On Superluminal Propulsion

I don't mean to be a Star Trek Nerd... but I always read that the Warp Drive was slightly different.


We all know that to attain the speed of light you would have to have an infinite amount of energy to move a mass/ship through space. However after you reach the speed of light you need less energy to move faster

Star Treks ships get around this by forming a warp bubble around their ships. This bubble significantly reduces a ships mass thereby reducing the amount of energy needed to propel the ship to the speed of light and also when going past faster than light speeds.

reply to post by grey580



Thanks for your post!
I am not sure how the Star Trek drive works specifically,but I always thought that it was the same principle of constricting and expanding space?

Originally posted by jkrog08
reply to post by grey580

 

Thanks for your post!
I am not sure how the Star Trek drive works specifically,but I always thought that it was the same principle of constricting and expanding space?

Somewhat. The big trick to warp drive the warp bubble. Less mass to move around means the ship doesn't need an infinite amount of power to move around.

here's a chart on warp speeds.

Warp Factor- Number of times the speed of light
1 1
2 10
3 39
4 102
5 215
6 392
7 656
8 1,024
9 1,516
9.6 1,909
10 Infinity

Other than that your on with the space folding in front and behind the ship.
There's a few other things involved also. You'd proably want to read the star trek book that explains all the star trek tech.

reply to post by grey580


So "Warp 1" would be c (the speed of light) ?

Also I don't see(I realize it is fiction) how reducing the mass to any level(unless it is in the "negative mass" category of astronomical factors) would prevent causality.It doesn't matter if you have a mass of 1 or 100,when you accelerate past c your mass becomes infinite.

reply to post by jkrog08


Thanks, I'll check for your other thread. Reverse engineering of superluminal craft would be the type of civilization advancing shortcut I dream of. If it were true, there would necessarily be a reason that trumps security in order for it not to be made common knowledge. Since serendipity figures into the finding of new discoveries, I see this as a possibility. Barring that, there isn't any good reason that continued research won't reveal workable solutions. The easy answer is that no research = no answers.

reply to post by elfie



Well said friend..I wonder what could be the consequences of such a drastic jump in civilization type??By 'cheating' normal evolutionary progress could there be major consequences?I always wondered about when you hear in scifi shows how the aliens don't think "we are ready" for such high technology.

Sorry if this has already been asked.
Could Einstein have been wrong about the whole thing, briefing his theories on what was 'thought' possible in his time?

reply to post by LAUGHING-CAT


Damn it,I just wrote a reply and then it didn't go through so here we go again........

Yes it is possible that Einstein was wrong in some respects due to limitation of knowledge at that time.Although time dilation and thus casualty have been proven.The main opposition to the theory of relativity is quantum theory,they are completely incompatible.That is most physicist goal to unify the two.I and others have some issues with some of his postulates though,including the analogs of E=MC^2 and the properties of mass at highspeeds.Most people think Einsteins theory precludes ftl travel,that is not the case.His associates and himself created and proofed a postulate on wormholes.Since spacetime is curved and thus malleable it is possible to bend it,like how gravity does.By taking two blackholes and conjoining their throats and stabilizing and directing the matter stream you could theoretically travel through this 'subspatial' corridor.Although they didn't think it would remain open long enough for even a photon to pass through,but that was before the discovery of negative energy.

So there are some issues and potentials right now as you can see.The main challenge, like I said in my OP, is the very extreme challenge of conceptualizing and building an 'engine' to achieve this,along with navigational systems.But right now we are entering from a 'silver age' in physics to a golden one.In the next 50 years the advances will be astounding.



[edit on 5/1/2009 by jkrog08]

reply to post by jkrog08

Damn it,I just wrote a reply and then it didn't go through so here we go again........

great post mate star and flag, also that keeps happening to me im making a habbit of copying the material first .

reply to post by theflashor



Ha,yea I usually do,but then it doesn't happen for a while,then BANG,it happens,lol.

Thanks,I'm glad you liked it.

Just want to say to all members............

I apologize for some of the minor typos in my OP,I didn't catch them until to late,sorry!

reply to post by jkrog08


Your typos are very minor. You did a LOT of work and research putting this thread together. I've read it about three times now. Very nice work!

You did a great job putting everything together.

I must say I knew it all but when you put it altogether it assumes another dimension.

One small detail you didn't talk about here popped up in my mind when someone pointed to the potential "billion year older civilization".

Well, I must say this isn't surprising at all but it requires further consideration. We live in a rather young universe and most people talk about ONE universe even without thinking twice (let's keep religion out of this...).

There are several theories considering the existence of multiple universes, you may call them dimensions or even a direct strings theory assessment.

If we do have multiple universes like foam or membranes we may well have a universe "A1" trillion years old than universe "Z99".

Even "worse", a highly advanced civilization may even create a new universe just as a lab test (like I do with genetics while I create new modified genes just to find out if I can discover the reason for a genetic disease).

I really don't know if you already did it, or are considering to do, it would make a lot of sense to dive into the multiple universes theory. I ready it many years ago and I read it again last year (Scientific American if I'm not mistaken).

To me, the story of a ONE single event creating EVERYTHING is just as ridiculous as saying we're alone in the universe.

Once again, thank you very much for this great thread.

P.S.
I'm sorry for the horrible English but as a humble Portuguese I did my best.


[edit on 02/11/2008 by novrod]

reply to post by jkrog08


have you ever thought about ion propulsion? not in the general sense but as in the sense of designing a transport system that travels along it mimicking an ion particle thus travelling at the same speed as said particles? just a thought, pound me to death if thats to out there, but a light particle would trravel at the speed of light, so acting like one would enable you to travel along the ion path just as fast

Originally posted by LAUGHING-CAT
Sorry if this has already been asked.
Could Einstein have been wrong about the whole thing, briefing his theories on what was 'thought' possible in his time?

einstein did stump himself early on, with his theories the expanding unverse theory was possible to exist, because of einsteins own belief system it didnt fit with his theorem so he denied it then it was seen that the universe has not always been a consatant that it had a beggining and that has famously come to be known as einsteins biggest blunder

Could the LHC or Tevatron help us with superluminal propulsion? Maybe one of those unknown particles could be the answer. I don't know.

[edit on 2-5-2009 by DEM0N]

spacedoubt:Thanks!I am glad you have read it three times.(hopefully that means you like it or it takes multiple times to digest,lol)

novrod:Thanks,so are you a Geneticist?I did briefly mention the civilization ‘types’,but didn’t want to go to far into that.I too have been wondering recently if our universe is nothing more than some other beings “LHC”,lol………..spooky thought kind of.As for the multiverse thread,I did that one a few weeks ago,here is the link,hope you like it:On Parallel Universes
Also I did this one on Astronomy,you might like it as well….Astronomy 101

I’ve been busy lately,lol.

Darren:LOL,don’t worry no one is going to pound you to death.Ion propulsion is being used now and has a good future for sublight propulsion.I know you were talking about changing a craft to the mass of a particle however.That would be more like the “Quantum Jump Drive”,or “Tachyon Drive”….The problem with using speeds associated with ions or photons is that they still travel at c,and that is to slow for what we want to do(even at lightspeed it would take 100,000 years to cross our galaxy).With the theoretical Tachyon (pronounced TAK-E-ON) it is postulated that the particle has whats called infinite velocity……to simplify,that means that the Tachyon, one, can go no slower than the speed of light,and two,can be anywhere in the universe instantly.Now if we could use that particle we’d be getting somewhere!Starred for you good point on Einstein and his “cosmological constant” and the blunder of it due to his unwillingness to go against his religion.Although oddly enough now there is something called the cosmological constant,but not in the sense Einstein thought.

Demon:Yes,the LHC and Tevatron(as well other particle accelerators) have,are,and will continue to help us in understanding advanced,high energy physics;which will help us create something like a ‘hyperdrive’.

Nice thread. I like it when posts inspire thinking.

One thing in particular jumped out at me which I feel the need to comment on...

Originally posted by jkrog08Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our own, and it is roughly 4 lightyears away...

If someone leaves at the speed of light from Earth to Proxima Centauri the trip would only be four years to the pilot of the craft while on Earth hundreds to thousands of years would have passed.

Based on my understanding of relativity and time dilation, that's incorrect. If a pilot went to Proxima Centauri at light speed (relative to observers on earth) he would take 4 years as seen from the people on earth. But from his perspective it would be instantaneous. He would be 4 years into the future relative to the people back on earth, and he would see Proxima Centauri 8 years into the future compared to what he would've seen in a telescope from earth prior to leaving.

The speed of light is fixed to the observer so there's no way of even getting close to it. Time dilation takes care of the rest. All that stuff about mass becoming infinite is a roundabout way of trying to explain something very simple.

reply to post by Kruel

Time dilation and space flight
Time dilation would make it possible for passengers in a fast-moving vehicle to travel further into the future while aging very little, in that their great speed slows down the rate of passage of on-board time. That is, the ship's clock (and according to relativity, any human travelling with it) shows less elapsed time than the clocks of observers on Earth. For sufficiently high speeds the effect is dramatic. For example, one year of travel might correspond to ten years at home. Indeed, a constant 1 g acceleration would permit humans to travel as far as light has been able to travel since the big bang (some 13.7 billion light years) in one human lifetime. The space travellers could return to Earth billions of years in the future. A scenario based on this idea was presented in the novel Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle.

wikipedia.org/timedilation

That should clear it up for you,relativity is a very confusing subject.Stars light is observed from light from the past because the distance traveled takes even light time to arrive at Earth.BTW,what is that supposed to be on your avatar?

Great thread. The only problem I have is your description of quantum entanglement. We have no way of knowing if the information is being transferred instantaneously, or if the states are determined ahead of time, before the particles are separated. It's analogous to two marbles, a black and a white. the black marble is put into a box, and the white marble is put into another box. The boxes are then separated. We can look into a box and know instantly what color the other marble is, but that doesn't mean that one marble magically changed the color of the other marble. In that way, this doesn't violate Einstein, and there is no "Spooky action at a distance" going on.