Star Trek TNG: New Ground [1].
Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel
31–40 of 76 posts
Re: Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel
#32If warp drives actually are feasible (either sub or super liminal), that'd be great. However, it seems to me that it's much more likely we'll travel between stars as digitized minds that are recorporialized at the destination.
Out of curiosity, what is the state of this research? That's the Takeshi Kovacs solution, but I haven't seen any real jumps in that regard other than some new tech allowing the brain to control computers to some degree.
And even if we do have that tech, we'd still have to be able to reach those destinations in the first place so we could establish outposts where our digitized minds could travel to. At the moment, the only way to do so is a generation ship capable of surviving the ~1000 years it would take to get to a new location with current technology.
Re: Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel
#33It is early in the morning, so I'm still irritable, but this line is pretty egregious -- The energy savings would need to be drastic, of approximately 30 orders of magnitude to be in range of modern nuclear fission reactors.” He goes on to say: “Fortunately, several energy-saving mechanisms have been proposed in earlier research that can potentially lower the energy required by nearly 60 orders of magnitude.” -- Say…
For a long time I thought of the sun as being the product of many cycles of recycled material from older suns - but if you look at the cosmic calendar our sun has been around for roughly half (a little less than) the age of the universe! For all we know we could be the first intelligent species to reach the space age in our observable universe.
The older stars were bigger and therefore had much shorter lifetimes, so the Sun indeed is made of the guts of several generations of stars. The Sun is at least the third generation down from the Big Bang.
Re: Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a cool calculator of what happen if you travel around with constant 1G acceleration. Long story short: to travel to Alpha Centauri it would take for the traveller still about 4 years, and when back at home, people would have aged only some months more than the astronauts. Crazy things happen if you decide to go on galaxy-wide trips though, to the astronauts because space contraction they perceive their own t…
I think you're forgetting that there's a hard upper limit on velocity. Edit: Ah, wasn't aware of length contraction. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/physics/chapter/28-3-lengt...
You never reach that limit if you are accelerating with a normal engine at 1g. You will get closer and closer to it, but never reach it.
If you somehow DO achieve lightspeed, time stops for you, completely, so from your point of view you are teleporting, but since time is stopped no machine or chemical reaction can happen, thus why we believe lightspeed machinery is impossible.
By the way, achieving near lightspeed with 1g acceleration is in a way, hard, for example the trip to alpha centauri at 1g results in you achieving "only" 94% of light speed... to do that same trip peaking at 99.0% of light speed it would take 3g of acceleration, and it would result in the trip being roughly 1/3 shorter (taking 1.7 years more or less, instead of 5)
Re: Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel
#35If warp drives actually are feasible (either sub or super liminal), that'd be great. However, it seems to me that it's much more likely we'll travel between stars as digitized minds that are recorporialized at the destination.
Out of curiosity, what is the state of this research? That's the Takeshi Kovacs solution, but I haven't seen any real jumps in that regard other than some new tech allowing the brain to control computers to some degree. And even if we do have that tech, we'd still have to be able to reach those destinations in the first place so we could establish outposts where our digitized minds could travel to. At the moment, the…
There is foundational research being done on destructive brain scanning and emulation. It is decades—at a minimum—away from being more realizable.
You don't need to send a generation ship, just solar sails powered by massive laser installations that have enough tech on board to convert an asteroid into a receiver.
To be fair, 1000 years is not very long when you have digital immortality.
Re: Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel
#36I am not a physicist by any means, so this may come off as a dumb question, but: If gravity waves have been discovered, and they move at the speed of light (speed of causality?), being thrown off by the most energetic events in the universe, how can something like an Alcubierre drive even work when essentially it is also a gravitational wave generated by far less energy?
It usually requires exotic matter with negative mass which isn't normally found.
Re: Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel
#37Coincidentally, Alcubierre recently posted a review article on warp drives: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.05610.pdf. It looks like a good introduction to this topic.
Re: Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're forgetting that there's a hard upper limit on velocity. Edit: Ah, wasn't aware of length contraction. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/physics/chapter/28-3-lengt...
You never reach that limit if you are accelerating with a normal engine at 1g. You will get closer and closer to it, but never reach it. If you somehow DO achieve lightspeed, time stops for you, completely, so from your point of view you are teleporting, but since time is stopped no machine or chemical reaction can happen, thus why we believe lightspeed machinery is impossible. By the way, achieving near lightspeed w…
> Crazy things happen if you decide to go on galaxy-wide trips though, to the astronauts because space contraction they perceive their own trip as happening still rather quick, a 100 000 ly trip (the size of our galaxy, for reference) takes 22 years for someone inside a spaceship with 1g acceleration, perfectly doable. But people outside still see it taking 100 000 years... (meaning they will be 100 000 years "older" from the point of view of the astronauts)
But from your frame of reference wouldn't you be moving much faster than the speed of light? If you're taking 22 years to travel 10,000 ly, that means you're moving faster than light in your perception, doesn't it? Isn't that forbidden in any frame of reference?
Re: Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree but the nearest star is (only?) 4 light years away. If we only managed to travel close to the speed of light, we surely live long enough today. Time dilation will cause our friends to be older by a few years than they should be, but not by that much right?
There is a cool calculator of what happen if you travel around with constant 1G acceleration. Long story short: to travel to Alpha Centauri it would take for the traveller still about 4 years, and when back at home, people would have aged only some months more than the astronauts. Crazy things happen if you decide to go on galaxy-wide trips though, to the astronauts because space contraction they perceive their own t…
I think because of the expansion of the universe, you don't have to decelerate as much if you travel to far away galaxies.
Re: Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're forgetting that there's a hard upper limit on velocity. Edit: Ah, wasn't aware of length contraction. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/physics/chapter/28-3-lengt...
Not on subjective velocity. As you approach the speed of light from an outsider's perspective from the insider's perspective the universe appears to shrink.
But if you experience 22 years to make 10,000 ly's of distance, you've subjectively gone much much faster than the speed of light, haven't you? I thought that was a constant in all frames of reference.