NASA: Alfa Centauri in two weeks?

andy06shake
reply to post by Diablos

 

I would have thought any stage one civilisation(I know we are not quite there yet) with the ability to produce antimatter would have met the energy requirements necessary. Then you also have dark matter/energy to consider, any stage two or three type civilization will almost certainly be able to manipulate those energy sources which for all intents and purposes are infinite.

edit on 7-12-2013 by andy06shake because: (no reason given)

Even matter-antimatter reactions would not generated the needed power unless you had a whole lot of both.

As for dark matter/dark energy. We don't even know what it is yet so its hard to see how it might be used to power a warp drive.

That doesn't mean someone else hasn't figured it out but it also doesn't mean someone else has.

reply to post by JadeStar


I realise it's all just theory at this stage Jade Star and im aware that we don't even have a clue as to the properties of exotic/dark matter and energy. I'm just spit balling now.

I'm sure we as a species will reach the stars one day as long as we take care not to destroy ourselves in the process.

andy06shake
I would have thought any stage one civilisation(I know we are not quite there yet) with the ability to produce antimatter would have met the energy requirements necessary. Then you also have dark matter/energy to consider, any stage two or three type civilization will almost certainly be able to manipulate those energy sources which for all intents and purposes are infinite.

edit on 7-12-2013 by andy06shake because: (no reason given)

Antimatter is extremely difficult to contain, not to mention funnel it through an engine to produce thrust. Although currently we at this time don't have any method of producing meaningful quantities for space applications, there are some good ideas that get around this issue by using lasers that are only a few orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones we can produce today. That still doesn't solve the problem of containment/entrapment, and the potential catastrophe that could ensue if there was a malfunction. Also, antimatter does not fit the "exotic matter" requirement that these spacetime geometries require.

As for dark matter, it's not something that can be harnessed. If it interacts at all by means other than gravity, then it's most likely through the weak interaction, which again makes it absolutely impractical for any form of space applications. For dark energy, based on the properties we have observed of it, it is also going to turn out to be something that cannot be harnessed. If it's indeed a cosmological constant, then attempting to harness dark energy would be as fruitless as attempting to harness the zero-point field. Although there are tantalizing new hints that dark energy may not be a cosmological constant, unfortunately even a dynamical dark energy is too weak to be useful for any type of technology to make use of. The amount of dark energy that pervades a cubic meter of space is simply much too small to be detected in the lab, and its effects are really noticeable only on cosmological (extragalactic) scales.

Edit: Also, both dark and dark energy don't meet the "exotic matter" requirements. The gravitational properties of dark matter is equivalent to that of baryonic matter, while dark energy is positive energy density with negative pressure. Neither create the "hill" spacetimes that warp drives, wormholes, and other exotic geometries would require.

reply to post by JadeStar


Thanks. Will do.

Sorry to go back quite along way in this thread but I do need to inform the OP of a correction...

Let me ask you this

Do you think Scientists are wealthy?

Do you think the LHC cost a lot of money, how much?

Diablos
Antimatter is extremely difficult to contain, not to mention funnel it through an engine to produce thrust.

Nah. All you need is a fork lift and one of these:

reply to post by ErosA433


LHR cots lots of money, yah. But not really that much. In 2008, British spendings were about a pint per adult annualy:

www.neatorama.com...

Anyway, we are talking about a shredder that costs several billion Euros. Just firing up costs millions, and maintainance and other things cost great money. The scientists involved may not make a lot of money on their work, but they sure have fancy toys

It is just one of those things that people say cost lots and in actual fact if you look at the whole scope didn't cost all that much, and that is money that was injected back into the economies via contract work and component requirements. People talk about it like Scientist stuffed a great load of cash in their back wallet, or some strange fantasy that scientists are earning alot of money from salary. Standard wage of a post-doc in the uk is about 24k... which is about half of that of a train driver...

Dr. White thinks that it may be possible to eliminate the need for exotic matter in a warp drive. He is using a high voltage electric charge in his device to create 'negative pressure', which may warp space. His results suggest that he may have already accomplished this in a very small way. The amount of possible warping so far is barely on the edge of what can be measured. He is working on improving the sensitivity of the measurements, so that the warp, if it exists, can be confirmed.

If the theory can be proven to work on a tiny scale, then meeting the energy requirements is probably just a matter of time. I believe Dr. White previously stated that if the experiments prove the theory, he hopes there will be warp drive within the solar system within 50 years and interstellar warp drive by the end of the century, about 86 years and a few weeks from now.

A lot can happen in 86 years. Dynamite was invented in 1867. 85 years later, in 1952, the first hydrogen bomb was detonated. The light bulb was invented in 1879. 81 years later the first laser was invented.

If we're taking bets, I'll bet that power generation will not be the biggest hurdle on this project.

Dr. White believes that the energy needed for a warp drive can be reduced even further by oscillating the warp field. If he can prove that even a very small, very slightly warped domain of space has been produced, progress in this area could take off at warp speed. Since only a high voltage electric field may be necessary, the basis for this technology may be simpler than anyone could have predicted.

Just dropping by to see where the thread is going. Found a few interesting things on the net, this first one being a 33 page PDF that looks interestingand has some more info on nuts and bolts, ups and downs; named

"Warp Field Mechanics 101" by Dr. Harold “Sonny” White (the scientist in question) at NASA Johnson Space Center:
--> ntrs.nasa.gov...

Also, I found this explanatory summary of different ideas involving warping of spacetime:
--> www.nasa.gov...

And the page below investigates the status of warp field research (may be old, couldn't find a date for publishing):
--> www.nasa.gov...

Any thoughts?

Some thoughts on antimatter:

antimatter does not automatically go boom on contact with any matter whatsoever. the annihilation actually occurs when the proper quarks and anti-quarks match up. thus in a given collision for three quark particles there is at least a 33 percent chance that the annihilation reaction will not occur. so if you could formulate matter using substitute quarks or particles made of different quarks you might be able to create a material that does not react with antimatter. i am talking about things like substituing muons of kaons or similar particles or SUSY particles for protons and neutrons or mirror neutrons or protons. mirror matter (which is different from antimatter) may not react at all except by not weak reactions as someone said (that's a radioactive decay process) but by weak mixing which is something else altogether. mirror matter is very interesting stuff and according to recent articles it may be all around us.

also anti-hydrogen is diamagnetic which means it is repelled by magnets. if your antimatter was in the form of anti-hydrogen and you froze it solid you could suspend it in ordinary magnetic fields. at that temperature it would not sublimate. in a vacuum you would get no or very little accidental contact with stray regular matter atoms. you would spin the Anti-hydrogen ice ball and shave it with a laser beam. the spinning would keep the ball from getting unbalanced and lopsided. because you use regular magnetic fields you should be able to build an emergency backup power supply into your container. several types of antimatter propulsion scheme only require micro or even nanograms of antimatter.

another thing related to mirror matter (which really has some very interesting properties) mirror neutrons were proposed recently as a solution as to the problem of why neutrons were disappearing faster than their accepted half life would indicate. it turns out that a regular neutron can turn into a mirror neutron and disappear (they are invisible, react only to gravity and weak mixing processes.) it is the mechanism by which they disappear that may be of interest. in the presence of a mirror magnetic field they just transmute under certain circumstances. so what if there is a analogous process by which regular matter can be converted to antimatter? you could then make your antimatter only when needed. greatly reduced storage problems. greatly reduced production problems.

[on a completely unrelated note... would mirror titanium or tungsten make a great window material for spaceships? i dunno if it is intangible but it probably is because the electronic field is necessary to make a solid feel like a solid. bummer...]

one final note: there already is a technology for creating on demand beams of positrons using a desktop sized device. presumably using more energy a similar deice could produce anti-protons. this would be another means of producing antimatter only when it is about to be injected into a reaction chamber.

more random thoughts...

exotic matter may not be all that hard to come by.

although it is not the exotic matter we are looking forward to mirror matter is postulated to be all around us. i am not talking about around as in being astronomically close. i mean right here on earth.

antimatter factories are all around too as in as close as the nearest thunderstorm. the van allen belts, the solar atmosphere, the magnetic fields of any planet with a magnetic field especially ones with an atmosphere or gaseous jovian type giants. the cosmic radiation at the heliopause is definitely gonna do it.

then there is this:

www.newscientist.com...

that's probably getting closer to the type of exotic matter we are hoping for even if it has positive mass/gravity.

but my point is if you are aware of these forms of odd matter being closer than generally known you have greater hope for finding what we need for warps, wormholes and stuff like that. Certainly the chances are better than the skeptics outlook would make it appear. and of course as Dr White says we may not even need exotic matter at all.