to beam emigrants off of the Earth to extraterrestrial habitats because the Earth and its remaining inhabitants were doomed to destruction, it would be impossible to evacuate more than a fraction of the Earth’s population. The reason given was that humans would breed more humans faster than the transporters could instantaneously transport them off of the Earth. I don’t know wheether or not their math would hold up to scrutiny, but the general principle is certainly applicable in the case of colonizing the Solar System with currently envisioned technologies.

[Personal Responsibility]

To take your example forward, a sailor on a ship may not seem to be moving but if the ship hit something, he’d get thrown around no?

[Rides_A_Red_Horse]

A simple Infinite Improbability Drive!

---

I need a pangalactic gargle blaster!

[coloradan]

The Lorentz transform doesn’t warp space in the way that the inflationary universe expanded, which was the point the poster I responded to was wondering about, having apparently found a contradiction. (”Can things move faster than light or can’t they?) I was trying to resolve that contradiction. I am well aware of the asymptotic nature of approaching c.

[ffusco]

Not if you raised your shields which is standard Federation procedure during warp drive ;)

[NicknamedBob]

"The permanent colonization of the Solar System can be accomplished only by self-sustaining economies. The costs are simply too astronomical for such an effort to be sustained by any form of deficit government spending imaganiable.

The Earth’s gravitational well is simply too expensive in energy to permit very much transport out of the gravitational well. Human colonization of space will become sustainable only after the off-planet presence has become a net exporter of goods and services to the Earth and itself."

The most valuable material in space will not be what we send from here, other than our mechanical and organizational skills. It will be the material that is already there.

Have you not heard that for an item to be launched into space, it has to be very valuable, and very needed? What then of the stuff that is already there?

What is needed, in space, is the ability to use the energy that is there, on the material that is there, with the design purposes that we have here. That can mean sending humans, or letting them operate machines remotely to gather, process, and manufacture things that will be needed for other activities.

In building colonies in the New World, the Old World did not send pre-packaged colonies. They sent tools, and workers to employ them. The forests of the New World became the ships of the whole world.

The ships of the Solar System will be made off Earth. Eventually, system colonies will trade with each other more than they will with Earth, for what will Earth have that they would need?

[GeronL]

bump

[NoCmpromiz]

Infinite Improbability Drive

Better stock up on advanced tea substitute...

[NicknamedBob]

"Take an infinitely stretchable rubber thread and tie it to two fence posts. This is your space. Then grip the thread near one post and drag that point all the way to the other post. That's how the FTL spaceship would travel within a very small time. Note that if there is an ant sitting on the thread where you gripped it, the ant is not in motion relative to the thread. If you ask the ant, he will tell you that suddenly the space in front of him compacted, the space behind him stretched, and he was propelled - without moving - all the way along the thread."

If the thread stretches, the ant will discover that his grips upon the thread will stretch apart as well. He may need to release his fore-grips and hind-grips to avoid becoming a stretched ant.

This situation is reminiscent of Niven's description of orbiting a "Neutron Star". His pilot was forced to position himself at the very middle of his ship, and present a minimal fore-and-aft aspect to the intensely variable tidal gravity effects.

Similarly, a black hole event horizon has been described as a place where one of the ordinary three axes of spacial coordinates is replaced by one of time.

This riding-the-wave technique for moving through space-time sounds like an application of gravitational distortion.

All I can offer at the moment, as a perplexed student of such phenomena, is the faint hope that the same kind of phenomenon which allows an electrical circuit to mimic a large quantity of atoms whose electrons are all arranged in a synchronized pattern, may be replicated in nuclear vibrational energies and modes which will similarly duplicate the effects of gravity.

If such an application of gravitational "magnetism" could be developed, either space travel itself may become easier, or faster-than-light travel may be in our grasp.

[GeronL]

Let’s hope the rubber band doesn’t snap...

[NicknamedBob]

It’s infinitely stretchable. The ant should hope no one gives it a twang.

Such items are down-loadable from the Topological Institute, if you have a use for them.

[GeronL]

If their testbed detects even a hint of spacetime distortion, it will be one of the biggest events ever, assuming we survive the twang. lol

It’ll take a lot of unmanned tests to get it right probably.

[Gene Eric]

>> was about 30 million billion times the speed of light...

Only if we could ride our debt.

[Gene Eric]

LOL

[Gene Eric]

>> but the particles of water do not.

In the vertical they do, but not the horizontal plane.

[Greysard]

If the thread stretches, the ant will discover that his grips upon the thread will stretch apart as well. He may need to release his fore-grips and hind-grips to avoid becoming a stretched ant.

That is true if the grip size is zero (a point object.) However the plot that I linked (that came from Wikipedia) has a large flat area in the middle. Looks like the inside of the bubble is completely isolated from the effects on the boundary. In your ant-stretching experiment you can achieve the same if you allow sufficient space (in the single dimension of the thread) to grip it. You can thread a little plastic ball onto the string, for example, with both holes glued to the string. The ant within that ball will not encounter any ill effects. Just try not to glue the ant.

[Greysard]

It was once observed that if there ever were a hypothetical instantaneous trasporter to beam emigrants off of the Earth to extraterrestrial habitats because the Earth and its remaining inhabitants were doomed to destruction, it would be impossible to evacuate more than a fraction of the Earth’s population. The reason given was that humans would breed more humans faster than the transporters could instantaneously transport them off of the Earth. I don’t know wheether or not their math would hold up to scrutiny

It's not too difficult to find that out. The population of Earth grows pretty slow - so slow that we can treat it as a constant. (It does not change considerably within a year or two.)

There are 6 billion people on the planet. Let's say the average lifespan is 70 years (all countries combined.) Within 70 years 6 billion people will die, and another 6 billion people will be born to replace them. This means that every year (6,000,000,000/70) = 85.7 million people are born, or 235,000 per day. That's a serious number.

Now, let's assume we have a teleport that accepts a single file of people walking into it. People can walk at 2.5 mph, and you want them to be spaced by 2 yards. 2.5 miles of the line will contain 2,200 people, and they will go through the portal within 1 hour. Since the teleport will not be closing for lunch, 2,200 * 24 = 52,800. So now we know, we need about five teleports - or one large enough to admit five people abreast. This does not look like an impossible requirement, assuming that you have the technology for constructing a teleport across the galaxy :-)