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Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow

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101–110 of 190 posts

Re: Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow

#101
post #75
post #6

When ever I think of traveling through a wormhole/blackhole, I imagine you would be squished and crushed and come out the other end as pure vaporized energy. This makes me wonder, if there is the potential for our beings (or things) be able to be vaporized and then recreated to original form. If we are just mass and particles, this should be possible?

Uncertainty principle says...probably not. It's impossible to make a complete copy of the pattern. Even aside from that -- it's unlikely to be practical to scan something down to the smallest level level of matter, because the tools we use to manipulate things can't manipulate things smaller than their own finest details. So there's a "glass wall" in that you can only replicate things less finely detailed than the re…

That's what the "Heisinberg compensators" in star trek fix. I heard this phrase in an episode once, and decided to figure out how that could even work...

What I came up with was the idea that the scanning stage doesn't need to gather exact data because it really doesn't matter. You just need to get averages, and then build up a model that matches the statistics... (you don't need to discover the exact energy and momentum of every particle, just measure the temperature)

Basically you get teleporter jpeg compression... good enough to fool you, just don't use it too many times without keeping the raw data:)

Re: Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow

#102
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always. Faster than light travel has never been bent.

Well, we are able to research FTL for only a few decades. Give it a few more due to complexity. Few ages ago people thought that the world is flat... Also, there are theories of FTL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light

They didn't really, that's a common misconception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

Re: Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow

#103
post #84
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, theoretically they could load their civilization up on a giant ship and move their civilization there over the course of a million years. Likelihood of success? Probably not great, but possible.

Everyone is missing the obvious solution. If we're talking about tech this fantastical, the best idea is to ditch our ephemeral biological bodies, jump onto a synthetic medium, and call it a day. Hit pause so the journey takes a fraction of a second, or spend 1000Y in a VR - do whatever you want. I don't see a future where we're this advanced yet still content with our frighteningly fragile bodies.

Perhaps it's because building a giant ship that can carry countless generations of inhabitants many light years is really more of just an engineering problem. All the challenges (of which there are plenty) all have reasonably known solutions. There's not really all that much novel technology required. Just better tech than we have, and a lot of it, to be sure.

Uploading a consciousness into a computer and have it remain "you"? That's completely foreign to what we know today. I'm not saying it's categorically impossible; to your point, if a civilization has advanced to the point where the above is ship is feasible, surely they must have picked this up along the way? Maybe, but maybe not. We don't even know if it is possible. But keep a shitload of people alive in space for a long time? Sounds plausible, even if it is enormously difficult.

Re: Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow

#104
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends on what do you mean by 'inaccessible'. Going there and back again, and telling your pals how things are 1000LY away is likely impossible. Expanding your civilization to more and more habitable celestial bodies, slowly but relatively surely, is entirely possible. This is how e.g. plants colonize vast spaces, being limited by the speed of their growth often by inches per lifetime. (You should also consider…

But aren't there massive gaps where an intermediate celestial body to perform this jump on will be simply too far away for traditional space travel?

Probably not. On the timescales of millions of years, the only thing that really matter is whether it's physically possible, and it looks physically possible to colonize other galaxies.

http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/intergalactic-spr...

I'd be pretty surprised if the jump between galactic groups is much worse.

Re: Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow

#105

Can someone point out where the article says why it's slower? I'm having difficulty unpacking: "The new theory was inspired when Jafferis began thinking about two black holes that were entangled on a quantum level, as formulated in the ER=EPR correspondence by Juan Maldacena from the Institute for Advanced Study and Lenny Susskind from Stanford. Although this means the direct connection between the black holes is sho…

The Average Null Energy Condition (ANEC) makes it so there can not be a traversable wormhole joining two otherwise disconnected regions of spacetime. So by construction, any infinite null geodesic (a light ray) which makes it through the wormhole must be chronal (causally connected). This means there can be no traveling faster than light over long distances by going through one.

I'm kind of relieved by this.

The last wormhole conversation I had with someone, I imagined a weapon using a short-distance wormhole with the ends opposed 180 degrees, and using a star's own gravity to tear chunks out of it. Everybody dies from massive solar flares.

Of course time travel books, wormhole researchers, and myself all make the same mistake over and over: If you made a wormhole or traveled in time, why do we assume that the frame of reference of the system is our star? Sol is whirling around our galaxy and an alarming rate, and that's moving through the universe at a huge velocity. Why would the hole you're trying to make in space move along with our solar system?

If I traveled back to five minutes ago I'd die in hard vacuum. I'd have just enough time to realize how stupid I am. Similarly, every time I try to use the same wormhole it would be farther from where I am and the other end farther from where I want to be.

Re: Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow

#106
post #84
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, theoretically they could load their civilization up on a giant ship and move their civilization there over the course of a million years. Likelihood of success? Probably not great, but possible.

Everyone is missing the obvious solution. If we're talking about tech this fantastical, the best idea is to ditch our ephemeral biological bodies, jump onto a synthetic medium, and call it a day. Hit pause so the journey takes a fraction of a second, or spend 1000Y in a VR - do whatever you want. I don't see a future where we're this advanced yet still content with our frighteningly fragile bodies.

The future you don’t see describes the present. We are (at very great, politically untenable cost, to be sure) capable of sending a ship full of humans and supplies elsewhere at a reasonable fraction of c. Our ability to do this continues to grow; although due to resource scarcity it’s not clear if efficiency gains will ever make it cheaper to do in the future than now.

We don’t even know where to start replacing our bodies. AI? Genetics? Cybernetics?

Re: Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow

#107
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always. Faster than light travel has never been bent.

Shadows can move faster than light.

That's an interesting assertion... Why would shadows be able to move faster than light?

Re: Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow

#108
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by the bright side you mean you would only make it there it there as pure energy. Mass is converted to energy as it approaches C (Light Speed). Though getting mass to actual light speed would require infinite energy, so that point is moot. Let's say you get to 96% C. You would experience 28% of the journey. Taking into account the the time to speed up and slow down from C, you're looking at over 290k years from th…

Mass is converted to energy as it approaches C (Light Speed). Not so much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJauaefTZM Try this thought experiment. Let's say you had a magic Bussard Ramjet rocket which scoops up energy and reaction mass from space and can accelerate forever. There are no special reference frames. So what happens if the rocket accelerates then shuts off its engine at the point where the "relativistic…

I stand corrected. That's what I get for trying to make an offhand joke based on some some bad info. The rest of the time comment stands though.

Re: Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow

#109
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always. Faster than light travel has never been bent.

Well, we are able to research FTL for only a few decades. Give it a few more due to complexity. Few ages ago people thought that the world is flat... Also, there are theories of FTL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light

> Few ages ago people thought that the world is flat...

Ah, no they didn't. Scientific consensus has been the earth is round for thousands of years.

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