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What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

arxiv.org

11–20 of 118 posts

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#11
post #2

Funny that the sci-fi got it backwards. It seems rather obvious in hindsight that should it even be possible, we will clearly be able to detect warp signatures far before we would be able to build a machine capable of producing them.

> we will clearly be able to detect warp signatures far before we would be able to build a machine capable of producing them

We’re in the crystal-radio stage of gravitometrics.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#12

Huh, so you can hear things explode in space, after all. If you're close enough to a warp field doing funny things, the gravitational wave strain would create audible-frequency artifacts, as it wiggles your eardrums at frequencies close enough to the audible. They derive an equation for estimated strain as a function of distance from the warp bubble collapse. How does strain translate to sound intensity, in the situa…

Would it even wiggle the eardrums relatively to the rest of your head? Intuitively it seems that would only happen if the wavelength is exactly right, but at that wavelength the frequency would be inaudible because the speed of light is so high.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#13
post #8
post #6

This is excellent. Like the Dyson sphere, predicting signals for technologies that we can imagine but not yet construct seems like a great way to guide our search for other life. Now we need a team of smart folks to identify tearing or other processing anomalies in universe-scale simulations.

If you like spooky stuff there is lots of fun things to think about. Just off the cuff; We are predicting a soul upload technology with Neuralink etc. So an alien technosignature could look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_grams_experiment This one is not rigorous but there are lots of other possibilities of this pattern.

If measurement of the soul's weight gave 21, that can only be half of the answer[0], right?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%...

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#14
post #2

Funny that the sci-fi got it backwards. It seems rather obvious in hindsight that should it even be possible, we will clearly be able to detect warp signatures far before we would be able to build a machine capable of producing them.

Except now the dark forest hypothesis precludes the development and use of warp drives with detectable collapse signatures.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#15

> Our work highlights the importance of exploring strange new spacetimes, to (boldly) simulate what no one has seen before. cute

It's fun that people can get paid to do this.

Why not? People get paid to play video games and any other vast number of examples that break the traditional concept of "job"

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#16
post #2

Funny that the sci-fi got it backwards. It seems rather obvious in hindsight that should it even be possible, we will clearly be able to detect warp signatures far before we would be able to build a machine capable of producing them.

> we will clearly be able to detect warp signatures far before we would be able to build a machine capable of producing them We’re in the crystal-radio stage of gravitometrics.

Excuse my ignorance about the term, what does “crystal-radio stage of gravitometrics” mean in this context?

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#17
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we will clearly be able to detect warp signatures far before we would be able to build a machine capable of producing them We’re in the crystal-radio stage of gravitometrics.

Excuse my ignorance about the term, what does “crystal-radio stage of gravitometrics” mean in this context?

Primitive. (Primitive radios used a crystal for tuning. We have since gotten a lot better at tuning radios...)

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#18

Huh, so you can hear things explode in space, after all. If you're close enough to a warp field doing funny things, the gravitational wave strain would create audible-frequency artifacts, as it wiggles your eardrums at frequencies close enough to the audible. They derive an equation for estimated strain as a function of distance from the warp bubble collapse. How does strain translate to sound intensity, in the situa…

I imagine the sound of the hull + everything else shuddering would probably dominate the perceived sound from eardrums or direct excitation of the air.

Re: What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

#20
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse my ignorance about the term, what does “crystal-radio stage of gravitometrics” mean in this context?

Primitive. (Primitive radios used a crystal for tuning. We have since gotten a lot better at tuning radios...)

To be pedantic, the crystal is the rectifier in a crystal radio. Tuning was (or is, since there are still people out there playing with these things) still usually done via a normal tuned LC circuit.

But yeah, we've gotten a lot better at rectifying too.

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