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Warp Drive?
Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 9:05 am
by peter
In 'Star Trek' they always use 'warp drive' to cross the massive inter-stellar distances between the planets they visit. Now I can see this consisting of two possibilities:-
i) They could 'bend' space in the manner of loosely folding over a sheet of paper and then using a worm-hole to go between two contiguous points on the bent space [thus circumventing the huge distance between the points in the 'unbent' space].
ii) They could 're-compress' the line of space between their starting and finishing point [ie imagining space like an elastic band that can be stretched or , as in this case, compressed] and then travel the much reduced distance they have 'created' before allowing the space to re-expand to it's currently normal degree of expansion. As the Universe is expanding all the time we know expansion to be possible, so it is only a small 'stretch' [pardon the pun] to imagine the process being briefly reversed to facilitate movement over huge distances.
Do we have any knowledge of which method 'warp-drive' utilised and more to the point [of the Lorseratt] do either method have any possibility of being realised such that we may achieve the apparently impossible task of crossing inter-stellar space.
Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 4:59 pm
by Hashi Lebwohl
If we ascribe to M-Theory and there are 11 dimension to our reality, then it is conceivable that in one of those close-yet-distant dimensions does not have a limit of c on velocities which Newtonian objects are able to attain. Perhaps the warp drive creates a region of space in which the ship is able to access one of those higher dimensions and move at superluminal speeds.
I know Babylon 5 did this but they used jump gates which physically transported the ships into a higher dimension where c was not a limit; the ships still used their normal non-Newtonian drives for motive power but you could get from Earth to B-5 in only a day or so (I forget exactly how long it took).
There are only two realistic possibilities of minimizing the length of time even interplanetary trips would take, one of which is realistic (and actually in use) while the other is possible (in theory) but has never been experimentally implemented.
The first is ion drive--the emissions from the ion drive, used in some satellites now, allow for a small amount of constant acceleration. Accelerate something for enough time and it is going to be going really, really fast. For example, if your acceleration is only 1 micro-g (.009803 m/s^2) then after one hour you are going 35.29 m/s, which may not sound fast but that translates into 127 kph or 78 mph. Fast on the ground, yes, but painfully slow for trying to go to Mars. After a month, though, you are moving at 1058.72 m/s (3811 kph or 2368 mph); better, but still not good enough. If you can plan it out in advance you can probably catch Mars when it is 60 M km away (a decent estimate), so the most efficient way to get there at this acceleration is to accelerate halfway there then decelerate the rest of the way (which you really wouldn't need to do, given that you want sufficient speed to settle into a stable orbit). It will take sqrt(30,000,000,000/.009807) = 1,749,011 seconds = 485 8364 hours = 20.24 days to get halfway there. Oh....that's faster than I thought. Okay, so with a constant acceleration we could get to Mars in only 1 month if we have drives that can give that kind of acceleration and if they don't break down and if they don't take too much energy to be useful. Of course, any sort of manned Mars mission has to be launched from the Moon--this will sidestep the cumbersome amounts of fuel required to escape Earth's gravity well.
The other possibility, which I have heard about only via conjecture on some websites, is that some researchers claim to have induced results in accelerometers by using powerful magnets and coils of superconducting wire (or something like that). Anyway....if you can induce an acceleration vector--which would essentially constitute non-Newtonian motion--then interplanetary travel becomes possible.
I still think we are at least 25 years away from any such undertaking. There is a new process of replacing a person's blood with a cool saline solution and lowering the body to 10 C which could put them into suspended animation for long trips like that (the research is actually for trauma surgery but it could be applied for missions to Mars).
Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 5:45 pm
by Vraith
IIR the "explanation" of the Star Trek warp, they generate a field that that stabilizes/maintains a bubble of "normal" space/time around the ship so it technically isn't violating any rules.
[A couple of people, I believe, have come up with theoretically possible "warp" drives...mathematically theoretically. Physically, I think they said they'd need material with "negative mass," and a significant portion of all the energy in the universe]
A cool thing [but also a problem in another way] with the constant acceleration at interstellar distances is time dilation. I THINK that if one could do a constant 1G acceleration, because of dilation, you could cross the entire observable universe in an average human lifetime...from YOUR point of view, on the ship.
Even at a much slower 1/10th of a G, it wouldn't take too long, ship-time. All without ever exceeding light speed.
Of course, the rest of the universe would probably have died of old age while you did it.
More locally: I think, if we really wanted to [or needed to] we could be mining the asteroids and beginning to terraform Venus within 100 years.
I don't know if we WILL, but I'm pretty sure we COULD.
Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2014 10:57 am
by peter
My guess V., would be that if we can - we will.
Also - the Universe is turning out to be so much 'weirder than we [can] imagine [think multiverses and membranes, universes inside black-holes, dark matter, dark energy, anti-matter etc], that hurdles like 'a significant proportion of all the energy in the Universe' no longer seem to be insurmountable. As the quantum world was anathema to Einstein, I'm guessing that the 'reality' we understand [and the physical limitations therin contained] will dissolve away in front of our eyes as new understandings drive forward the line between possible and impossible.