"IS WARP DRIVE POSSIBLE?" - A discussion

[Dryson]

Is traveling at the speed of light possible? No. It's not. Even if it was, you'd need to accelerate and decelerate, and that would take a long time even at multiple gravities.

However, there might be a workaround somewhere, something concerning wormholes, space origami, or other theoretical parlor tricks.

Where is your proof that humanity can't travel at the speed of light?

Einstein said the light is energy and everyone is made of light. Therefore it isn't impossible to travel at FTL velocities, we just haven't found the means to do so yet.

 

[Dryson]

Warp could be described as space origami...

Interesting concept...folding the space around an object using origami shapes.

I am thinking that your idea involves the object being at the center point of all points of the origami and then moving to a new point when the origami flower opens.

 

[Santaman]

No, we're NOT made out of light, we're NOT made of photons, we're built out of the heavy stuff, you know, particles that have mass which will become infinite or near infinite a we approach lightspeed and prevents us from reaching it.

 

[StarCruiser]

Einstein said that NOTHING with MASS can travel at light speed.

Last time I checked, I had mass...so..?

 

[StarCruiser]

Theoretically possible but has ICF yet been demonstrated as viable for sustained energy generation on Earth never mind as a means of spacecraft propulsion? As far as I'm aware, even ignition conditions have not yet been obtained unlike with magnetic confinement. There would have to be vast improvements in implentation to make it practical for the purposes of propulsion.

I don't recall if anyone has even tried to prove or disprove the idea of ICF yet. No one seems willing to spend the money needed to even test it at any particular scale.

I would expect that some aspect of the idea could be proven in a lab (not the playful, furry kind of lab either!).

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

ICF has been researched for power generation for decades but not for propulsion applications as far as I know. It seems a fundamentally much more difficult problem in terms of miniaturisation and power requirements even if one does not add the problem of external fuel mass collection. It's probably easier and cheaper to prove the concept works for the former application before tackling the second.

 

[Dryson]

ICF has been researched for power generation for decades but not for propulsion applications as far as I know. It seems a fundamentally much more difficult problem in terms of miniaturisation and power requirements even if one does not add the problem of external fuel mass collection. It's probably easier and cheaper to prove the concept works for the former application before tackling the second.

Here's a question, if a rocket is propelling through space at 10,000 kph, full rocket propulsion capabilities and has thrusters on the front creating resistance to reduce the total forward velocity by 25%, when the forward thrusters are turned off, will stored energy potential increase the forward velocity of the rocket proportional to the total velocity achievable by the main rocket engines if the main rockets are firing at full potential?

 

[Deks]

There has been a new development it seems:
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-warp-barrier-faster-than-light.html

"Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel"

"This work has moved the problem of faster-than-light travel one step away from theoretical research in fundamental physics and closer to engineering. The next step is to figure out how to bring down the astronomical amount of energy needed to within the range of today's technologies, such as a large modern nuclear fission power plant. Then we can talk about building the first prototypes," says Lentz.

Energy requirements remain around the size of Jupiter - correction... its in the order of hundreds of times of Jupiter's mass.

"The energy required for this drive traveling at light speed encompassing a spacecraft of 100 meters in radius is on the order of hundreds of times of the mass of the planet Jupiter. The energy savings would need to be drastic, of approximately 30 orders of magnitude to be in range of modern nuclear fission reactors." He goes on to say: "Fortunately, several energy-saving mechanisms have been proposed in earlier research that can potentially lower the energy required by nearly 60 orders of magnitude." Lentz is currently in the early-stages of determining if these methods can be modified, or if new mechanisms are needed to bring the energy required down to what is currently possible.

 

[Deks]

If it were I, and it made sense energy-wise to do so, I'd make my proof-of-concept warp-capable ship just a small probe, capable of taking and transmitting pictures, and send it around our own solar system.
Just a thought.

Yup.
It would be a good way to get about the Solar system first, gather more data, improve on what we have for long voyages and send maybe more probes into other solar systems (before sending people - I'd surmise we'd need to check how the technology operates under long term first).
Hopefully we can use the same technology for communications across huge distances.

 

[dupersuper]

spacetime origami...

I think perhaps we need a theory of spacetime as an emergent property of something deeper in order to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics and to allow us to travel the cosmos in reasonable timespans - albeit we might still be subject to the strictures of special relativity - twin paradox included. However, we don't have direct access to that deeper realm so we are currently fumbling about in the cave even if we have slipped off some of our chains.

Sounds a little string theory-ish.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Sounds a little string theory-ish.

String theory doesn't explain where spacetime comes from as the theory is background independent. There have been attempts to incorporate spinor theory and similar to address this but I'm not sure how successful these are. There's also loop quantum gravity theory but this has shortcomings with respect to describing fundamental particles. Wolfram's branchial theory is another attempt but it requires trying to guess which fundamental automata rules are applicable.

To me, as I'm a nominalist, it seems like we just haven't yet invented a suitable form of mathematics to mimic the cosmos at a basal level. It might not even be possible to do so, which might have some significance.

 

[Non Sync]

NASA scientist Harold G. "Sonny" White published a paper in 2011 (Warp Field Mechanics 101) improved Alcubierre's designs, dramatically reducing the amount of exotic matter from a Jupiter sized amount to about the size of Voyager 1.

In April 2020, Jessica Gallanis and Eytan Halm Suchard published a patent application for a drive named the Alcubierre-White Warp Drive.

Things may be closer than we think, 2063 isn't that far away.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Neither was 2001.

 

[dupersuper]

Things may be closer than we think, 2063 isn't that far away.

We just have to get through those sanctuary districts, WWIII and the post-atomic horror (I hope no one here's a lawyer).

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Also, haven't all the Titan ballistic missiles been retired? That's going to be a problem.

 

[Dryson]

There has been a new development it seems:
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-warp-barrier-faster-than-light.html

I personally think if rocket designers work on incremental acceleration, such as the ION Drive, faster methods of ION Drive will lead to near FTL velocities.

"Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel"

"This work has moved the problem of faster-than-light travel one step away from theoretical research in fundamental physics and closer to engineering. The next step is to figure out how to bring down the astronomical amount of energy needed to within the range of today's technologies, such as a large modern nuclear fission power plant. Then we can talk about building the first prototypes," says Lentz.

Energy requirements remain around the size of Jupiter - correction... its in the order of hundreds of times of Jupiter's mass.

"The energy required for this drive traveling at light speed encompassing a spacecraft of 100 meters in radius is on the order of hundreds of times of the mass of the planet Jupiter. The energy savings would need to be drastic, of approximately 30 orders of magnitude to be in range of modern nuclear fission reactors." He goes on to say: "Fortunately, several energy-saving mechanisms have been proposed in earlier research that can potentially lower the energy required by nearly 60 orders of magnitude." Lentz is currently in the early-stages of determining if these methods can be modified, or if new mechanisms are needed to bring the energy required down to what is currently possible.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

There are muon-catalysed fusion drive proposals but I've never really looked into these. The following example is for a 0.08c drive, which would presumably be most useful for zipping around the solar system but not for travel to other stars in a reasonable time frame.

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[Deks]

NASA scientist Harold G. "Sonny" White published a paper in 2011 (Warp Field Mechanics 101) improved Alcubierre's designs, dramatically reducing the amount of exotic matter from a Jupiter sized amount to about the size of Voyager 1.

In April 2020, Jessica Gallanis and Eytan Halm Suchard published a patent application for a drive named the Alcubierre-White Warp Drive.

Things may be closer than we think, 2063 isn't that far away.

So, according to that, the thicker the Warp bubble is, the less energy you need to expend.
The robotic/automated space-craft would achieve a speed of 10c and reach Alpha Centaury in 0.43 years (or just over 5 months).
Quite useful to establish a large array of scanners in SOL itself so we can get a better look at what's happening in our own neighborhood (not to mention further out) and also send probes to other nearby solar systems for surveying (like Alpha Centaury and bit further away).

Heck, we could potentially use this for automated self-replicating manufacturer bots to get around our own solar system and construct a Dyson Swarm in a smaller amount of time by disassembling Mercury and also harvesting the local asteroid field... and quite possibly, automation would be able to make more exotic matter much faster in space than we could probably on Earth.

Now the question remains... what form would this exotic matter actually be in?
And if the energy requirements are indeed improved and merged with other breakthroughs... what kind of power source would it have to be given the improvements in efficiency?
Fusion?
Antimatter?
Something else?

EDIT: On another, this further makes me think that Impulse engines on Trek are nothing more than subspace field manipulation generators. In that fiction, the low level subspace field is used to reduce the mass of the ship and achieve large speeds - at least 75 000 km/s.

Couldn't we use similar principles for Warp drive combined with all energy efficiencies and create a SUBLIGT engine so we can use it with say conventional power sources (and possibly Fusion when its done) if the efficiencies from the Phys.org paper I posted bring it in line with conventional nuclear power generation?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Exotic matter - that has to be extracted from unicorns, I believe.

 

[Vger23]

I’m sure people 300 years ago would have thought landing missions on Mars or the moon were pure fantasy. What about thin black devices that basically do everything for you? Television and radio? Airplanes and cars? Splitting the atom?

We are so arrogant about the current state of science. Shit is only impossible until we figure out it is not.