If humanity ever learns how to exceed the speed of light, how do you think it'll be done?

[derby378]

[saltpoint]

1. One of my college roommates, Craig, drove that fast as a matter of

course.

[sakabatou]

2. I think warp drive seems the more plausible.

[anonymous171]

3. Warp. nt

[FreakinDJ]

4. Manipulating Gravity

[derby378]

8. Interesting thought

Makes me think of the region just within the event horizon in a black hole, where the escape velocity is greater than c. Only question is: how much greater at the region just within the event horizon?

[niceypoo]

26. Not so sure we could withstand.....

....being compressed.

To get an idea of how strong gravity is in a black hole, a mountain the size of Everest would be compressed to the about the size of a nucleus of an atom.

[FreakinDJ]

39. I wasn't talking about just increasing Gravity

Increase the Gravity in the direction you want to go and decrease it behind you. The space you would occupy would be gravity neutral

Isn't that what an Airplane Wing basically does with air ?



BTW: they already have a "Working Ion Drive" in use

[Selatius]

45. Replace a few words, and you have a diagram of how warp drive works.

Replace "Low Pressure" with "Contracting Space" and "High Pressure" with "Expanding Space." You expand the space in back of you and contract the space in front of you to propel yourself. Of course, you need tremendous amounts of energy to bend and warp space.

If you can master the use of gravity to propel yourself, you can theoretically tame g-forces on your body as you travel. You could manipulate gravity to cancel out the effect of your ship doing a 90 degree turn flying at 10,000 miles an hour. The result is you do not die by being turned into a puddle of mush on the wall of your ship, and you can do fantastic maneuvers not possible before. You would fly with the same characteristics as these supposed flying saucers can do that people keep reporting.

[Occulus]

46. He's talking about the Alcubierre drive

Wiki

The Alcubierre metric, also known as the Alcubierre drive or Warp Drive, is a speculative mathematical model of a spacetime exhibiting features reminiscent of the fictional "warp drive" from Star Trek, which can travel "Faster-than-light" (although not in a local sense - see below).

In 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a method of stretching space in a wave which would in theory cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand.<1> The ship would ride this wave inside a region known as a warp bubble of flat space. Since the ship is not moving within this bubble, but carried along as the region itself moves, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation do not apply in the way they would in the case of a ship moving at high velocity through flat spacetime. Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move faster than the ship; it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a light beam restricted to traveling outside the warp bubble. Thus, the Alcubierre drive does not contradict the conventional claim that relativity forbids a slower-than-light object to accelerate to faster-than-light speeds. However, there are no known methods to create such a warp bubble in a region that does not already contain one, or to leave the bubble once inside it, so the Alcubierre drive remains a theoretical concept at this time.

Imagine going outside and shaking dust off a floor carpet. The ship rides in the trough of the waves, and in fact depends on the waves in order to move. Einsteinian relativity doesn't apply in such a situation; the speed of the craft is determined by the frequency of the wave in the fabric of spacetime itself.

At least, that's how I understand it.

[havocmom]

5. With a whimper instead of a bang

[Journeyman]

6. I wonder if we'll ever exceed the darkness in which too many of us live. . .

[MineralMan]

7. It will be done first by some ditsy teenaged girl with a

malfunctioning cell phone attached to her ear.

[derby378]

12. Instead of this guy?

[Frosty1]

9. Um... they already did

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2000/07/20/speedlight000720.html

http://www.khouse.org/articles/2000/265/print/

[derby378]

17. The question was if HUMANITY could do it, not light itself

That was a light pulse with no mass. The goal is for something with mass to exceed c and do it in vacuo.

[Frosty1]

25. Picky picky

Of course we all know scientists are not human
:sarcasm:

[Johonny]

27. Yeah it's only in a vacuum

that the speed of light is limited. Things can travel faster than the speed of light in other media. And scientist have already measured it so been there done that. Will humans warp space... no. The energy needed to warp space to move a human from one area to another is so huge it will not happen.

[angrycarpenter]

10. I don't think we will ever make an interstellar voyage.

As long as capitalists are in charge, there's no profit in it. I believe that C is the absolute speed limit. There is no money to be made sending people on a two hundred year trip to the nearest stars. Mankind was born in this solar system and it will die here.

[anonymous171]

11. Of course there is.

Once we run out of resources on Earth Fast space travel will become extremely important for mining operations and other interplanetary/intergalactic capitalist enterprises.

[angrycarpenter]

16. Once we run out of resources on earth.

The powers that be will simply reduce the population by genocide to a level that matches available resources. Much cheaper that way. We already have the means to kill off most of humanity, we are still a hundred years away from interstellar flight.

[dysfunctional press]

33. a hundred years?

i don't think we're even that close, realistically.

although- maybe obama could emulate jfk, and initiate an 'apollo 2' program to get a man to alpha centauri by the end of the century...


but i'd rather have decent healthcare.

[Odin2005]

20. Wow, pessimistic much?

:eyes:

[angrycarpenter]

21. All the time.

I just don't think mankind will ever learn how to live with itself. No future utopia awaits. I would love to have a Star trek future but looking at the leaders that we always pick for ourselves I just can't see it. Short term expediency always trumps long term aspirations.

[derby378]

23. Exceeding c would neither follow a utopia nor create one

It would simply become another tool in the hands of humankind, but one that enabled us to begin space exploration in earnest.

[Shagbark Hickory]

13. Fossil Fuels imported from countries that "don't like us very much"

[Schema Thing]

14. Harnessing the power of nature:

Roadrunners.







:beep beep:

[ThomWV]

18. There's enough energy in a vine of poison ivy to scratch your way to the moon.

[Uzybone]

15. Its a fantasy right now

as fantastic as telling someone in ancient Greece that we would be able to place a man on the moon.

[Odin2005]

19. Something derived from Superstring Theory and the Holographic Principle.

[derby378]

22. Sounds like a Smashing Pumpkins album

:hide:

[givemebackmycountry]

24. Other: Harnessing the AMAZING and ENDLESS source of power that is the fear...

Of the Birthers, Fundy's, Right Wing Neo-Cons, gay hating, Fox News watching, immigrant fearing, racist, War Mongering, Palin and Bush worshiping, Liberal despising, Book Burning, Catcher in the Rye hating, Let's go back to 1950, Reagan worshiping assholes into a giant containment vessel and were off to DEEP space.

NOW THAT'S SOME POWER FOR YOUR ASS.

(I'm so stupid when I'm tired)

[Xicano]

28. Interdimensional or quantum entanglement

The energies needed for the above selection I think will always be too prohibited. I think interdimensional travel or manipulating quantum entanglement will be a way to travel faster than light.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtdE662eY_M


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja0UUKbVlhA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh8uZUzuRhk

[Ex Lurker]

29. I don't know, but however we do it, some DUers will be against it

read the Polywell Fusion threads. If it comes to pass, a clean, safe, virtually limitless source of power. And there are some here who think it's a bad thing. They can't explain WHY it's bad, but it's bad and ought to be stopped.

[johnaries]

36. Ain't it the truth. nt

[ColbertWatcher]

30. Quickly!

I'm sorry.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

31. I thought that speed of light travel was instantaneous

I'm not a scientist but I've heard that if you could straddle a beam of light, it would take someone to any part of the universe without the passage of time, relative to the traveler. I thought that you could not go faster than the speed of light (what is faster than instantaneous travel to any physical destination?), but that the idea of a worm hole was to collapse space and eliminate distance, not travel faster. Using a wormhole would make travel appear faster to the non-traveling observer, but that it wouldn't be faster for the traveler. Is this incorrect?

[Xicano]

32. 186,000 miles per second

And the faster one travels the more time slows relative to one more at rest.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

34. But I believe that it's instanteous relative to the one traveling

Time slows down to zero for the one riding the light beam no matter how far they travel.

[Xicano]

43. Good point

But have you considered that no matter what the frame of reference light speed is always 186,000 miles per second? In other words if one was in a spaceship and traveling at half the speed of light and gets passed by a spaceship traveling at the speed of light. Relative to the observer in the slower spaceship he will be passed at the full rate of the speed of light by the other spaceship. On the other hand, if two space ships traveling toward one another and both at the speed of light. Relative to both of them, their closer rate will not be 2x the speed of light, but, rather, it will still be the speed of light.

So in other words, no matter what the frame of reference to an observer, the speed of light is a constant. With that being the case then wouldn't it not be logical to assume that a traveler traveling at the speed of light will have to perceive themselves traveling at that speed and therefore perceive the correct amount of time it takes light to travel a given distance?

I love discussions like this. :)

[Selatius]

44. The problem is who wants to travel if at the end of the voyage everyone you know is dead?

If you traveled at the speed of light for a year, how many years will have passed on earth?

The trick is to move from point A to point B without that side effect or any effect that would result in you or your ship being destroyed.

Warping space by contracting the space in front of you while simultaneously expanding the space behind you could propel you to your destination without the problem of everybody else not on your ship dying of old age.

Another theoretical way to travel would be by ripping a wormhole between point A and point B. Jumping through it could allow you to skip vast amounts of space between the two points.

[rug]

35. I don't know but there will be a cop there to ticket you.

[omega minimo]

37. Meditation

[yodoobo]

38. Reduce your net mass to zero

Speed of light is only a barrier if you mass is non zero.

So, your craft will have a container in the trunk that contains exactly enough anti-matter to equal the amount of matter you are trying to move. Put a bubble around around the whole thing and then even the slightest amount of propulsion will do.

Bubble and anti-matter container need some work at the moment.

[muriel_volestrangler]

40. By an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator ...

... a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. :D

[Rex]

41. Dark matter reroute.

Like hopscotch inside a blender.

[RagAss]

42. Not sure but I think it will have something to do with aspirin and lizard piss.