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Faster than light travel
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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
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Was on my home way from work thinking how I could teleport home, went down a YouTube rabbit hole and looked into warp drive, then alcuberrie drive, then some people said ftl travel is possible others said it's impossible does anyone with a bit more knowledge than me watching YouTube have an opinion on this concept would be interested to hear |
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Outside of the quantum world, 'light speed' is the maximum speed anything without mass can travel. Physicists call it C and it's known as light speed because it's the speed photons travel, which have no mass. And from a photos perspective, time barely exists at all! As far as we know, they are the only things that are massless. Electricity can travel at nearly lightspeed, but the electrons themselves don't as they have mass. We can't do it ourselves (in rockets etc), and if we did yes, we could time travel and kill our own grandparents. But space and time are called 'spacetime' because they are intrinsically linked, and 'causality' (cause and effect, ie the forward appearance of time with one thing leading to another, or 'atrophy' as it's also called - the state of decay or change from any state to further complexity - is that time?) only works because it can't be reversed. It's how we all exist.
Weirdly, freaky time discrepancies can actually 'co-exist' in different parts of the universe if we shoot off in one direction fast enough, but the act of reducing velocity to turn around and go back will see huge ages of time flash by! But the universe is huge - most of the stars we see with the eye are of course long dead. People say light speed is not strictly impossible in certain circumstances, but basically the universe is a constant 'thing' and therefore is naturally self-protecting by default. Just by being the way that it is, so to speak.
pt |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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"Outside of the quantum world, 'light speed' is the maximum speed anything without mass can travel. Physicists call it C and it's known as light speed because it's the speed photons travel, which have no mass. And from a photos perspective, time barely exists at all! As far as we know, they are the only things that are massless. Electricity can travel at nearly lightspeed, but the electrons themselves don't as they have mass. We can't do it ourselves (in rockets etc), and if we did yes, we could time travel and kill our own grandparents. But space and time are called 'spacetime' because they are intrinsically linked, and 'causality' (cause and effect, ie the forward appearance of time with one thing leading to another, or 'atrophy' as it's also called - the state of decay or change from any state to further complexity - is that time?) only works because it can't be reversed. It's how we all exist.
Weirdly, freaky time discrepancies can actually 'co-exist' in different parts of the universe if we shoot off in one direction fast enough, but the act of reducing velocity to turn around and go back will see huge ages of time flash by! But the universe is huge - most of the stars we see with the eye are of course long dead. People say light speed is not strictly impossible in certain circumstances, but basically the universe is a constant 'thing' and therefore is naturally self-protecting by default. Just by being the way that it is, so to speak.
pt"
Did you know that if you travel North you would eventually travel south but if you travel east you can never west ? :P |
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"I think if we travelled that fast we would be gurateed to pass out and probably die from being crushed by g force"
Isn't G force just from acceleration and change of direction though?
Most theories about FTL travel involve using gravity to warp space in front of the vehicle, it would be like falling at a constant rate. |
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By *ack688Man
over a year ago
abruzzo Italy (and UK) |
My understanding is that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows although I don’t think that’s slowing is linear, you have to get very close to light speed to have a significant slowing, but given that speed is measured against time then if you were at almost light speed and time had almost stopped for you then you could travel many light years but it would not take years for the person travelling although it would to an external observer. |
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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
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I saw somewhere that if we can access the fabric of spacetime and "pull and push" on it we can avoid the E= mc2, issues but this would require negative energy which of course isn't possible. Then I saw somewhere that someone found how to do it with positive energy but you would need energy in the magnitude of the size of Jupiter. I feel like in my lifetime maybe we could see something preliminary. Every decade we seem to get closer, exciting stuff I guess |
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"I saw somewhere that if we can access the fabric of spacetime and "pull and push" on it we can avoid the E= mc2, issues but this would require negative energy which of course isn't possible. Then I saw somewhere that someone found how to do it with positive energy but you would need energy in the magnitude of the size of Jupiter. I feel like in my lifetime maybe we could see something preliminary. Every decade we seem to get closer, exciting stuff I guess "
The whole “push and pull” might refer to the act of “warping” space time so that it is space time moving and the vehicle. That’s what the Alcubierre drive would theoretically do, almost the same way as warp drive in trek.
Currently we cannot come close to faster than light but there are possible ways to cheat it, wormholes being the main.
Someone already mentioned time dilation, time slowing for the traveller relative to a non traveler, which gets larger the faster you go, but there is also a corresponding relative mass increase and an exponential increase of energy to get there.
I’ll shut up now but I could talk about this all day and it feels good to put my degree to some use for once lol.
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"I’m afraid physics won’t allow us too.
The mr at one time physics said bumblebees couldn't fly,..science laws often change. "
The g force alone would probably reduce you body to particles.
The mr |
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".
The g force alone would probably reduce you body to particles.
The mr "
At a constant 1g acceleration relative to earth it would only take about a year to reach near the speed of light and you’ll only have travelled about half a light year. But you’d need fuel for the journey… |
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"I think if we travelled that fast we would be gurateed to pass out and probably die from being crushed by g forceIsn't G force just from acceleration and change of direction though?
Most theories about FTL travel involve using gravity to warp space in front of the vehicle, it would be like falling at a constant rate."
That's just a theory on something nobody has tried though, same as me thinking you'd actually have to travel really fast to travel faster than light  |
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"My understanding is that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows although I don’t think that’s slowing is linear, you have to get very close to light speed to have a significant slowing, but given that speed is measured against time then if you were at almost light speed and time had almost stopped for you then you could travel many light years but it would not take years for the person travelling although it would to an external observer. "
So if you wanted to travel quickly to get to a meet they would be dead by the time you got there |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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If we somehow mastered permanent acceleration then we could reach any point in the universe within 45 years.
If we travelled back the same way we would find ourselves hundreds of thousands of years in the future. |
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WOW!
I have read through this thread and there are some great, incredible, even amazing contributions made by fabbers who clearly have given this consideration and thought.
But let’s face it, we don’t really know do we? We get told these theories and we read books by people like Stephen Hawking and at the end of the day we can’t really relate to what they are saying… I mean I get pretty excited when I am driving my car on a road that runs along side a railway track and a train starts going past me, I put my foot down then I start to go past the train and I think “ how fast am I going! “  |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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"Mohammad Ali could turn the light off in his bedroom and was in bed before the room got dark! "
Even I can do that - I have a light switch next to my bed  |
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"I think if we travelled that fast we would be gurateed to pass out and probably die from being crushed by g forceIsn't G force just from acceleration and change of direction though?
Most theories about FTL travel involve using gravity to warp space in front of the vehicle, it would be like falling at a constant rate.
That's just a theory on something nobody has tried though, same as me thinking you'd actually have to travel really fast to travel faster than light "
It's not the speed that would fuck you up though. It's the acceleration. We are hurtling through space rotating at 1000 mph, orbiting the sun at 67k mph and that sun is orbiting the blackhole at the centre of our galaxy at about 450k mph. Handling speed clearly isn't the issue. |
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first you would have to find a material that would stand the impact of space debris such as dust/rocks etc even if you could travel at the speed of light.
All the materials currently known to mankind could not stand up to hitting even small particles at that speed and would punch holes in the hull of the craft and through anyone inside it |
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Any faster than light travel "ideas" are purely speculations and haven't got any evidence to support them. Tachyons are still considered hypothetical particle.
Anyway, we humans haven't even crossed a tiny fraction of light speed. It's a long way to go for faster than light travel even if it's theoretically possible. |
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By *ortyairCouple
over a year ago
Wallasey |
"Any faster than light travel "ideas" are purely speculations and haven't got any evidence to support them. Tachyons are still considered hypothetical particle.
Anyway, we humans haven't even crossed a tiny fraction of light speed. It's a long way to go for faster than light travel even if it's theoretically possible."
Thought it was theoretically impossible to go faster than light. Isn't that what Einstein theorised? X |
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There's also the energy problem. As you get closer to the speed of light you need exponentially more energy to increase your velocity. It gets to a point where there isn't enough energy in the universe to increase your velocity to the speed of light.
We're not going to go faster than the speed of light without a physics loop hole. Like a worm hole or something like that. |
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"Anyway, we humans haven't even crossed a tiny fraction of light speed. It's a long way to go for faster than light travel even if it's theoretically possible."
For a bit of perspective: Saturn V that went to the moon took 3 days to get there. Light takes about 1/2 second...
Whilst I would love to go "out there" and explore, light speed is, based on our understanding, impossible without the help of some kind of cheat, like extra dimensional travel. As others have said, as you approach light speed your mass becomes greater, and so you need more fuel to keep accelerating, therefore you end up needing infinite fuel to keep accelerating to light speed.
As much as I hate to say it, the universe has a speed limit, and it's really slow compared to going anywhere, and do fast that we aren't even at 1% of it.
Sad times, but we'd need some kind of cheat/shortcut like wormholes, Element Zero, Ancient technology, jump gates etc |
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By *linyMan
over a year ago
Manchester/London |
There are things that travel faster than the speed of light already. Neutrinos(no not the rapper from So Solid Crew!) we’re discovered to travel faster than the speed of light after being discharged from an activation of the Large Hadron Collider at SERN. They were detected in Italy in an unrelated experiment. |
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By *empted23Couple
over a year ago
countryside |
"Outside of the quantum world, 'light speed' is the maximum speed anything without mass can travel. Physicists call it C and it's known as light speed because it's the speed photons travel, which have no mass. And from a photos perspective, time barely exists at all! As far as we know, they are the only things that are massless. Electricity can travel at nearly lightspeed, but the electrons themselves don't as they have mass. We can't do it ourselves (in rockets etc), and if we did yes, we could time travel and kill our own grandparents. But space and time are called 'spacetime' because they are intrinsically linked, and 'causality' (cause and effect, ie the forward appearance of time with one thing leading to another, or 'atrophy' as it's also called - the state of decay or change from any state to further complexity - is that time?) only works because it can't be reversed. It's how we all exist.
Weirdly, freaky time discrepancies can actually 'co-exist' in different parts of the universe if we shoot off in one direction fast enough, but the act of reducing velocity to turn around and go back will see huge ages of time flash by! But the universe is huge - most of the stars we see with the eye are of course long dead. People say light speed is not strictly impossible in certain circumstances, but basically the universe is a constant 'thing' and therefore is naturally self-protecting by default. Just by being the way that it is, so to speak.
pt"
Was gonna way in with a fairly knowledged answer but this one saved me a lot of typing
And can be summarised with
It’s a fun thought but actually No not really  |
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"first you would have to find a material that would stand the impact of space debris such as dust/rocks etc even if you could travel at the speed of light.
All the materials currently known to mankind could not stand up to hitting even small particles at that speed and would punch holes in the hull of the craft and through anyone inside it "
If you strapped a galvanised bin lid to the front… ? |
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"There are things that travel faster than the speed of light already. Neutrinos(no not the rapper from So Solid Crew!) we’re discovered to travel faster than the speed of light after being discharged from an activation of the Large Hadron Collider at SERN. They were detected in Italy in an unrelated experiment. "
The neutrino anomaly had since been disproved |
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"Anyway, we humans haven't even crossed a tiny fraction of light speed. It's a long way to go for faster than light travel even if it's theoretically possible.
For a bit of perspective: Saturn V that went to the moon took 3 days to get there. Light takes about 1/2 second...
Whilst I would love to go "out there" and explore, light speed is, based on our understanding, impossible without the help of some kind of cheat, like extra dimensional travel. As others have said, as you approach light speed your mass becomes greater, and so you need more fuel to keep accelerating, therefore you end up needing infinite fuel to keep accelerating to light speed.
As much as I hate to say it, the universe has a speed limit, and it's really slow compared to going anywhere, and do fast that we aren't even at 1% of it.
Sad times, but we'd need some kind of cheat/shortcut like wormholes, Element Zero, Ancient technology, jump gates etc"
Conspiracy theory - That's why I believe that the whole thing is a simulation. Someone didn't want to simulate too big of a universe and enforced limits on our speed to keep us within the solar systems  |
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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
|
"I saw somewhere that if we can access the fabric of spacetime and "pull and push" on it we can avoid the E= mc2, issues but this would require negative energy which of course isn't possible. Then I saw somewhere that someone found how to do it with positive energy but you would need energy in the magnitude of the size of Jupiter. I feel like in my lifetime maybe we could see something preliminary. Every decade we seem to get closer, exciting stuff I guess "
Also just wondering how the tf can we access the fabric of spacetime?!?!  |
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"There are things that travel faster than the speed of light already. Neutrinos(no not the rapper from So Solid Crew!) we’re discovered to travel faster than the speed of light after being discharged from an activation of the Large Hadron Collider at SERN. They were detected in Italy in an unrelated experiment.
The neutrino anomaly had since been disproved
"
-Pretty much all the potential discoveries they find at the LHC at the CERN complex near Geneva (and elsewhere to a smaller degree) get disproved - but that's science. But there's usually something the go it seems. Not everyone is into these Large (larger and larger) Hardron Colliders - they cost a fortune. A lot of people want to look more at direction and theory, building things as needed.
Just read this nonsense from The Guardian last year:
"Cern gears up for more discoveries 10 years after ‘God particle’ find
With the Higgs boson already in the bag, the Large Hadron Collider begins another period of data collection"
It goes on to say, "Thanks to the discovery of the Higgs boson, scientists can now explain a host of phenomena.."
What discoveries? What they say about the Higgs boson here is just not true, as scientists confidently explained those things already using what we had: we use quantum mechanics and the standard model every day. Higgs proposed the boson (there are lots of bosons) back in 1964 and it had to be there for the rest of the standard model to work.
So what a massive amount of overblown hype - what has happened to that paper? They didn't even capitalised CERN, which is not an area - it's the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire - 'European Council for Nuclear Research'.
And what 'bag' are they bragging about?
So the LHC spotted the Higgs Boson, but to absolutely *no ones* surprise because it simply had to be there. As a part of the standard model, we've essentially been 'using' it for years and finally seeing it added nothing and gave us nothing. You cannot call it a 'discovery', though it always constituted a huge amount of hype given that the LHC was essentially all about finding new undiscovered things - a concept that by itself is a lot harder to sell.
I've just seen this too (in terms of citation);
https://science.howstuffworks.com/5-discoveries-made-by-the-large-hadron-collider-so-far-.htm
Not one of the "Five discoveries (so far)" are discoveries at all! 'Discoveries of potential evidence for various existing theories including fringe theories' can be meaningless in just about every way. Also, sifting data in a way that may 'yet prove supersymmetry' is NOT a discovery! It's just a chance to talk about supersymmetry in a new article that grabs attention.
I really feel uncomfortable with the world of science a lot of the time, as much I love, value and need it.
We have spotted gravitational waves now (in 2015, which was previously pure theory), but that needed an interstellar opportunity and different technology, and was done over two places in the US. That got a LOT less hype than the LHC-approved Higgs boson 'discovery' in 2012 (10 years before the daft Guardian article), but was much more profound for a lot of people.
pt
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"Was on my home way from work thinking how I could teleport home, went down a YouTube rabbit hole and looked into warp drive, then alcuberrie drive, then some people said ftl travel is possible others said it's impossible does anyone with a bit more knowledge than me watching YouTube have an opinion on this concept would be interested to hear"
What will freak you out, OP, is that I posted those YouTube videos tomorrow. |
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"The expansion of Space is faster than light
"
-Just after the Big Bang they believe space expanded much faster than light (cosmic inflation), but currently they think that maybe at the extents of the universe perhaps.. ie further then we can ever see from here (due to the speed of light itself) - but we know so little about why it expands, as we do about 'dark energy' etc, and what could be behind it.
And that kind of 'metric expansion' is covered by 'general relativity' too (ie it's about the general effects of gravity over vast distances that include cosmic matters such as spacetime curvature and even time evolution on a grand scale) - we would follow 'special relativity', which involves localised spacetime, and a whole array of observations (including 'time dilation' in motion, ie moving clocks being different to stationary ones and the 'relational' nature of simultaneous events, the equivalence and transmutability of energy and mass ie E=mc2, and of course this finite speed limit ie light speed within spacetime itself). You can never underestimate distance in cosmological physics I think.
I forgot to say earlier that light speed (which is specifically to say light's maximum speed) can only happen in a vacuum (ie to be full light speed), which makes it even harder to achieve.
pt |
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"Was on my home way from work thinking how I could teleport home, went down a YouTube rabbit hole and looked into warp drive, then alcuberrie drive, then some people said ftl travel is possible others said it's impossible does anyone with a bit more knowledge than me watching YouTube have an opinion on this concept would be interested to hear"
Try the book series 'teleport' by Joshua b Talbot - basically your consciousness is digitised and transmitted and inserted into a new clone |
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By *r TriomanMan
over a year ago
Chippenham Malmesbury area |
"The expansion of Space is faster than light
-Just after the Big Bang they believe space expanded much faster than light (cosmic inflation), but currently they think that maybe at the extents of the universe perhaps.. ie further then we can ever see from here (due to the speed of light itself) - but we know so little about why it expands, as we do about 'dark energy' etc, and what could be behind it.
And that kind of 'metric expansion' is covered by 'general relativity' too (ie it's about the general effects of gravity over vast distances that include cosmic matters such as spacetime curvature and even time evolution on a grand scale) - we would follow 'special relativity', which involves localised spacetime, and a whole array of observations (including 'time dilation' in motion, ie moving clocks being different to stationary ones and the 'relational' nature of simultaneous events, the equivalence and transmutability of energy and mass ie E=mc2, and of course this finite speed limit ie light speed within spacetime itself). You can never underestimate distance in cosmological physics I think.
I forgot to say earlier that light speed (which is specifically to say light's maximum speed) can only happen in a vacuum (ie to be full light speed), which makes it even harder to achieve.
pt"
Cosmic inflation... is that why fuel and food prices have gone up so much? |
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tldr, there seems to be a 'reason' in everything being so far apart - just in the sense that things being so far apart seems to keep it all together. (Just as the space and spin of electrons within atoms keeps atoms from imploding). It is what it is.
pt |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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We need to get to stage 1 civilisation first without blowing each other up, warp drive and interstellar travel next, we need to work out what element 115 is and how other civilisations have managed it, a guess is it’s actual solidified dark matter, they have worked out how to harness it as if allows instantaneous travel between two points, all our preconceptions about everything by that time will be in the bin, science logic philosophy, just bin the lot because by that point the human race will be on a wildly different path as explorers of the known universe, the problem we have is our ‘vision’ is very much tied to us being largely similar to what we are now, Star Wars, Star Trek, interstellar but by the time we get to work out worm hole travel will there be a need for sex organs, will we have large brains and bigger heads and no need for strong muscular frames as there will be no need to fight anyone or run away from anything, will we look like little green men? Some of us do now to be fair |
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"Was on my home way from work thinking how I could teleport home, went down a YouTube rabbit hole and looked into warp drive, then alcuberrie drive, then some people said ftl travel is possible others said it's impossible does anyone with a bit more knowledge than me watching YouTube have an opinion on this concept would be interested to hear
Try the book series 'teleport' by Joshua b Talbot - basically your consciousness is digitised and transmitted and inserted into a new clone
"
--But how do you transmit digital information faster than light? Or any information? Massless photons are the universe's 'information carriers' after all.
Before anyone says somehow 'quantise' it - aside from the reality of such a theory, just think of the amount of information! I read once that the energy needed for a theorised version of teleportation was calculated to be more than exists in the entire universe.
And can you teleport the mortal coil anyway? What actually will come out the other end?
Also, surely if you can teleport someone you can theoretically duplicate them too? So who is who?  (Why was that one never in Star Trek lol. It just ruins the concept and the drama and would just get crazy.)
pt |
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"Was on my home way from work thinking how I could teleport home, went down a YouTube rabbit hole and looked into warp drive, then alcuberrie drive, then some people said ftl travel is possible others said it's impossible does anyone with a bit more knowledge than me watching YouTube have an opinion on this concept would be interested to hear
Try the book series 'teleport' by Joshua b Talbot - basically your consciousness is digitised and transmitted and inserted into a new clone
--But how do you transmit digital information faster than light? Or any information? Massless photons are the universe's 'information carriers' after all.
Before anyone says somehow 'quantise' it - aside from the reality of such a theory, just think of the amount of information! I read once that the energy needed for a theorised version of teleportation was calculated to be more than exists in the entire universe.
And can you teleport the mortal coil anyway? What actually will come out the other end?
Also, surely if you can teleport someone you can theoretically duplicate them too? So who is who? (Why was that one never in Star Trek lol. It just ruins the concept and the drama and would just get crazy.)
pt "
It was in Star Trek, there where two Rikers |
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"Was on my home way from work thinking how I could teleport home, went down a YouTube rabbit hole and looked into warp drive, then alcuberrie drive, then some people said ftl travel is possible others said it's impossible does anyone with a bit more knowledge than me watching YouTube have an opinion on this concept would be interested to hear
Try the book series 'teleport' by Joshua b Talbot - basically your consciousness is digitised and transmitted and inserted into a new clone
--But how do you transmit digital information faster than light? Or any information? Massless photons are the universe's 'information carriers' after all.
Before anyone says somehow 'quantise' it - aside from the reality of such a theory, just think of the amount of information! I read once that the energy needed for a theorised version of teleportation was calculated to be more than exists in the entire universe.
And can you teleport the mortal coil anyway? What actually will come out the other end?
Also, surely if you can teleport someone you can theoretically duplicate them too? So who is who? (Why was that one never in Star Trek lol. It just ruins the concept and the drama and would just get crazy.)
pt
It was in Star Trek, there where two Rikers
"
-From teleportation, really? Did the two of them constitute an interesting character lol.
pt |
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By *m_hardMan
over a year ago
Swaffham |
"...does anyone ... have an opinion on this concept would be interested to hear"
The Alcubierre drive you mention could be built in principle with a design that utilises a negative energy density. That in turn will require an engineering breakthrough in optics to work with Unruh radiation that some scientists think has already been observed and others are not sure of. It's merely a matter of time until we know more.
Happy to provide you with more details if interested. |
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"We need to get to stage 1 civilisation first without blowing each other up
"
-Alas I see so little evidence of us doing this lol. (did I just say lol?). We developed smartphones, ie handheld computers for the masses, probably at least 20 years too early imo. Pretty much due to modern sl@very and hyper capitalism when you consider the incredible amount of things that goes into them (from gold and platinum to quantum physics). And what do they give most of us? Single screen 'echo chambers' of Andrew Tate, Qanon and Donald Trump.
I personally don't think there are many (if any) advanced civilisations in the whole universe's history, because I think there is likely a 'goldilocks period' for all advanced Life, where technology cannot overtake societal progress to the degree where societies actually go backwards while technology shoots forwards.
If you add that to all the other myriad of cosmic goldilocks scenarios Life needs simply to evolve (and then to survive and control it's own evolutionary impulses) - and the odds become infinitesimal imo - even when compared to the sheer amount of opportunity out there! ie the billions of galaxies where life can evolve (though not every galaxy is that fertile in terms of the building blocks needed, billions likely are).
So we may well be one our own, and not even for all that much longer alas if we don't up our game (let's be honest) to unprecedented (and pretty unlikely) levels. But this will be our consolidating century for sure if we do though - if we get past this one the future is surely ours. But will we even get half way? I doubt it personally.
Happy shopping hedonistas 
pt |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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Matter moving FTL is a total mindfuck concept. We already have examples of that happening. In water it is called Cherenkov radiation (the blue glow at the bottom of a nuclear reactor).
"C" is the definition for the speed of light in a vacuum and even that is a mindfuck. If you were traveling at C and pointed a light source along the direction of travel, you would see any light emitted from the light source as travelling at C relative to you. However to an observer outside of your reference also sees the is light traveling away from you at C, but it should technically be 2C!
Then there is the fact we can not measure C directly. As in measure the time it takes light to travel from point A to point B. We can only measure the round trip from point A back to point A then divide that measurement but that can not account for relativity during the period of travel only relativity at point A. If you try to measure point A to B you need to synchronise the clocks at both ends. This is where relativity collapses both points to the one used for synchronising the information. See........ Total mindfuckery! |
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By *aggonerMan
over a year ago
for a penny |
"I think if we travelled that fast we would be gurateed to pass out and probably die from being crushed by g force"
They said something like that about rail travel in the 1800s. Don’t think g force was mentioned by name. |
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By *hav02Man
over a year ago
Glasgow/London |
As above. Speed is relative, and it all depends on your reference point.
I am sitting still,but I'm spinning uber fast on this rock we called Earth,
and Earth is hurtling around the Sun in our Solar System.
Our Solar system is spinning in our galaxy, which is expanding further away from other galaxies.
Now how far have I actually moved while typing this?!  |
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"...does anyone ... have an opinion on this concept would be interested to hear
The Alcubierre drive you mention could be built in principle with a design that utilises a negative energy density. That in turn will require an engineering breakthrough in optics to work with Unruh radiation that some scientists think has already been observed and others are not sure of. It's merely a matter of time until we know more.
Happy to provide you with more details if interested.
"
-This is a 'warp drive' and breakthroughs are always what are needed. But what constitutes a breakthrough?
The idea here is to circumvent the light speed barrier by 'warping' spacetime. Yes Elon Musk is into it, lots of people are..
It has to be said that there is a BIG difference in to going around light-speed and going "faster than light". The problem with light speed of course is that it is really slow in terms of intergalactic travel ('light years' are years of travelling at light speed!), so the dream is always to go faster.
The original Alcubierre Drive involved creating 'something' less energetic than a vacuum - something of 'negative energy' (using hidden mass perhaps) that can be warped and squeezed to push forward. But negative energy simply doesn't exist, and the drive would need enormous amounts of this non-conserved energy!
Sci-fi being sci-fi, the idea became a science fiction staple and it has been for years, but this is probably seen as being on the scientific end of science fiction, especially as time has gone on. Nobody likes negative energy though, or can yet see how this can go faster than light.
More recently the idea has been adapted to fit in with Einstein's field equations (good as far as that goes - but that doesn't make it physically possible, although spacetime can indeed be warped and expand at huge speeds - re the huge speed of the universe's expansion above) - and a 'bubble' idea has been forged! Some scientifics like Sabine Hossenfelder, have been unusually positive about the research in general (especially in her case) at least in theory, mainly due to actual advancements in the maths (this is not something that often happens!).. but they still fall down on the negative energy, and still cannot see where it can go faster than light!
The bubble idea has passengers moving at normal speed within a bubble, but it's the bubble itself that is moved. There is maths here, so they now they have a framework to calculate with - but they still haven't worked out how to do it! According to Sabine, that may only happen if general relativity itself is not quite correct. And of course - who knows? Nobody thinks Einstein managed to say it all (it doesn't 'all' fit together for a start).
However, Hossenfelder has more recently suggested that a warp drive *could* (ie from what we already know) be made that comes pretty *close* to the speed of light.
And that is not too bad! Near Light speed can still get us around our solar system within several hours. We could mine asteroids for metals and such like. Unfortunately Andromeda (the nearest galaxy to us) is 2.5 million light-years away. Well the thread does say "faster than light", and that is exactly what we will need for that!
All in all though, a warp drive of any capacity is not coming to tomorrow, not even remotely imo. We still have to warp spacetime! Who has yet done this? Of course, Elon Musk (the great show man of our day) has loads of colourful pictures of how it's going to take us to Mars within 30 mins or whatever (sorry I just can't read his stuff). He will probably get something up/down there I imagine, but not actual people inside something like this imo.
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/01/are-warp-drives-science-now.html
pt |
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"Was on my home way from work thinking how I could teleport home, went down a YouTube rabbit hole and looked into warp drive, then alcuberrie drive, then some people said ftl travel is possible others said it's impossible does anyone with a bit more knowledge than me watching YouTube have an opinion on this concept would be interested to hear
Try the book series 'teleport' by Joshua b Talbot - basically your consciousness is digitised and transmitted and inserted into a new clone
--But how do you transmit digital information faster than light? Or any information? Massless photons are the universe's 'information carriers' after all.
Before anyone says somehow 'quantise' it - aside from the reality of such a theory, just think of the amount of information! I read once that the energy needed for a theorised version of teleportation was calculated to be more than exists in the entire universe.
And can you teleport the mortal coil anyway? What actually will come out the other end?
Also, surely if you can teleport someone you can theoretically duplicate them too? So who is who? (Why was that one never in Star Trek lol. It just ruins the concept and the drama and would just get crazy.)
pt
It was in Star Trek, there where two Rikers
-From teleportation, really? Did the two of them constitute an interesting character lol.
pt"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chances_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) |
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"Was on my home way from work thinking how I could teleport home, went down a YouTube rabbit hole and looked into warp drive, then alcuberrie drive, then some people said ftl travel is possible others said it's impossible does anyone with a bit more knowledge than me watching YouTube have an opinion on this concept would be interested to hear
Try the book series 'teleport' by Joshua b Talbot - basically your consciousness is digitised and transmitted and inserted into a new clone
--But how do you transmit digital information faster than light? Or any information? Massless photons are the universe's 'information carriers' after all.
Before anyone says somehow 'quantise' it - aside from the reality of such a theory, just think of the amount of information! I read once that the energy needed for a theorised version of teleportation was calculated to be more than exists in the entire universe.
And can you teleport the mortal coil anyway? What actually will come out the other end?
Also, surely if you can teleport someone you can theoretically duplicate them too? So who is who? (Why was that one never in Star Trek lol. It just ruins the concept and the drama and would just get crazy.)
pt
It was in Star Trek, there where two Rikers
-From teleportation, really? Did the two of them constitute an interesting character lol.
pt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chances_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
"
--Wow, so they did lol.
To be fair, the original Star Trek was certainly based on the scientific thinking around at the time, Gene Roddenbery was supposed to be really keen on that.
I always think it's amazing that almost all of what we know today was actually at least speculated by the time of Star Trek, if not entirely proven by then.
I think it's crazy to think that despite the new millennia (now 2023 somehow), science - in terms of discoveries - has ironically actually really dragged over the past few decades.
People continually promise and get excited over stuff, but we've essentially relied heavily on computing power and Moore's Law (re the guaranteed speed increase of them - if that still exists at the rate it did) - for decades now. We've had inventions for sure - and quantum computers for what they are worth, and maybe even nuclear fusion are not all that far away now - but core scientific advancements have been few and far between.
Of course that wasn't supposed to be how it happened - we were supposed to be on Mars at least by now! Given how society still is, maybe we are actually lucky it has slowed down as much as it has.
But of course there is artificial intelligence now. The combined power of networked computing and the internet (combined with the sheer marketability of human laziness and of course our utter folly) has given us hugely-advanced AI now. I do agree with Elon Musk that this is seriously scary, especially when combined with engineering and robotics - from bespoke workers, to androids to drones etc. Or even just with some kind of developed AI 'hive mind'. I don't think AI can quite be 'human', but that hardly matters. It or they only have to see themselves as being more capable imo (which is kind of the idea of them at least in part anyway), and to start doing things, whether asked to or not, that we are not fully aware of. It could make the millennium bug look at a ladybird flying over a picnic, because we may not fully know what's going on.
pt |
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Even if you could travel faster than light... if you get hit by an object, let's say a pigeon, surely the force and speed at which you collide will probably blow each of you to pieces.
You'd have to devise some sort of protection from collision.
Unless of course the body sort of breaks down to a molecular level at faster than light travel... Like Tom Paris when he went faster than Warp 10 and became a weird lizard thing |
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"Even if you could travel faster than light... if you get hit by an object, let's say a pigeon, surely the force and speed at which you collide will probably blow each of you to pieces.
You'd have to devise some sort of protection from collision.
Unless of course the body sort of breaks down to a molecular level at faster than light travel... Like Tom Paris when he went faster than Warp 10 and became a weird lizard thing "
-This is a problem in space anyway. Other things moving at incredibly fast speeds. Freezing cold, no air, no sound, maybe no light. Space couldn't be less hospitable. pt |
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By *rHotNottsMan
over a year ago
Dubai & Nottingham |
"Outside of the quantum world, 'light speed' is the maximum speed anything without mass can travel. Physicists call it C and it's known as light speed because it's the speed photons travel, which have no mass. And from a photos perspective, time barely exists at all! As far as we know, they are the only things that are massless. Electricity can travel at nearly lightspeed, but the electrons themselves don't as they have mass. We can't do it ourselves (in rockets etc), and if we did yes, we could time travel and kill our own grandparents. But space and time are called 'spacetime' because they are intrinsically linked, and 'causality' (cause and effect, ie the forward appearance of time with one thing leading to another, or 'atrophy' as it's also called - the state of decay or change from any state to further complexity - is that time?) only works because it can't be reversed. It's how we all exist.
Weirdly, freaky time discrepancies can actually 'co-exist' in different parts of the universe if we shoot off in one direction fast enough, but the act of reducing velocity to turn around and go back will see huge ages of time flash by! But the universe is huge - most of the stars we see with the eye are of course long dead. People say light speed is not strictly impossible in certain circumstances, but basically the universe is a constant 'thing' and therefore is naturally self-protecting by default. Just by being the way that it is, so to speak.
pt Did you know that if you travel North you would eventually travel south but if you travel east you can never west ? :P"
They say if you stand right on the North Pole , every direction is south. But I’m pretty sure if you get a hard-on , it still points north. |
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By *rHotNottsMan
over a year ago
Dubai & Nottingham |
"Even if you could travel faster than light... if you get hit by an object, let's say a pigeon, surely the force and speed at which you collide will probably blow each of you to pieces.
You'd have to devise some sort of protection from collision.
Unless of course the body sort of breaks down to a molecular level at faster than light travel... Like Tom Paris when he went faster than Warp 10 and became a weird lizard thing "
It’s not such a crazy idea. One of the most likely ways to achieve space time travel in the future is using self-replicating AI that can reproduce , xenobots already do this , they collect material from the over environment and make copies of themselves. So as long as the source code survives the light speed journeys it can replicate the body when it arrives. |
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"Outside of the quantum world, 'light speed' is the maximum speed anything without mass can travel. Physicists call it C and it's known as light speed because it's the speed photons travel, which have no mass. And from a photos perspective, time barely exists at all! As far as we know, they are the only things that are massless. Electricity can travel at nearly lightspeed, but the electrons themselves don't as they have mass. We can't do it ourselves (in rockets etc), and if we did yes, we could time travel and kill our own grandparents. But space and time are called 'spacetime' because they are intrinsically linked, and 'causality' (cause and effect, ie the forward appearance of time with one thing leading to another, or 'atrophy' as it's also called - the state of decay or change from any state to further complexity - is that time?) only works because it can't be reversed. It's how we all exist.
Weirdly, freaky time discrepancies can actually 'co-exist' in different parts of the universe if we shoot off in one direction fast enough, but the act of reducing velocity to turn around and go back will see huge ages of time flash by! But the universe is huge - most of the stars we see with the eye are of course long dead. People say light speed is not strictly impossible in certain circumstances, but basically the universe is a constant 'thing' and therefore is naturally self-protecting by default. Just by being the way that it is, so to speak.
pt Did you know that if you travel North you would eventually travel south but if you travel east you can never west ? :P
They say if you stand right on the North Pole , every direction is south. But I’m pretty sure if you get a hard-on , it still points north."
It points to Polaris and never gets a night's sleep! |
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"I’m afraid physics won’t allow us too.
The mr at one time physics said bumblebees couldn't fly,..science laws often change. "
It wasn't so much a law of physics that changed, it was more an understanding of how the bumblebee generates lift in order to fly that corrected the misconception. |
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