Warp Drive Study - UFO-Like Design Possibly Key for Working Prototype

a reply to: jeep3r

Did you read the paper? Im confused it basically says we might be able to effect clocks in a region of space has nothing to do with moving anywhere. I guess if you slow down time you can in theory travel faster according to an observer in the effected time buble. But anyone outside it you would be moving just as slow as normal. The other part discusses how we can evaluate warp bubles with the asumption that we can treat spacetime as pressure variants. There is no indication we could make this asumption and they dont even try to explain why we should.

So im going to say this paper really has nothing to do with moving an object through spacetime and more how to evaluate the effects if we could. I really dont see how this advances anything as far as warping space. And effecting time doesnt seem like a great way to travel be like moving at a turtle pace but slowing time. I guess if you slowed down time to the point of 1 hour being 10000 years may have some use but you wouldnt want to be that pilot unless your goal was to travel to the future.

originally posted by: dragonridr
a reply to: jeep3r

So im going to say this paper really has nothing to do with moving an object through spacetime and more how to evaluate the effects if we could.

That conclusion would make sense, their paper does not seem to describe how to move an object through spacetime but rather how to move the warp bubble itself through our actual universe in a way that doesn't violate known physics. And more importantly, they provide a mathematical basis for this approach.

I did read some portions of the paper but mostly relied on other sources for interpretation, since I'm not a theoretical physicist myself. I guess their main achievement is to have shown that Einstein's field equations do have a solution for spacetime involving positive energy (ie. applying known physics). Which again results in a certain distribution of masses and energies in that particular spacetime configuration (one that makes sense).

originally posted by: jeep3r
I'm not pretending to be an expert in this area, far from it, but the key point seems to be that if you want to be most energy-efficient with your warp-drive, the spacetime bubble it creates should be flat and wide.

They probably call it "warp drive" because that sounds like a cool term, but the paper, while using the term "warp drive" does not actually describe a warp drive, it describes a warp bubble or spacetime bubble as you called it, and it discusses how it would distort if it had some form of propulsion, but, they do not specify any means of propulsion, only vaguely wave their hands metaphorically and say something about black holes being a possible energy source for propulsion but give no details if they are talking about actual black holes, or making micro black holes as part of the propulsion, or whatever. Their paper says this:

Generally, there are no self- consistent warp drive solutions proposed in the literature which can self-accelerate at all from zero velocities, not to mention gain superluminal speeds.

So it's really more of a downer for warp drive, they say there are no warp drive solutions in the literature which can self accelerate, and that includes their own paper which doesn't provide any means of self acceleration, so what are you going to accelerate the warp bubble with? They don't offer a solution, they metaphorically "wave their hands" and say maybe someone can figure out a way to propel the bubble:

Finally, since all warp drive objects require propulsion in order to accelerate, any practical implementation of such objects would have to be asymmetric in shape, since the back part would have to accommodate a propellant exhaust system. One may further hypothesise on setups, wherein black hole-like regions of the spacetime may be used to produce accretion power. Accretion of material onto black holes is known to be a few tens of times more efficient at extracting rest-mass energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation from the material than nuclear burning (Frank et al. 2002). Such a process could potentially provide both a source of energy and a source of propulsion.

So read that, there's no maths in that paragraph. The part about "the back part would have to accommodate a propellant exhaust system" is plain english and pretty familiar sounding, like rocket motors or ion drives or whatever other propellant exhaust systems we already have. They don't provide any real solution to propulsion of the warp bubble that I can see wo why call it a warp drive? Maybe because warp drive sounds cool, I guess?

Moreover, the geometry of said spacetime is circular in nature.

All this would make the ideal passenger area basically look "disk-shaped" (circular, flat, wide), in other words: it would resemble the classic and probably most reported shape of UFOs in the whole of history.

You don't seem to have noticed this, but your diagrams are not flat and wide in the same orientation, so it's completely unlike the disc reports which have them as in your second illustration, a disc moving to the right is wide horizontally and thin vertically. Your drawing on the top shows the exact opposite, it's thin horizontally and wide vertically for travel to the right in the direction of the arrow.

Just coincidence?

It doesn't even make sense to ask if two things which are complete opposites are alike by coincidence! You shouldn't need any physics or math to see the difference, just that you meed to rotate one of those illustrations 90 degrees to get them to look anything alike.

originally posted by: jeep3r

originally posted by: Bluntone22
a reply to: jeep3r

Whenever I read these type of stories I can't help but think of old alchemists trying to turn lead into gold.

They failed, if I recall correctly?

We can finally turn lead into gold, at a cost many times higher than the market value for gold, but the old alchemists didn't figure out how to do that.

Well, at any rate their theories will be put to the test, by global peer-review and experimental data. But I guess I know what you mean: even if their theory is correct, the practical hurdles might still be insurmountable.

They don't really have a theory for how to accelerate the bubble, just broad hand-waving and not very well specified speculative statements, see above.

originally posted by: moebius
How about we stop calling them drives then.

Good point.
Far from getting me excited about warp drives,this paper was somewhat of a downer for warp drives.
Not only did they re-emphasize all the known problems with the FTL Alcubierre drive which everyone already knew about, like they take lots of negative energy, which by the way nobody knows how to make, and too much of it. They also pointed out the lack of "self consistency" or I suppose you could call it a kind of math error in Alcubierre's warp drive theory.

So that kills the superluminal or faster than light idea we had.
Then they come up with this slower than light "warp bubble" but call it a drive for some reason even though they don't give any specific means to accelerate it, they let someone else have the pleasure of figuring out that part.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

You're obviously a lot more familiar with warp drives than I am, so thanks for your additional comments.

The shape of the warp bubble (and whatever is inside the passenger area) seems to make a difference, though, in terms of mass-energy distributions and ways to circumvent the issue of negative energy requirements in the field equations. At least that's what I understood from all the additional sources.

One of the authors uses the terms "shield" or "plate" in a related article to describe the ideal shape, whereas it would compress spacetime in front of its central axis. One would assume that it would also depend on the process of bending spacetime itself, if one were to determine whether or not that motion would look as if the object were tilted by 90° (if seen from a location outside of the warp bubble).

Apart from that, I think there are some further interesting questions one could ask. For example, could this be the method of propulsion for any kind of vehicle with passengers and would the effects of its technology be reminiscent of those reported in connection with historical UFO sightings? Here I'm thinking of things like certain EM-Effects (stalling engines), missing time, changing colors depending on rate of speed and acceleration, erratic zig-zag maneuvers, pendulum motion, angel hair, sudden appearance/disappearance, excessive acceleration etc.

Although we can't yet conceive of any practical warp drive implementation, maybe some of the aforementioned effects are indeed related to the manipulation of spacetime, which is essentially what a warp drive would be doing. Just speculating, of course, but maybe we'll get some answers in future from this kind of research...

a reply to: 1947boomer

Light will be able to transit a warp bubble.

I wouldn't be so sure. It more than likely depends on the shape and topology of the warp bubble, as well as the mechanism used to warp space-time, some designs have an oscillating warp field to conserve energy.

a reply to: jeep3r

I think where ever you read about this paper the person interpreted it their way. And wanted to believe this paper was something its not like useful for example. to some it up it says lets magically figure out how to create a warp buble and if we do we can evaluate the best shapes if we assume they act the same as pressure variants would. But we have no indcation this is even corrrect to assume. To be honest if a student turned this in to me they woud fail it has nothng to prove their equation would even work. Because we have no idea what a warp buble might be like but im sure warped space doesnt create pressure variants. Because if it did we would have detected it around our planet or us for that matter because anything with gravity warps space.

The orientation is correct. Think helicopter cyclic control. The disk is in motion at 10m/s when stationary.

The bubble doesn't need acceleration. The object inside the bubble is stationary and so is the bubble. Space time is being moved with compression and decompression.

The physical device is called a drive because it drives the implementation of moving data, in this case space time itself. My computer hard drives doesn't physically move themselves around, nor does my display drivers.

We did detect it around our planet, think GPS.

originally posted by: dragonridr
I guess if you slow down time you can in theory travel faster according to an observer in the effected time buble. But anyone outside it you would be moving just as slow as normal.

Yeah, see, there's no such thing as being "inside" or "outside" the bubble. Because time is personal. No matter where I am or where I'm going, I'm always going to be looking at time through my own eyeballs. I can go back and kill my grandfather as a child and it's not going to affect me at all, because in my personal timeline I was born, grew up, etc. Going back in time isn't going to affect that because there is not another "me" watching the whole thing from some kind of mythical objective viewpoint. Anything else is just fiction. Mathematics attempts to bring an objective viewpoint into it, but that's simply a weakness of the symbolism.

originally posted by: Blue Shift

originally posted by: dragonridr
I guess if you slow down time you can in theory travel faster according to an observer in the effected time buble. But anyone outside it you would be moving just as slow as normal.

Yeah, see, there's no such thing as being "inside" or "outside" the bubble. Because time is personal. No matter where I am or where I'm going, I'm always going to be looking at time through my own eyeballs. I can go back and kill my grandfather as a child and it's not going to affect me at all, because in my personal timeline I was born, grew up, etc. Going back in time isn't going to affect that because there is not another "me" watching the whole thing from some kind of mythical objective viewpoint. Anything else is just fiction. Mathematics attempts to bring an objective viewpoint into it, but that's simply a weakness of the symbolism.

Correct, all relative. a Warp bubble will also not have time dilation as the "inside" is normal space time like the "outside". Nothing is technically in motion with warp theory. Normal high velocity ballistic travel however has a lot of undesired dilation effects to the travellers relative to the observers. Unmanned is the only option really for near light speed ballistic velocities.

originally posted by: dragonridr
anything with gravity warps space.

Good point. Space-time around the Earth is warped in a way that allows satellites to orbit the earth.

Space-time around the Sun is warped in a way that allows the Earth to orbit the sun. So it's not like space-time warps are completely unfamiliar to us.

originally posted by: Beestie
The bubble doesn't need acceleration. The object inside the bubble is stationary and so is the bubble. Space time is being moved with compression and decompression.

That's some of the common mythology or misunderstanding of the Alcubierre "drive", but did you actually read the paper that's the topic of this thread? It acknowledges that idea is circulating, but says it's not a "self-consistent" idea which is sort of a nice way of saying it's wrong.

We did detect it around our planet, think GPS.

I am thinking GPS and wondering how you can say Blue Shift is right in light of GPS.

originally posted by: Blue Shift

originally posted by: dragonridr
I guess if you slow down time you can in theory travel faster according to an observer in the effected time buble. But anyone outside it you would be moving just as slow as normal.

Yeah, see, there's no such thing as being "inside" or "outside" the bubble. Because time is personal. No matter where I am or where I'm going, I'm always going to be looking at time through my own eyeballs... Anything else is just fiction.

So is GPS fiction?

If the clocks on the ground and the clocks in orbit ran at the same rate, your GPS would be off by kilometers after only one day. So what does your personal view tell you when you look at your GPS display which says you need to turn right at the next intersection .1 mile ahead? If there is an intersection where the GPS says it is, then it works and the "mathematical" space-time warp around the earth is not fiction. If it really was fiction, the GPS wouldn't work because it's based on the mathematical model of spacetime warping around the Earth.

Real-World Relativity: The GPS Navigation System

If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day! The whole system would be utterly worthless for navigation in a very short time...

Relativity is not just some abstract mathematical theory: understanding it is absolutely essential for our global navigation system to work properly!

The next time I'm traveling along the street at 80 percent lightspeed, I'll let you know. For the regular world, of course the math works good enough. But that's not what we're talking about.

originally posted by: Blue Shift
The next time I'm traveling along the street at 80 percent lightspeed, I'll let you know. For the regular world, of course the math works good enough. But that's not what we're talking about.

The thing is your personal time is not the only time and there are various positions in the space-time warp of earth, in orbit and deeper inside the warp field where time travels slower.

When your eyes look at a GPS display, that reflects the two different clock rates, so in some sense you can not only see your own clock but the effects of signals from the clocks on the satellites in orbit, so it's not just your personal time that matters. GPS is pretty much an everyday "regular world" thing nowadays, they are cheap and easily available. You don't have to be traveling at at 80 percent lightspeed to use GPS which is based on "inside the warp" and "further inside the warp" time differences.

I would take it a step further and call it fiction haha. Fun to think about thought.

I read through it again now, why do they want to accelerate the bubble? That's counter productive. I understand it like so, if you give the field energy at a selected axis, compressing spacetime in the process. The gravity that's created at that axis will pull the whole thing along. The ship doesn't move, nor the drive or anything that's inside the boundary layer of the field. So nothing needs to be accelerated. Only energy is applied to a static field is how I understand it.

Like a boat on a fast moving river that looks stationary but is actually moving relative to the water. a High pressure is applied in the form of thrust to achieve this. Nothing on the boat itself is moving except relative to the water, and if you couldn't observe the water you wouldn't even know you're moving relative to it. I visualize the same for warp but applied in reverse, essentially a "low pressure" pulling the thing along instead of high pressure thrust.

Wait a minute.., isn't that where negative energy comes into play? Mein gott, it's confusing hahaha.

Wait, the same thing can be achieved with the boat thought experiment by just dropping and anchor using no thrust. Nope my brain is now broken

a reply to: Beestie

You understand wrong the way a warp drive would work is it shrinks space in front of it. You still have to travel through it however. Oddly if warp travel was possible its actually a time machiene and not a drive at all. Here lets look at a warp drive lets say it allows us to travel to Sirius A & B this is 8.6 light years from us. now lets say we travel there at warp and arive in say 7.3 months. But a catastrophe occurs and are warp core explodes causing a huge release of energy. The old warp core breach from star trek.

Now they traveled to sirius in 7.3 months meaning they passed alot of light that had already left roughly 8 years worth then they explode. Which would take 8.6 light years to reach earth however there is already 8 years of light heading towards earth before the explosion occured. Meaning the light would have to take 16.6 years to travel 8.6 light years or the drive has to actually go back in time to keep observations consistent from other reference frames. So our drive had to take us 8.6 years into the past to keep observe But now lets say it didnt blow up if we turned back to earth and again our ship arives in again in 7.3 months. But it would arrive 16 years before it even started its journey in the first place.

originally posted by: dragonridr
a reply to: Beestie

You understand wrong the way a warp drive would work is it shrinks space in front of it. You still have to travel through it however. Oddly if warp travel was possible its actually a time machiene and not a drive at all.

So could you use the time machine to kill your grandfather before he fathered your parent?

It seems pretty unlikely. Even in the future, we may not have warp drives/time machines. None of the future time travelers showed up to the party Stephen Hawking threw for them! SO, maybe there aren't any time travelers, even in the future, who can time travel to the past.

Hawking's Welcome Reception for Time Travelers

On June 28, 2009, the world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking threw a party at the University of Cambridge, complete with balloons, hors d'oeuvres and iced champagne. Everyone was invited but no one showed up. Hawking had expected as much, because he only sent out invitations after his party had concluded. It was, he said, "a welcome reception for future time travelers," a tongue-in-cheek experiment to reinforce his 1992 conjecture that travel into the past is effectively impossible.

I don't know if that's considered a valid test. Maybe it's not conclusive, but it is indicative. Or maybe they figured out how time travel to the past (in the future), but it's banned because you could go back and step on a bug and accidentally change history, at least that makes for a good sci-fi story where the time cops have to go capture people violating time-travel laws.

There's a famous limerick to illustrate your point, published in 1923:

There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.

a reply to: jeep3r

One question i have ... if warp driver ever becomes a thing.. will Time dilation still
be relative to the occupants of the Warping space craft.

I have no idea .. but better heads might be able to answer the question.