Interesting Ideas on FTL Travel

[Dryson]

I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

Semantics and nothing more.

If you take away the obvious which in this case is that a Sun and Blackhole both produce gravity that effects the velocity of light speed and actually creates mass then when both have been countered and there is no gravity then faster than the speed of light is possible.

 

[Metryq]

Semantics and nothing more.

Speaking of which, you cannot even form a coherent sentence, let alone crack the secrets of nature by slapping together random bits of pop science. Light travels faster than the speed of light away from gravity?

 

[Dryson]

Quantum Vacuum Virtual Plasma Thruster

Have you ever wondered what a Quantum Vacuum Virtual Plasma thruster is? You might have, and not even realized it. The engine, seen above, is considered a bit of an anomaly. Previously laughed-off as science fiction nonsense, the actual engine has been built by two separate teams, and verified by NASA as legitimately usable.

The engine was initially scoffed at, with top minds saying it violated all known theories of propulsion. The entire scheme violates Newton’s Laws of Motion — which for the jet propulsion crowd — mean an accelerant must fuel a rocket. This engine uses no fuel, and can even be powered by solar energy.
So how does this engine accomplish combustion without fuel? Microwaves bouncing off one another in a controlled environment. The microwaves are generated by electricity, which can be created any way we know how, even via the sun (or a potato). The absence of fuel means the thruster can, in theory, work forever so long as the hardware doesn’t break down.
The engine was first tested by a team of Chinese scientists in 2009, who found it to work. Originally imagined by Roger Shawyer, this EmDrive was recently built by an American scientist named Guido Fetta. Working with NASA, Fetta showed the engine was capable of producing thrust.
While the engine NASA tested doesn’t produce enough thrust to power a rocket to the moon and back, it is much more important. This engine — which works, and has been proven by two separate teams who did not work together — can produce a nearly infinite amount of energy and thrust. Those times you wondered how the crew of the Enterprise got around, pouncing on warp speeds as they saw fit?

http://www.slashgear.com/this-nasa-proven-engine-might-change-space-travel-forever-01339521/


Inside of the sun there is a process at work that creates the speed of light velocity if that same process could be duplicated to even provide half the speed of light velocity life would begin to look pretty good for humanity.

 

[sojourner]

Inside of the sun there is a process at work that creates the speed of light velocity

No.

 

[Dryson]

Quantum Vacuum Virtual Plasma Thruster

Have you ever wondered what a Quantum Vacuum Virtual Plasma thruster is? You might have, and not even realized it. The engine, seen above, is considered a bit of an anomaly. Previously laughed-off as science fiction nonsense, the actual engine has been built by two separate teams, and verified by NASA as legitimately usable.

The engine was initially scoffed at, with top minds saying it violated all known theories of propulsion. The entire scheme violates Newton’s Laws of Motion — which for the jet propulsion crowd — mean an accelerant must fuel a rocket. This engine uses no fuel, and can even be powered by solar energy.
So how does this engine accomplish combustion without fuel? Microwaves bouncing off one another in a controlled environment. The microwaves are generated by electricity, which can be created any way we know how, even via the sun (or a potato). The absence of fuel means the thruster can, in theory, work forever so long as the hardware doesn’t break down.
The engine was first tested by a team of Chinese scientists in 2009, who found it to work. Originally imagined by Roger Shawyer, this EmDrive was recently built by an American scientist named Guido Fetta. Working with NASA, Fetta showed the engine was capable of producing thrust.
While the engine NASA tested doesn’t produce enough thrust to power a rocket to the moon and back, it is much more important. This engine — which works, and has been proven by two separate teams who did not work together — can produce a nearly infinite amount of energy and thrust. Those times you wondered how the crew of the Enterprise got around, pouncing on warp speeds as they saw fit?

http://www.slashgear.com/this-nasa-proven-engine-might-change-space-travel-forever-01339521/

Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster Wiki -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_vacuum_plasma_thruster

The now electrically charged plasma is then exposed to a crossed electric and magnetic field, inducing a force on the particles of the plasma in the E×B direction, which is orthogonal to the applied fields.

Perhaps the electric and magnetic field grid need to be moved in manner of direction along an axis similar to how the layers of the sun move along an axis of direction.

When a body is at rest, the body being the electric and magnetic field grid, it is only consuming energy. But just like a human body at rest the body still consumes energy while the at rest sections do not produce any other type of energy which a body in motion fully does. Consuming energy at all levels while releasing energy at various levels while in motion but consuming more energy that is released while at rest. So perhaps if the electric and magnetic field grid were made to work and based off of the consumption of energy they consume the grid might actually release more energy because of the interaction of two equally at work bodies in motion.

If you take the palm of your hand and move it back forth in a circular and counter circular motion on the other palm you can feel the heat being generated as your body is using energy. If you do the same motion with both palms you generate more heat while using a lesser amount of energy.

Inside of the sun there is a process at work that creates the speed of light velocity if that same process could be duplicated to even provide half the speed of light velocity life would begin to look pretty good for humanity.

...no one cares what a Cartoon Avatar has to say...

 

[Metryq]

...no one cares what a Cartoon Avatar has to say...

Now there's a compelling scientific argument that trumps all evidence.

This allegedly "reactionless" thruster is highly controversial. Like the "Casimir force," the effects of this drive are so nebulous that scientists are not even sure what they are measuring—if they are measuring anything at all. An EE I know would call this "the tailwind spec." Thus, calling this a breakthrough in space propulsion is counting chickens before the eggs are even laid. If funding can be found, something may come of the research, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The cover-up must be a conspiracy by Big Oil to keep everyone here on Earth. /s

 

[publiusr]

A better idea, from a poster here:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/08/elon-musk-says-that-sustainable-human.html

"I really think that if you have that 10 gigawatt-year (thermal) reactor, it would make more sense to "take the hit" and turn it to electricity, then using a high-amperage ion accelerator, accelerate caesium or barium or some other I / II column heavy ion down the track, and out the end. Using superconducting microwave resonators (Q > 10⁹), the exhaust Isp could be well over 1,000,000. Quite easily, in fact."

"Now this wouldn't result in much quantitative thrust, but it would result in a lot of kinetic energy and momentum transfer over years of service. Thousands of times more thrust than even nuclear fired reactions such as you've been imagining."

"A sesame-seed's worth of radium, placed on a pinhead, mounted a few inches between a lead plate and an aluminum foil wire grid (quite airy), all three mounted on a block of teflon or glass, with the lead isolated, but the grill electrically attached to the pin, will do the following. The radium will emit a powerful flux of alpha particles."

"The lead plate will temporarily absorb the ones flying its way. They will charge the lead plate positive. With conservation of charge, the radium + grid becomes quite negative. Over time, the lead plate will become so positive that it will deflect the alpha particles flying its way. "

"They'll generally be deflected toward the negative charged grill. Thus, viewed well outside the system, there is a net flux of high-speed alphas heading almost entirely away from the lead plate. Most of the kinetic energy of the spontaneous fission of the radium is converted to kinetic energy without heat loss."

"The amount of thrust is very small, of course. But the efficiency is very high, and the stored fission energy of the radium is maximally utilized. This same reaction can occur for any radionuclide species that emits charged particles. However, ones that generate the heaviest particles will give the best energy-to-monentum transfer."

I think that's the "fission fragment" method, or something like it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket

That's great over a long haul, but it is best to kick it out of Earth Moon with a big high energy cryogenic upper stage, to get the best use away from our gravity well.

 

[Kemaiku]

Inside of the sun there is a process at work that creates the speed of light velocity

No.

Yup, QI even covered this with stating how mind boggling long it takes for photons created in the suns interior to make it to the outer surface, the Sun works incredibly slowly.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I don't know where I got the idea that this forum was supposed to be about science.

The only interesting "scientific ideas" that can come out of this thread, or indeed this forum lately, might be new entries to be included in DSM-6.

 

[Tim Walker]

Atomic Rocket has a review of FTL drives. Unforetunatedly, I am having trouble posting the link.

 

[Metryq]

Inside of the sun there is a process at work that creates the speed of light velocity

No.

Yup, QI even covered this with stating how mind boggling long it takes for photons created in the suns interior to make it to the outer surface, the Sun works incredibly slowly.

Everything allegedly happening inside the Sun is purely theoretical. Until we plumb the depths and do some actual measurements, we don't really know.

With that said, the gravity-driven fusion model does not imagine photons to travel straight-line from their point of emission to the surface. So if that's what you believe, it is incorrect.

Photons emitted from one atom will be absorbed by another, and the theoretical mean density inside the Sun is such that a photon is thought to bounce around for a very long time before finally reaching the surface.

Imagine you are blindfolded and dropped into the middle of a very big crowd. As you bounce off others in the crowd, you may get turned around and even head back in. (You and the photon are not bubbles moving in a fixed direction to the surface.)

Some photons may make it to the surface much faster than others. But there are a lot of atoms in the way, and they will absorb/reemit the photon over and over.

 

[Drone]

I don't know where I got the idea that this forum was supposed to be about science.

The only interesting "scientific ideas" that can come out of this thread, or indeed this forum lately, might be new entries to be included in DSM-6.

That's going to be quite aways down the road. Aren't there provisional addendums done, in which some of these valuable nuggets can be inserted, without having to wait all that time to share them with the wider world????

 

[sojourner]

Atomic Rocket has a review of FTL drives. Unforetunatedly, I am having trouble posting the link.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php

 

[gturner]

...no one cares what a Cartoon Avatar has to say...

Now there's a compelling scientific argument that trumps all evidence.

This allegedly "reactionless" thruster is highly controversial. Like the "Casimir force," the effects of this drive are so nebulous that scientists are not even sure what they are measuring—if they are measuring anything at all. An EE I know would call this "the tailwind spec." Thus, calling this a breakthrough in space propulsion is counting chickens before the eggs are even laid. If funding can be found, something may come of the research, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The cover-up must be a conspiracy by Big Oil to keep everyone here on Earth. /s

I'm going to cross post a comment I made on an aerospace blog back on Aug 2nd.

****

I doubt they’re doing what they think they’re doing, because the device is a simple piece of metal operating in the microwave region.

If there was a real, not-yet-understood effect that produces almost a Newton of thrust from a kilowatt of power, then RF engineers certainly didn’t know about it, and thus didn’t take extreme pains to avoid it in all the waveguides and antennas on our satellites, which hurl out kilowatts of radiated power. If the effect is real, it would be highly unlikely that the present satellite systems weren’t at least producing several micro-Newtons of thrust by accident, and since we didn’t care if an antenna was wildly off-axis to a satellite’s center of mass, all our communications satellites should have slowly started to tumble, then expended all their reaction control propellant trying to compensate for the mysterious microwave thrust, not to mention the huge effect such a thrust would have on their orbits.

But that didn’t happen, so I’ll note that it is easy to accidentally make a high-power circuit that’s also an electric motor or electromagnet. It’s so easy to accidentally do it that we always bolt the components down so nothing moves. (It’s also easy to accidentally turn any high-gain audio amplifier into a bad FM radio if you’re prototyping on it next to a 100 kW broadcast tower, but that’s something everybody figures out on their own.)

A few years ago I was doing some controls on a small scissors lift mounted on the back of a little electric maintenance truck, designed for changing light-bulbs in an aluminum plant. The platform had to be mostly fiberglass so the truck wouldn’t get flipped on its side from the invisible, propellantless forces you encounter when you park next to a pot with 300,000 amps DC running through, where shovels can be ripped right out of your hands. But of course there is an equal and opposite force being exerted on the pot of aluminum.

They’re measuring forces on their drive system using a torsion balance, so they’ve managed to build a rotor. By Newton’s first law, their rotor is being acted upon by an external force. By Newton’s third law, there’s some other body experience and equal and opposite force, so what I’d do is try to identify the stator. An easy way to do that is to take all their carefully calibrated lab equipment and shielding that surrounds the test article, and suspend it all from a tall ceiling with wire or string roughly 13 feet long, which should turn everything in the room into a pendulum. Then adjust the length of each string so each piece of equipment swings with a period of exactly four seconds. Then turn the thruster on and off every two seconds and see which pieces of equipment start swinging. Those would be the stators.

***

I'm reminded of the Hubble Space Telescope where the optical engineers did sophisticated interferometric testing but skipped the simple Foucault test. Foucault also made a cute pendulum test, and pendulums have all sorts of interesting uses, from measuring gravity with extreme accuracy to finding the center of percussion on a sword, which is why all the early physicists were studying impacts and pendular motions so intently, which gave us Newtonian mechanics. A macroscopic, desktop, wild violation of Newtonian mechanics is probably not going to come from a guy fiddling with a radio, who claims that by bending the sheet metal antenna he can make it fly.

 

[Metryq]

(It’s also easy to accidentally turn any high-gain audio amplifier into a bad FM radio if you’re prototyping on it next to a 100 kW broadcast tower, but that’s something everybody figures out on their own.)

That reminds me of an incident many years ago. A roommate and I lived next to a guy with a tractor cab (truck for "18-wheelers") in his driveway. This was a very fancy truck with slick paint job, chrome everywhere, and neon lighting. We knew instantly the day he added a booster to his CB radio. The speakers on our entertainment center—which was turned off—were buzzing away very clearly with every word the trucker said.

I remember my roommate stepping outside, "Hey, buddy, could you kill the booster while you're in the driveway? My cat and my toilet are vibrating with your radio chatter. Thanks."

Then there are hobbyists who make "lifters" (which is actually a result of moving air, not "anti-gravity").

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzZy1Aqleno[/yt]​

 

[gturner]

Speaking of that cute effect, I've been wondering whether a re-entering space vehicle could make beneficial use of the ionized air in the high-temperature plasma it creates in its shock wave.

 

[Metryq]

Speaking of that cute effect, I've been wondering whether a re-entering space vehicle could make beneficial use of the ionized air in the high-temperature plasma it creates in its shock wave.

I've wondered the same thing—but it probably depends on whether the ionization is due to the high temperature from aerobraking, or a built-up charge on the spacecraft from exposure. (Electric braking works on power tools and cars, why not spacecraft? Think of the ships in THE MATRIX.) Either way, I doubt the charge would be enough to do anything useful.

Too bad Tesla and Birkeland never got together. Imagine what they might have created.

 

[Kemaiku]

Photons emitted from one atom will be absorbed by another, and the theoretical mean density inside the Sun is such that a photon is thought to bounce around for a very long time before finally reaching the surface.

Which is precisely what QI stated, that it could take as much as thousands of years for any photon emission from the fusion reaction to actually "reach" the outer surface and leave.

Nothing about the Sun operates at faster than light speeds, which is what Dyson seems to be implying, that somewhere in there there are superluminal speeds happening regularly.

He has no basis for any of that, yet states that it "does happen" or so he thinks he read...somewhere.

 

[Dryson]

Then there are hobbyists who make "lifters" (which is actually a result of moving air, not "anti-gravity").

Instead of moving air? Why can't the same process be applied to particles in space?

If air molecules can be moved to apply a force against an object to cause it to move then particles in space should be able to be moved in the same manner to place a force against an object to cause the object to move.

Maybe not at half the speed of light but maybe a 1/4 speed of light which a lot faster than even a plasma rocket can travel.

Basically how it would work would be similar to how a hot air balloon works.

A large solar like sail attached to a large burner via cables with the cargo and crew compartments situated behind the burner with an access corridor running the entire length of the ship to the cargo and crew compartments would be the base design.

The burner would attract particles in space that generate a lot of thrust exhaust when heated due to their energy momentum increasing. The burner would 'heat' the space within the solar sail causing the particles to accelerate in an outward direction thus causing a force to be placed against the solar sail and forward momentum to be achieved.

Basically the idea is taking the Bussard Collector and reverse engineering some its functions to first take in particles and then convert them to directable energy.

 

[sojourner]

The bussard collector is a fictional device in a science fiction show. If you want to talk about technology in the Star Trek setting you're in the wrong forum.

Otherwise, your entire post :facepalm: