FTL Travel possibilities?

Interesting, but I doubt we'll have something like that for a few hundred years. I don't know how they come up with the different dimension thing because we're still trying to see how many possible dimensions there are.

The engine sounds like it probably generates a positive field on one end and a negative field on the other. Cause the spacecraft to pull itself towards the front if the front can keep moving as fast if not faster than the tail end to keep the ship from crunching like a soda can.

I don't think an electromagnetic field can generate a gravity field. Gravity is still very mysterious to us, all we know is it's created by a presence of mass and that Elecromagnetism as a force is like 10^36 more stonger than Gravity. Case in point, I remember reading this in a book, If you were to fall off a skyscraper, gravity will pull you to the surface, but when you hit the ground, it's the negative forces of electrons that keeps you from plowing into the earth straight to the center.

Someone can correct/clarify if I'm mistaken in my figures.

I remember reading somethign like this at The Sun Online as well.

It probably be cheaper to propel spacecraft with nukes or something instead. Actually my favorite method for high speed propulsion is the Bussard Ramjet.
 
Given the rate of technological advancement from the beginning of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st, I don't think this is something that is centuries away. It wouldn't surprise me if we saw feasible travel within our solar system, and to other stars, within our lifetimes.
 
Interesting, but I doubt we'll have something like that for a few hundred years. I don't know how they come up with the different dimension thing because we're still trying to see how many possible dimensions there are.

Well, according to Bukaroo Banzai there are at least 8 ;)
 
If something is too good to be true, it usually is. Crossing vast distances in extremely short periods of time to me implies unfathomly large mass/energy requirements. Theories which postulate cheap, easy zipping about the universe violate the TANSTAAFL principle for me.

Wake me up when this gets peer reviewed by Nature or some other journal.
 
Natoma said:
Given the rate of technological advancement from the beginning of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st, I don't think this is something that is centuries away. It wouldn't surprise me if we saw feasible travel within our solar system, and to other stars, within our lifetimes.
As I said in a different thread on this subject, the laws of physics are not a matter of technological advancement. That's Star Trek Think.

It doesn't matter how fast our technology advances, if something isn't physically possible then it will remain physically impossible until this Universe gets reset and we start all over again with a different set of laws of physics.

So FTL is either possible, or it isn't. Full stop. It's up to the laws which govern the Universe, it's not up to us. Our rate of scientific/technological advancement determines the time-frame on which we might achieve FTL *if* it's possible, that's all.
 
Ive always thought that teleportation is the way forward. Its actually probably very close to being a reality with todays technology.

Simple method:
Flash freeze your subject
take very ver small slices of them(say 1nm) and scan each slice.
repeate till they are all cut up.
send the stored scan data via whatever medium you want
At the receiving end use a very very precise 3d printer to reasemble

This would work for simple objects today which are all made out of similar materials (say different coloured plastic). Give the scanner and 3d printer more time to mature and it should be possible for complex objects. Theres always the ethical problem about sending people/animals. Does the 'soul' go with them? Are they the same person when they get there?

Anyway, once you have the 3d printer on some other planet you can use gravity as a FTL medium to send the data, and hey presto, almost instant interstella travel!

I know there are one or two other problems, but I think Ive done my part. Someone else can work out how to use gravity to send the data (since gravitys action is FTL AFAIK)

Ali
 
london-boy said:
I'm quite sure it was proved some time ago that the speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light.

But there are a couple of theories that the speed of light has been different in the past because the gravitic density of the universe has been different while it was forming ie, the speed of light is not constant and does seem to be affected by environmental factors.

Heck, it wasn't that long ago that everyone thought time was constant, and now we know it changes all over the place depending where you are and what you're doing.

Still, the quoted article was awfully vague and gave virtually no details on how this FTL drive was supposed to work in practice, so I won't hold my breath waiting for my day trip to the rings of Saturn.
 
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
But there are a couple of theories that the speed of light has been different in the past because the gravitic density of the universe has been different while it was forming ie, the speed of light is not constant and does seem to be affected by environmental factors.
AFAICT, the considerations that have been done around the so-called Planck units (of which light speed is one) seem to suggest that if light speed was cut by, say, a factor of 2, as seen from a god outside the universe, the inhabitants of the universe would be utterly unable to tell any difference (change of light speed => change of the distance perceived as "one meter" and/or of the time span perceived as "one second" => light speed in meters per second stays the same => not observable).
 
here is a bit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton


String theory predicts the existence of gravitons and their well-defined interactions which represents one of its most important triumphs. A graviton in perturbative string theory is a closed string in a very particular low-energy vibrational state. The scattering of gravitons in string theory can also be computed from the correlation functions in conformal field theory, as dictated by the AdS/CFT correspondence, or from Matrix theory.
An interesting feature of gravitons in string theory is that, as closed strings without endpoints, they would not be bound to branes and could move freely between them; this "leakage" of gravitons from our brane into higher-dimensional space could explain why gravity is such a weak force, and gravitons from other branes adjacent to our own could provide a potential explanation for dark matter. See brane cosmology for more details.



this is surely in speculation stage, at least for the public. Its interesting that there is a confirmation that US government is investigating the idea.
 
so....

on reading that, I couldn't help feel it was awfully convienient that a gravity field was going to do the pulling... From what I can tell of the numbers, they are suggesting the acceleration of the ship would be approximatly lightspeed every second... 300 million m/s^2. Then again it's 3am, so I'm not going to put too much faith in my brian right now.

I also can't help wonder how you would test this... I suppose if the ship dissapears instantly then it's a good sign, and if you hear back from it in a year it's a success.

If a tiny piece of metal can zap a small hole in the space shuttle, imagine what a single particle might do when nearing light speed. Hmm.

Also what about the problem of aiming the dammed thing. If you were to aim directly at the star, well, you'd end up where it was 11 years ago, which may not be where you expect. UPS, universal positioning system I guess.

[Edit]

Having read a bit more about the guy it's pretty clear was a definit genius.

The first words of the abstract of the summary of his 2000 page work was enough to make my brain implode... "unified 6-dimensional polymetric structure quantum theory", with later mentions of things such as 'quadratic hyper-matrix,', etc...

Then there is this:

there is, according to Heim, no “big bang“ with an infinitely dense energy.
Instead, matter appears only after very long evolution of a world without any physical
measurable objects, which only consists of a dynamics of geometrical area quanta.

!
 
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Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
Heck, it wasn't that long ago that everyone thought time was constant, and now we know it changes all over the place depending where you are and what you're doing.
Sounds like you've been reading Terry Pratchett :)
 
nutball said:
As I said in a different thread on this subject, the laws of physics are not a matter of technological advancement. That's Star Trek Think.

It doesn't matter how fast our technology advances, if something isn't physically possible then it will remain physically impossible until this Universe gets reset and we start all over again with a different set of laws of physics.

So FTL is either possible, or it isn't. Full stop. It's up to the laws which govern the Universe, it's not up to us. Our rate of scientific/technological advancement determines the time-frame on which we might achieve FTL *if* it's possible, that's all.

When I speak of technology advancements of the 20th century, and I should have made this clear, I'm speaking of the advancements that occurred due to the theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics (Microchips). Much of the technological advancements that took place in the 20th century wouldn't have happened without those two leaps in the understanding of our universe and how it functions.

Better?
 
But then that's expecting that similar leaps in technology will happen relatively soon...

For all we know, we might be in another stage of "Middle Ages" now, and we won't progress our technology a lot for the next 2 centuries or so, when the next huge leap happens. Just saying of course...
 
The lack of advancement during the middle ages was due moreso to widespread lack of education, poor living conditions, and religiously imposed suppression of science than anything else. I'd daresay those conditions don't apply today. :)
 
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