Star Trek's Warp Drive Not Impossible 541
Trunks writes "No doubt trying to ride the hype train that's currently going for the new Star Trek film, Space.com has a new article detailing how warp drive may not be impossible to acheive. From the article: '"The idea is that you take a chunk of space-time and move it," said Marc Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project. "The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it's not moving at all. It's the space-time that's moving." One reason this idea seems credible is that scientists think it may already have happened. Some models suggest that space-time expanded at a rate faster than light speed during a period of rapid inflation shortly after the Big Bang. "If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not for our space drives?" Millis said.' Simple, right?"
Keep dreaming! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So which is it (Score:5, Insightful)
Summary of the previous article: Here's a technical problem, which no-one will ever figure out how to solve, therefore it's impossible.
Summary of the current article: Here's a tiny shred of scientific evidence that it may have happened before, therefore it is not impossible.
Note that the previous article was just a logical fallacy. The fact that you've identified a potential problem in a technology that doesn't even exist does not rule it out as a possibility.. it just shows that it is hard, duh, we knew that already.
Note that the current article is just wild speculation.. they're trying to say that if space warping happened slightly after the big bang then that might actually mean it is possible to do it now. And people tend to read what they want to read, namely, they confuse "possible" with "practical".
Re:So which is it (Score:5, Insightful)
So which is it? Neither. It's viral marketing piggy-backing on the hype surrounding the new ST movie. No news here. Nothing to see.
Re:But what if it is? (Score:3, Insightful)
What could possible go wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)
"If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not for our space drives?"
You see that is where your going wrong, anything that involves trying to recreate big bangs is not a good idea.
I also though inflation theory was just a stop gap, its a model not as pure as the original big bang theory, yet doesn't quite close all the problems, so its a good starting point for progress but its defiantly not right!
That's not WARP technology.... (Score:5, Insightful)
that sounds more like Guild Heighliner technology where they Fold Space.
"travel to any part of the universe, without moving".
It also avoids the acceleration/deceleration with WARP speeds :P
I was not here, I did not say this.....
Crash? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Keep dreaming! (Score:5, Insightful)
Birds have been flying for longer than a few centuries. What widely accepted scientific law ruled out human flight? Or computers? It's true that they had not yet been achieved, but that's different from saying that they were impossible.
Simple, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So which is it (Score:2, Insightful)
There's no such thing as proof that something ISN'T possible -- only that it IS possible. If we could prove that warp drive wasn't possible, all of the atheists would be climbing over themselves to be the first to prove that god doesn't exist. Instead, they laugh and tell theists to prove that their god exists. There's a good, logical reason for that.
None of which is to say that good logic about proof or disproof means that atheists are more correct than theists.
Big Bang level energy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So which is it (Score:5, Insightful)
they're trying to say that if space warping happened slightly after the big bang then that might actually mean it is possible to do it now.
Well supposedly space is warped slightly by ordinary particles, right? (gravity?) If there was a "big bang" then what happened shortly after the big bang would be more than "slight".
I think the point they were trying to make about the big bang was not that it's possible to warp space (which happens), but that it must be physically possible to warp space to such a degree so as to allow matter to travel faster than light. The theory is that, at the time of the big bang, space was expanding faster than light, so that one year after the big bang particles would be more than 1 light-year apart from each other. So that would mean that those particles were moving faster than light, and it would be an example of faster-than-light travel already happening.
Of course, I don't know how they know how fast things were moving after the big bang. Even if you were there to observe it, there wouldn't be anything periodic to compare the motion to (no sun for the earth to go around, and so no "year" measurement). But then even ignoring that, I'd think that an event like the big bang would distort time, too. But I guess some really smart mathematician must have figured it out, right?
Re:Keep dreaming! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, he's talking about this thing called "history" that you may not be aware of. Ya see, people actually did say that heavier than air flying machines are impossible. The fact that birds can fly is irrelevant. They obviously were created by God, not man, so they didn't count.
Simple FTL question (Score:4, Insightful)
IF I had a stick 100 Million light years long. With me holding the stick on one end, and a tiny model spaceship on the other end of the stick and I move that stick left or right, would the ship not move faster than light?
Re:So which is it (Score:5, Insightful)
Your nitpick is wrong. More than one light-year away from each other after one year would require a relative speed greater than light speed, which would be sufficient to demonstrate an exception to the general principle that light speed is the greatest possible relative speed.
Re:Simple, right? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Simple, right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So which is it (Score:5, Insightful)
I knew it was a mistake to give up trying to solve the Halting Problem!
Re:Keep dreaming! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, first off computers were not impossible a few centuries ago. Both analog computers (the slide rule) and digital computers (the abacus) existed 400 years ago. Flying was also not impossible a few centuries ago. The Montgolfier brothers flew more than 200 years ago.
But more to the point, you're misunderstanding how science works. Modern physical science basically dates back to Galileo and Newton. Since then, nobody has ever found a violation of Newton's laws of motion within their realm of applicability. Newton's laws didn't just go out of style with the advent of relativity and quantum mechanics. What happened was that we learned that Newton's laws were only an approximation that was valid under certain circumstances (v<<c, etc.). Almost every depiction of FTL in science fiction directly contradicts relativity within the realm where it's already been thoroughly tested, and therefore those stories are simply scientifically wrong. A good example of FTL in science fiction that doesn't violate relativity is Contact, by Carl Sagan. Two of the constraints that relativity puts on FTL, if it's possible at all, are that (1) it has to involve the manipulation of godlike amounts of mass and energy, and (2) any technology for FTL is also automatically a technology for time travel. Contact, for example, gets it right: the FTL is accomplished by aliens with godlike powers, who can also do time travel.
And, by the way, I'm not arguing that science fiction has to be scientifically correct in order to be good. I liked Contact, but it's not my favorite SF story ever. There's actually a serious dramatic limitation imposed if your story has to have time-traveling gods appearing on stage.
If we want to be realistic, we should admit that even the simplest kind of crewed slower-than-light space travel, like going to low earth orbit, is much harder than we imagined in the 1950s. It's so much harder than we thought that by the time crewed space travel of any kind becomes economically reasonable (rather than a nationalistic propaganda exercise or a lark for a few billionaire tourists), I'm guessing that human beings will no longer be recognizable as anything like today's human beings.
Re:So which is it (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought the Inflatinary Era what what happens in a few years when the trillions we've been printing catch up with us?
Actually, the Inflatinary Era is just a big WTF in current cosmology. Everyhting makes good consistant logical sense back to a certain point, with lots of hard evidence thans to the recent CMBR stuff. But then we have to invent a whopping great cosmological constant to makes sense of it all. I think that's probably as full of shit as each previous cosmological constant.
I suspect there are better theories for why the CMBR temperature is so uniform, and given the fantastic progress that cosmology has in recent years, the whole Inflatinary Era idea may be abandoned by cosmologists by the time it's a reality for economists!
Re:So which is it (Score:3, Insightful)
One can also prove that a god doesn't exist by showing that said god's defining characteristics are contradictory. Atheists do it all the time, but theists usually respond with the childish "that may be, but *my* definition of god is now such and such instead".
Re:Simple, right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, CO2 isn't poisonous. Atmospheric toxins and heat absorption are two completely unrelated topics.
The effect is negligible at this point. Even if it weren't, though, it's got nothing to do with what I was saying.
Re:So which is it (Score:3, Insightful)
Idiot, that is why the LHC broke.
Re:Come on... (Score:1, Insightful)
The spaghetti bunny is one of the many incarnations of our noodly savior.
Re:So which is it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Come on... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Simple, right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really (Score:3, Insightful)
Quantum, inflation, space time continuum (Score:3, Insightful)
The reasoning in this article builds on the assumption that we can somehow rip out a region of space and move it along independently of the rest of space, which is of course nonsense. The geometry of space is basically equivalent with the gravitational field the permeates space, if you will. If we "move a region of space", we fundamentally change the geometry - just imagine a 2D coordinate system and move a region of that space around (0,0); you would either have to break the coordinate axes or bend them, both of which will have a huge impact on the geometry of the thing. If we were to move a piece of space along like that, we would see some really weird gravity distortions.
But apart from that, what Einstein's assumption was, was not that "it is impossible to do anything faster than light", but that it was impossible to transmit any signal that propagates through space faster than light. There are some unspoken assumption in this wording - like eg that a signal propagates through space in much the same way as through an elasic media; if one could find a way of not propagating through space in that fashion, perhaps things can move faster. Indeed, the famous "Ghostlike Action at a Distance" phenomenon must be of that category.
Agnostics (Score:3, Insightful)
all of the atheists would be climbing over themselves to be the first to prove that god doesn't exist
Really? Because, you know, being an agnostic, I was pretty sure that's what atheists actually do.
Re:Simple, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, you can grab a few spare computer parts and assemble a box, but that doesn't make you an uber-programmer. You can build a guitar but it doesn't automatically make you a Santana.
Re:Simple, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are different perspectives on God, or gods. Some believe that God is all knowing and all powerful, but others have believed that gods are simply super-beings with an existence that is so far beyond our own that they should be worshiped. I point to the whole Roman and Norse mythologies as examples of this.
Some would say that if we COULD create a universe with life in it that we would be defined as gods to those we have created. Our knowledge would be far beyond that of what we have created, at least initially, and our existence would be so far beyond that of our creations that we WOULD seem godlike.
Then again, if we could go back in time to when prehistoric humans were around, our scientific abilities would seem godlike, being able to summon fire at will, or with a plane, the ability to fly(even if we could not fly without machines). Divinity is in the eye and mind of the observer.