Warp Capable Ship Concept

[localzuk]

how does that affect causality? you do something 50 light years away you see it 50 years later just because you got there and back before the light did dosent mean it cant happen it just means if your viewer was good enough you could see yourself there

 

Time operates as normal. If it takes 2 weeks to travel there at "light speed" then it takes 2 weeks for the crew. However, we'd not see them via a telescope until the light from there has travelled to us - so it would be a further 2 weeks until we see it (if we're talking about warping about at light speed).

[tmcd35]

We talk about these laws like they are government laws, and how to evade (or avoid) them. According to Albert, it just cannot be done rather than we need to cheat them.

 

Isn't Einstein that came up with warped space as part of his Special Theory of Releativity? I think the concepts is space is folded so two point that where distant are suddenly alot closer together, you then travel between those two points at normal speed - there is no FTL travel. When space is unfolded you are at your new destination and the old destination is now back to being light years away. I'm sure it's been proven that space does indeed warp and fold in this way, and I'm sure gravity comes into the equation somewhere.

[sted]

Because you would carry back the information about what is going to happen before the information could physically arrive at Earth. You would know the effect before you saw the cause.

 

What you could do with that information, I don't know, but it would violate the principle AFAIK.

 

but its still physicall happened you are changing nothing other than the time its viewed its not time travel (it just looks like it). My read is its the same as being on set when they record say qi you already know whats happened even though its not broadcast for 4 weeks knowing what will happen in 4 weeks dosent change anything but from the point of view of someone who wasnt there the tv programe is in the future they dont know what happened

[sonofsanta]

This post is a better exploration of the issue, actually (just reading through it now): Q: Hyperspace, warp drives, and faster than light travel: why not? | Ask a Mathematician / Ask a Physicist

 

In short: FTL travel gets complicated because of frames, lightlike, timelike and spacelike separation, and allows you to travel back in time which is really messy and shouldn't be able to happen (by going somewhere FTL then coming back again FTL, you skip back in time).

 

Most of this is over my head, mind you. I know enough to ask the question and not enough to understand any answer

 

Say you’ve got the Enterprise (NCC-1701) and it works just like you’d expect: it cruises around at sub-light speeds until it engages its warp drive, which allows it to move at FTL speeds. It moves from one star system to another, then eventually disengages the drive and “drops out of warp”, no harm no foul. However! When viewed from a different frame, the same situation can be very strange.

 

The engage and disengage events are spacelike separated, so they don’t actually have an order. From (any one of) the proper frames, the disengage event can happen first (right half of the image above). When that’s the case you find that:

 

-First there’s one ship, traveling slower than light.

 

-Then suddenly, and without cause of any kind, two new copies of the ship appear at a place some distance away. One is traveling faster than light, and the other is traveling slower. This event corresponds with the drive being shut down.

 

-The FTL version travels backward until it contacts the original ship, at which point they both disappear at the moment that the original engages its drive.

 

Now, sure, ships coming into existence and popping out again may seem bad enough, but the big problem is that FTL travel opens the door to backward time travel (forward is fine: you’re doing it now).

 

By taking a couple spacelike paths that end earlier than they started you can zig-zag back in time and find yourself in the same place you started, but earlier than the time when you originally left.

Edited June 12, 2014 by sonofsanta

[Bananas]

'Could' is right. It will take 50 years to perfect the system, given it is only a concept so far, then need to build the thing. It is taking us 25 years to build HS2 for blasphemy sake!

 

I could still be around in 50 years

 

As for the HS2 garbage only reason that's happening/not happening is we don't blooming need it. Government should have stuck the billions into building a huge FTTP program to every home in the UK and then once up and running privatise it to recoup as much of the money as possible. We'd then have been the world leaders in connectivity and we wouldn't need HS2 ripping up the countryside and devaluing peoples homes etc because it would make home working much more feasible. In fact you could have diversified call centres with people logging in from home to take calls reducing companies overheads and making it much easier for people with disabilities to work.

 

But what the hell do I know i'm just a schmuck that pays their taxes...

Edited June 12, 2014 by Bananas

[cobra427col]

Someone in NASA has to have a sense of humor and stick on a wall somewhere

[Bananas]

I did read that some scientists think that bringing a ship powered by an Alcubierre drive out of warp would kill all of the life in the star system you were arriving in. So it might be a one way trip.

 

Only anything directly in front of the ship, drop out of warp facing empty space, no problem

[localzuk]

Only anything directly in front of the ship, drop out of warp facing empty space, no problem

 

But then you're miles away from your actual destination, so would need to travel at sub-light speeds to get there...

[Bananas]

How are you miles away, you could drop out of warp in orbit as long as the forward part of the ship is pointed out to open space.

 

Allow me to quote from K-Pax:

 

Dr. Mark Powell: What if I were to tell you that according to a man who lived on our planet, named Einstein, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light?

 

Prot: I would say that you misread Einstein, Dr. Powell. May I call you Mark? You see Mark, what Einstein actually said was that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light because its mass would become infinite. Einstein said nothing about entities already traveling at the speed of light or faster.

[sonofsanta]

Only anything directly in front of the ship, drop out of warp facing empty space, no problem

 

I think high energy gamma rays would go a very long way without losing much of their energy, so finding an empty patch of sky to aim at might be more of a challenge than you'd expect. The sky may be big, but there's a lot of stuff in it. As best as I can find out, a supernova's kill radius for cosmic ray bursts is about 30 light years and some of the mass extinction events in our past may have been caused by them. And @JJonas's linked article says there's no upper limit to the energy build up - fly far enough and you could unleash the cosmic ray equivalent of an M1 Browning sniper shot.

 

There's an SF short story in there somewhere

[pete]

"First contact" #ShotsFired

 

We're too violent.

 

We might find we're not violent enough.

 

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/fish.png

[JJonas]

Greg Bear's The Forge of God has one answer to the Fermi Paradox

[Bananas]

I think high energy gamma rays would go a very long way without losing much of their energy, so finding an empty patch of sky to aim at might be more of a challenge than you'd expect. The sky may be big, but there's a lot of stuff in it. As best as I can find out, a supernova's kill radius for cosmic ray bursts is about 30 light years and some of the mass extinction events in our past may have been caused by them. And @JJonas's linked article says there's no upper limit to the energy build up - fly far enough and you could unleash the cosmic ray equivalent of an M1 Browning sniper shot.

 

There's an SF short story in there somewhere

 

It's all theoretical rubbish though, to be fair a big chunk of the scientific community thought igniting an atom bomb would ignite our entire atmosphere killing everyone, didn't stop them doing so. Hell we don't even understand half the things we "think" we do so projecting science from a potentially unsound base could lead to all kinds of errors, we don't even know if the theoretical drive would even work in the first place let alone what high energy particles it may or may not give off when you turn it off.

 

Start getting onto subjects like the multiverse and parallel realities which again are being speculated about, was watching one on the multiverse a few weeks ago and my eldest (7) was fascinated by it and kept talking and speculating about it for weeks afterwards.

 

Gamma ray bursts are bloomin scary stuff, to give it a scale in a second one puts out more energy than our sun in its lifetime

 

Anyway in order for a gamma ray burst to be dangerous to us, it would have to have originated from within our galaxy and as of now(?) there's not a candidate star close enough to kill us all, GRBs are also incredibly directional they're not like an explosion that radiates out they're very linear so we'd have to be phenomenally unlucky for the planet to be roasted by one. Again who knows we just don't know enough about them, how frequent they are, what really causes them, whether black holes even really exist (they could be wormholes for example). More questions than answers, just the way it should be