Warp Drives May Come With a Killer Downside 458
An anonymous reader writes "Alcubierre warp-drives (theoretically) allow rocket ships to travel faster than the speed of light, while staying within the rules of Einstein's general theory of relativity. New research (PDF) has shown that as such warp-drives zip through the universe, they gather up particles and radiation, releasing them in a burst as the warp-drive slows down. This is bad news for family and friends waiting for the ship to arrive, as this intense burst will fry them."
Northern Lights and Killer Asteroids (Score:5, Interesting)
So you drop out of warp outside the Van Allen belts and everybody gets a nice light show.
Worst case you only use Warp Drive as far in system as Mars and use more conventional means from there to Earth.
Hell using Warp drive through the Oort cloud or Asteroid Belt might be troublesome if you just start picking up crap when passing through dense matter. You slow down and all of the asteroids and comets you picked up are on a colission course for Earth. I suggest some different approach vectors might be the first precaution.
Apparently these guys never watched any Star Trek (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what the deflector array is for. Like, the original purpose, not the solution-of-the-week it usually gets jury-rigged for.
Queller Drive (Score:5, Interesting)
No brakes!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure about the theoretical effect of stopping, since the original theory [wikipedia.org] postulates that once riding that warp bubble there's no way to stop...
Re:Not even real and already weaponized. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
Helicopters (Score:5, Interesting)
Can injure boarding/deboarding passengers with the intense amount of static electricity that builds up on the rotors. Getting fried by discharge of built-up charged particles is not a new downside to travel methods.
Re:Already handled (Score:5, Interesting)
There was essentially one thing wrong: it was written by the same retards who did Transformers.
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
If you use the same logic, not observing God interacting with the world does not imply that God does not exist.
So many of the same arguments apply to both proving the existence/nonexistence of God and proving the existence/nonexistence of extraterrestrials.
The difference is that "God," as generally defined by believers, is a being who specifically does interact with His creation. There is not (and probably will never be) any evidence either way on the hypothesis of a "watchmaker" who set the universe in motion and then left it alone, but that's not the God people pray to, either. If you believe in the power of prayer, or in the Bible as a moral rulebook, or any of the million and one other things which believers are constantly pushing, you have to believe in a God who should have left evidence of His active involvement all over the place, and yet has mysteriously failed to do so. There are people who believe in active involvement in human affairs by aliens too, of course, but they're a fringe minority rather than being in the mainstream of those who speculate on the possibility of extraterrestrial life.