Posted on 10/01/2014 4:35:50 PM PDT by lbryce
But if NASA continues shilling some cockamamie theory about faster than Warp Drive then I might have to re-evaluate NASA's pragmatic state of mind and it's soon to be carted out era of faster than bull shiete ludicrous speed that Mel Brooks claimed he could do and join the ranks of moon landing deniers.
Well there has been some very interesting research into the possibility of warping space without the need for enormous mass. It takes a LOT of power but there has been nanometer scale warping of space through electromagnetism.
Orion would be sublight but certainly orders of magnitude faster than we can go now. As far as spaceflight is concerned, we’re really in the early stages of inventing the wheel.
interesting stuff. thanks for posting.
Great, NASA to send IS to the moon faster.
The “Alcubierre drive” is a mathematical premise for allowing space-time in a general relativity context to be stretched behind a ship and contracted ahead of is, therefore accelerating it forward without actually moving the ship itself. Since it isn’t really moving through space according to special relativity, but rather space itself is moving, it should be able to go faster than light.
One problem is that it requires a lot of energy, more than our sun can produce, for example. The only thing NASA is working on is a way to reduce that energy requirement. Another problem is that something called “exotic matter” is needed, but doesn’t exist. It has negative mass and therefore negative energy density, allowing space-time geometry to be manipulated in the manner that is required.
One of the things which fascinates me, mainly because I don’t really understand it is I have seen more than once that Einstein claimed that if you were riding a light wave, exactly no time would take place from the time you left until you arrived. This could be billions and billions of light years distant.
Couldn’t this somehow be used?
Heh, the article is really just a tease.
For the crew on a near light speed traveling ship, yes, but time back home and on the target planet continues normally. In effect, for folks back home, the ship accelerates into the future, and (if one was travelling a billion light years) the target would have aged a billion years (approximately) too, so who knows if it is still inhabitable, etc...
You think planes are bad....try living on a submarine.
Logic is a pretty flower that smells bad.
And I wouldn’t even go that far.
True, but we may not know all of the laws of physics.
I have been working with electronics for more than 40 years. If you would have told the finest engineering, chemistry, optical, and physics scientists 45 years ago that there would be mass-produced integrated circuits with billions of transistors on them early in the 21st century, or that I could go out to the store and buy a 100 watt LED lightbulb they would have told you that you were out of your mind. And I’ll bet they they could prove those things to be impossible with the science/technology available at that time.
It will be discovered April 5 2063
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