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."
This is why you drop to impulse in a solar system (Score:5, Funny)
Duh
Re: (Score:2)
Can't they wrap the dock in tinfoil or something?
Re:This is why you drop to impulse in a solar syst (Score:5, Informative)
If this is our biggest barrier to developing one tomorrow, then why don't we have these already?
Because nobody has figured out exactly how one would warp space, only that it's theoretically possible.
Awesome!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe we could practice on asteroids.
Re:Awesome!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Uh, if we had this technology then the easiest way of wiping out the competition would be to not stop. You get all the mentioned effects plus the ship itself as an RKV and any destruction the warp field can do to their planet. It's like the difference between an asteroid and a space capsule - it's easy to hit Earth, it's harder not to leave a crater on impact...
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I don't think we need to worry about competition. We are already beaming out our TV broadcasts into space.
If you think about that.... it progresses from Hitler, to variety shows, to I Love Jeannie, some really weird shit in the 70s, stuff we want to forget about in the 80's, the beginnings of Idiocracy in the 90's... to Ghost Hunters, The Search for Bigfoot, and Snooki.
Any alien species that picks up those broadcasts is probably smart enough to stay away at all costs.
Re:Awesome!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Now we know why no one answers our calls. They've seen Star Trek.
"It's that little planet out near the rim calling again."
"Sssshh. Just pretend we're not home, or they might come over."
Fermi Paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:5, Informative)
After reading the "bad news" I immediately thought of how even Star Trek had already addressed this: the Bussard collectors at the front of all warp drives are designed to scoop up interstellar particles and radiation for fuel replenishment.
Obviously Trek is a work of fiction, but the collectors are based on actual theoretical Bussard ramjets/ramscoops [wikipedia.org] proposed in 1960.
And yet 52 years later, with Star Trek providing at least speculative options and real-life regenerative braking on electric and hybrid cars around us, the write-up didn't even think to speculate about somehow collecting and using that energy.
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The problem is with the way this particular warp drive operates.
It isn't the intersellar medium that produces the energy wave. It is the collateral effect of the warp field itself.
More specifically, the edge of the warp bubble acts like an event horizon, and the radiation is hawking radiation that forms from virtual particles getting caught in it, and being made real.
While the drive is "on", these particles are stuck to the event horizon of the warp bubble. They never get anywhere close to the ship, and as
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:5, Funny)
From their perspective, you might as well not.....
Plus, I'm sure your HOA wishes you would mow more.
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Because Texas is a well known communist paradise? Texas tried to move so far to the right they accidentally wrapped around and became virulent leftists.
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
Your scale is a bit off.
I'll make some assumptions for you. :)
You are an average male, with a size 10.5 shoe, and you have two feet.
Your yard is 1 acre, with no other objects obstructing it.
We are only considering a single plane for both your yard, and our solar system.
The size of your foot equals the size of the earth (cross section at the equator).
Then....
If your foot were the size of the earth, the soles of your shoes would have had contact with 0.205381533% of the area of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
I guess you're just about right then. We like to think we know what's in space around us. As has been proven by recent near misses with asteroids, we are not necessarily aware of rocks the size of a city before they are *very* close to us, or in some instances have just missed us.
There could be a small intelligent alien species in a small object say a spacecraft or natural body that we have passed off as "just a rock", somewhere between us and our sun, who do not meet the criteria for living on earth, and we wouldn't have ever known it existed.
We like to standardize "life" on the terms we know. Any advanced life will be roughly 1.5 meters tall, weighing roughly 72.5 kilograms, biped form, which breaths a nitrogen/oxygen mixture. That makes a lot of assumptions, including the idea that it would breathe.
It could be plausible that an alien species travels in a FTL space craft which is no larger than a mosquito. If it used Star Trek based warp technology, the resulting emissions if it slowed to "impulse" several planets away wouldn't even register as a change in background radiation.
But, we are humans, and we know everything.
I just hope that when we are visited, they do breathe oxygen, eat compatible foods, are tall enough so I can stand up in their ship, and they understand when I say "Thank goodness you've arrived, I've been waiting for years to get off this rock. Lets get out of here before the others try to kill you."
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That doesn't mean what you think it does.
That means that both Gods and aliens are largely if not completely irrelevant and belief in either is nothing to get terribly excited about. Never mind starting wars and such.
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.
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
That which ye seek, so shall ye find.
If a person believes in a meddling deity, and looks for evidence of such, they will find it.
If a person believes in a deity who has a firm stance of non-interference, and looks for evidence of such, they will find it.
If a person believes in no deity at all, and looks for evidence of such, they will find it.
That's the real problem of theology/anti-theology as an argument: It's a purely subjective realm of thought, and thus every person looking through the same window will, depending on their theological beliefs, see the world differently.
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If you use the same logic, not observing God interacting with the world does not imply that God does not exist.
It is pretty much the same and no less valid in either case. Science hasn't *disproved* either option nor has it provided evidence in support of either as well. The concept of God is not something that lends itself to being disproved since a believer can always say God does not want to be observed and so will not exist.
'Aggresive' athiesm that declares there is no God is technically a faith kind of like how religion is also faith. Really the only scientificly sound postiion is agnosticism. Normally just
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Yes, we've already been able to definitively sample one planet with life, and there is some pretty good evidence for life having made a go of it on at least 2 other bodies.
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Yes it is. They are just dark matter cats. I saw one in the basement once.
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:4, Informative)
So maybe that's exactly what we have been seeing! :D
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:4, Informative)
l33t
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:4, Funny)
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But we do see unexplained, massive gamma ray bursts all over the place. For all we know, we're seeing what happened when someone dropped out of warp 5 million years ago or something in another galaxy.
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More specifically, they've figured out all the neat things they can do with warped space, but just not how to accomplish it in the first place. Gravity, energy, magnetism, and mass all can warp space, but not in useful ways yet. I'd bet magnetism is going to be the way we do it, if ever.
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yep, I'd agree, gravity certainly is an attractive Earth feature
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If this is our biggest barrier to developing one tomorrow, then why don't we have these already? I mean besides NASA budget cuts...
Well, there is that whole problem with creating a bubble of negative energy, something we've not quite figured out how to do (or even what it means).
Re:This is why you drop to impulse in a solar syst (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, my ex wife can create an enormous bubble of negative energy with only a moment's notice...
Re:This is why you drop to impulse in a solar syst (Score:5, Funny)
Proposing to use your ex as fuel is taking it a bit far...
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This drive gives the old saying "you never really can go home" a whole new meaning.
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duh (Score:5, Funny)
>thisfuckingguy.jpg
Not even real and already weaponized. (Score:5, Funny)
Yup.
Re:Not even real and already weaponized. (Score:4, Interesting)
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"We'll be there in a sec... (Score:4, Funny)
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"I sense a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices all cried out in terror, and then were suddenly silenced. So ease up on the damn brakes next time, Solo."
Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Star Wars uses hyperspace, not warp. Get off my lawn!
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.
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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.
An Aggie with warp drive is what caused the Oort cloud.
Dump it all on Mars (Score:3)
Actually using Mars as a dumping ground to add more Mass and Heat, that was in Red Mars right?
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"Everybody gets a nice light show"
Yeah, except all the people you just gamma ray'd.
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.
Re:Apparently these guys never watched any Star Tr (Score:5, Funny)
You mean, as in:
Data: Geordi, in my experiments to become more like a human, I seem to have lodged Captain Picard up my positronic rectum
Geordi: Wow, Data, I mean, um.... Maybe I don't want to know. But I tell you what, we'll set up a tachyon burst through the deflector array and that should cause your mechanical sphincter to open. If we're lucky, it will also fry his brain so he won't remember you stuffing him in there.
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Visit The In-laws! (Score:3, Funny)
Makes a visit to the Mother-In-Law worth while now!
Helluva weapon (Score:5, Insightful)
Sent from a long distance, nearly undetectable, essentially unstoppable. When it arrives, its arrival is itself a weapon, plus whatever payload it is carrying.
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No doubt, instant destruction, and occupation force in one nice and tidy package :) Galactic conquest can be in your hands now!
Queller Drive (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Queller Drive (Score:5, Funny)
So you're the other Space 1999 fan.
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...
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Before we broke the sound barrier there were some calculations that showed that air loads would approach infinite as the aircraft approached the speed of sound. Obviously that proved to not be true, demonstrating that some models ought to be taken with a grain of salt.
How far? (Score:3)
In the case of forward-facing particles the outburst can be very energetic — enough to destroy anyone at the destination directly in front of the ship. “Any people at the destination,” the team’s paper concludes, “would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for [forward] region particles.”
I do not see anywhere where it is mentioned how far in front of the ship the blasted into oblivion effects will occur. How close is directly in front of the ship?
Warp Speed Warps Space (Score:2)
Gamma ray bursts (Score:2)
so they're really only Alcubierre drive-equipped ships slowing down in our direction.
Conservation of energy (Score:5, Informative)
I hate to be the party pooper, but:
All the energy for those high energy particles has to come from somewhere, which means that it'll take ridiculous amounts of energy to create an Alcubierre drive, it it's possible at all.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Conservation of energy (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, it's always something! (Score:2)
Pheww..... I prefer our good old.... (Score:2)
... and very slow rockets. There are only behind the ship deadly. ;-)
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.
Waiting friends (Score:2)
This is bad news for family and friends waiting for the ship to arrive, as this intense burst will fry them
Not only that, but since you're traveling faster than light they wouldn't see you coming in time to duck.
Jet aircraft... (Score:5, Funny)
Jet engines (theoretically) allow large metal objects formed into a lifting body to fly though the air at great velocities. This causes them to accumulate great momentum. This is bad news for family and friends waiting on the runway for the aircraft to arrive, as this momentum will cause the aircraft to run into them and kill them.
Han Fried First (Score:2)
The falcon, being the first spaceship in the SW universe to be seen going into (and out of) FTL, makes Han Solo the first fryer. Stuff it George Lucas!
But seriously, wouldn't solar winds and a habitable planet's magnetic field tend to deflect the vast majority of this crap? I mean, without either of these, we'd be getting fried by our own sun.
What? (Score:2)
Have they never watched an episode of star trek before... you drop in or out of warp drive at a safe distance from any other planet/lifeforms
so you would never hi warp drive until you actually where outside orbit...a safer distance then this guy thinks it would be...
Darn it all! (Score:2)
How dare someone interject reality in to my SciFi visions of the future!
On the more serious side, I'm sure that by the time we could develop something that could warp space, we will also have developed some sort of frictionless space flight. If we flew in space without friction, we would not be collecting all of those loose particulars.
Asimov (Score:3)
Easy solution (Score:2)
Well as long as we're talking about stuff that doesn't exist, it's an easy solution: just add a dampening field generator.
Safe Zone (Score:2)
Easy to fix. It's just like in Mass Effect 2: there would be a "safe zone" for where ships traveling at FTL speeds to come out of FTL safely. The zones would just have to be large enough to accommodate the largest of ships. The station where you would disembark and your family would be would be outside this zone.
Also, if you are a Star Trek person, you will remember the episode of TNG where the ship had to be evacuated at an orbital platform so that it could be "cleaned" as it built up particles along the h
Rebel propaganda exposed! (Score:5, Funny)
Remember when the Millennium Falcon jumped out of hyperspace and Alderaan was gone? What we now know is that the dust on the leading edge of the ship is what actually destroyed the planet, arriving just before the ship, leaving it in the middle of an "asteroid field". However, this would have been mighty embarrassing for the Rebellion, so they made up this myth of destruction by the "Death Star" (which wasn't even operational yet!) as the killer. Who do we have to prove otherwise, Leia? She's from the planet that got destroyed and head of the Rebellion; of course she'd lie to protect it (remember, she'd never consciously give it up)! Let's stop the propaganda in its tracks!
Oh, and when Kenobi felt that disturbance in the force: it was a premonition of what they were about to do, but Mr. "I've seen a lot of crazy things" didn't believe in some "force"
We knew this... (Score:3)
Why do you think all warp capable vessels in Star Fleet have deflector arrays? Gosh, kids today not paying attention in interstellar physics...
Re:bussard collector (Score:5, Insightful)
More like needing the radiation equivalent of a Catalytic Converter...
If one knows that some undesirable trait will manifest, look at ways to mitigate that undesirable trait.
Or, use that trait beneficially. If the act of dropping out of warp releases a fuckton of energy, find a way to harness that energy.
Re: (Score:3)
The big difference between this and KERS / a catalytic converter is that the energy you're trying to collect cannot be collected from inside the vehicle at all. A better analogy is an aircraft trying to collect the energy from its own sonic boom.
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Actually, they never really said exactly everything that the Bussard collectors did. They very well could have also been used to suck up said particles just before exiting warp. I'll be in my parent's basement if anyone would like to discuss this further.
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Did you post this from your quantum computer???
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...every single thing discussed here is based on theory, which tends to make me scratch my head as to how much we're spending funding research like this. Kind of hard to put the cart before the horse when you haven't even invented the wheel yet.
I've heard about this kind of ignorance, but I'm a bit astounded to find it on Slashdot.
Basically, we still haven't found the Higgs boson. Yet physics has advanced far beyond that point, leading to several breakthroughs that we are enjoying the benefits of. And with time, we're eventually going back to prove the Higgs boson. I could name similar "theory points" in almost every science where something has not been proven, but the evidence is enough that we can move forward making assumptions and make othe
Re:Already handled (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Already handled (Score:5, Interesting)
There was essentially one thing wrong: it was written by the same retards who did Transformers.
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You know. There has to be something in DSM IV to describe the sort of neurological malfunction that can lead someone to watch, let alone like those fucking awful movies.
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But you see, the Transformers universe is occupied by humans with Shia LaBeouf's intellect. People like that would have a hard time not picking up a stick and doing themselves real harm long before they could ever stick it in an exposed cog.
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If it's like all the other complaint I have read, then.. nothing was wrong with it.
Slap an Ad Hom is not really a complaint.
" couple hundred meters from space dock"
Based on? You have no reference to scale the distance. Not that ti matters, they ahve gone to warp close to things many times throughout the series.
" and dropped out in Vulcan orbit."
so? No the first time the came out of warp in an orbit.
Here is Bender, with more shocking news for you old people:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8H5_l9E3s [youtube.com]
Star Trek The Motion Picture (Score:5, Funny)
Except that in the 23rd Century way back then, Pluto was a PLANET!!!
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Except that in the 23rd Century way back then, Pluto was a PLANET!!!
It cost the tax payers a pretty penny to make it big enough to be a planet, but it was worth it.
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Actually, oddly enough it seems to me that much of science fiction is actually limited to a one-dimensional view of the solar system, much less a 2D view. The reference to Pluto is a good case and point.
Everyone seems to think of the planets in such a fashion that they're strung together along a (long) straight road such that to travel "out" of the solar system from Earth you would have to pass along each planet in turn. Who's to say for any given year which planet (if any) you'll pass heading outward (op
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What happens when someone comes in behind you in the arrival lane? Since any FTL communication would by necessity be based on this unless yet another way to break the speed of light was discovered, you can't even send a "get the fuck out of the way, I'm coming in!" message without killing everyone in the arrival lane.
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Actually, more like a Vogon freeway.
Re:faster than the speed of light (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought that it was impossible (theoretically) to go faster than the speed of light.
It is easy to theoretically go faster than the speed of light. It's darn near impossible to actually do it.
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sure exactly the thing we want for first contact with an alien race
alien: i like these humans! they keep sending us these tasty frozen dinners and microwaving them upon arrival so they are nice and toasty warm upon delivery!
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More like, every time you park your car, everyone within a half mile of the car gets hits by tires flying off the car at 50 mph.
Re:Easy Fix (Score:5, Funny)
Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kilotomb bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law?
First Recruit: Sir! A object in motion stays in motion, sir!
Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!
First Recruit: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!
Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this husk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you're ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Second Recruit: Sir, yes sir!