Gravity Pull Engines and Time Displacement Drives.

[AlexanderSen]

I was writing about colonization of another planet. In order to get the crew there I needed to transport people over many light years away to be plausible, yet I didn't want to use the regular take and conventions of hyperspace.

Right now, just to give space travel a unique spin, I was thinking about gravity engines where the engine creates miniture black holes and creating gravity to pull a ship forward. Also, in order to make the trip achievable, instead of cyrosleep, in order to make the trip achievable I was playing with the idea of time displacement drives of some sort which slow time down or speed it up so that they get there sooner or later, or that the crew doesn't get affected by time while traveling.

Anybody have any good names for such devices? And how does it sound in terms of believability? Is it too high tech (meaning it needs a whole novel around the effect of the technology)? I just wanted to use it to make it believable, not write a novel about it.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Newton's going to give you a small problem. As the ship is pulled towards the black hole the black hole is also pulled towards the ship. Also where did all the matter come from to create the black hole in the first place? And was that matter sort of pushed out to where the black hole was formed - in which case is equally pushed and pulled and thus goes nowhere.

As for time displacement do you really need it? If the ship is capable of travelling close to the speed of light then the relativistic effects will take care of this for you.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[tinkerdan]

Your better bet would be to harness some form of anti-matter with a negative mass. The theory is that it would react strangely when exposed to normal mass- you would have to look this up but the theory is- one item will push on the other while the other will pull the one toward it. So one attracts the other repels. Theoretically you start them in motion and they travel in a straight line kind of in a push me pull you way that by theory won't use any energy at all. I'm not sure how fast it can go though and I've no Idea yet how to stop it.

once I do stop it I can finally get off of it.

Also when traveling close to the speed of light you will-by theory again-experience dilation that will make you age slower than the people you left behind. Once again you will need to research that to find out how fast how much slower aging and all that.

 

[AlexanderSen]

I am sorry about the grammar, I hope it didn't create any confusion. I am a little dyslexic sometimes, I get so caught up in my thoughts I almost need an personal editor to clear that jumbled mess that is my mind.

Anyways, to refine the the idea, the ship would use negative dark-matter to create constantly collapsing miniature black holes in front of the ship, kind of like a worm hole, or warp drive to pull the ship forward at greater than light speed travel. If the time displacement occurs naturally then I guess it would be more like a teleportation of some sort as the ship would be just speeding through space time...

BTW I appreciate your guys feedback. It's good to have a bouncing board for these ideas! ;D

 

[Mirannan]

I am sorry about the grammar, I hope it didn't create any confusion. I am a little dyslexic sometimes, I get so caught up in my thoughts I almost need an personal editor to clear that jumbled mess that is my mind.

Anyways, to refine the the idea, the ship would use negative dark-matter to create constantly collapsing miniature black holes in front of the ship, kind of like a worm hole, or warp drive to pull the ship forward at greater than light speed travel. If the time displacement occurs naturally then I guess it would be more like a teleportation of some sort as the ship would be just speeding through space time...

BTW I appreciate your guys feedback. It's good to have a bouncing board for these ideas! ;D

Yup. This one sounds very much like the Alcubierre warp drive, or maybe its later refinement by White. Both are worth doing a web search on. Warning: expect some truly terrifying maths if you delve deep enough.

 

[chrispenycate]

David Weber, in 'The Path of the Fury' ('In Fury Born', same book does the virtual black hole drive very nicely. But if you can manipulate time, do you even need a gravity drive, even if the field only affects space within the ship – no, it has to include the hull, too.

And from outside the ship it would look like superluminal travel.

 

[jastius]

that is why i put that warp displacement field around your book cover ship alexander sen.. superluminal perspective...

why a series of black holes? why not a white hole upon a leash.. dark matter doesn't create the black hole type of singularity .. it creates a white hole.. and what you basically want is to gather all those bits of dark matter together and utilize the london forces of them.. have them esp each other and one molecule of dark matter talk to the other molecule of dark matter across the universe much as we make a phone call.. instead the two decide that we aren't at the beginning of the phone call any more, we are at the end.. as the ship goes through its little pet white hole, and bazinga.. they are there.. of course its not really them, its all a series of quantum ghosts that eventually cause reverberations in constant travelers as they have to constantly discover whether its their 'now' or their 'then'. so it no longer matters 'where' you are.. what is important is 'when' you are. wadja think alex?

 

[tinkerdan]

Are you off your meds again?

that is why i put that warp displacement field around your book cover ship alexander sen.. superluminal perspective...

why a series of black holes? why not a white hole upon a leash.. dark matter doesn't create the black hole type of singularity .. it creates a white hole.. and what you basically want is to gather all those bits of dark matter together and utilize the london forces of them.. have them esp each other and one molecule of dark matter talk to the other molecule of dark matter across the universe much as we make a phone call.. instead the two decide that we aren't at the beginning of the phone call any more, we are at the end.. as the ship goes through its little pet white hole, and bazinga.. they are there.. of course its not really them, its all a series of quantum ghosts that eventually cause reverberations in constant travelers as they have to constantly discover whether its their 'now' or their 'then'. so it no longer matters 'where' you are.. what is important is 'when' you are. wadja think alex?

This reminds me of half the paragraphs in charles stross accelerando. So that's pretty good: really.

 

[Glitch]

Colonisation stories usually involve some degree of isolation from the industrialised home. If your story needs some difficulty in getting supplies from Earth, then the effectiveness of your spaceship engine needs to support that to be believable. If travelling to your destination planet was simple enough, then getting supplies or reinforcements would be equally simple.

Time dilation would have some bearing on the simplicity of resupply missions. That raises the possibility of advanced technology creating a ship than can leave after the first, but arrive before it.

 

[Mirannan]

Something that was said a while back was that for durable cargo, a combination of an STL drive system and a time machine is equivalent to FTL. Throw in a reliable method of suspended animation, and this works for live cargo and passengers as well.

 

[chrispenycate]

Something that was said a while back was that for durable cargo, a combination of an STL drive system and a time machine is equivalent to FTL. Throw in a reliable method of suspended animation, and this works for live cargo and passengers as well.

I don't think we're talking time machine in terms of travelling in time, but more variable duration, time stretching and compression. And you still couldn't send a message back home in a reasonable length of time except by ship, and unless you sent a colonisation fleet, sending a ship back for supplies means you've no way of evacuating your colonists if things went wrong.

 

[jastius]

Are you off your meds again?



This reminds me of half the paragraphs in charles stross accelerando. So that's pretty good: really.

meds? we doan need no stinkin' meds (to paraphrase mexican police quote about badges) i do not require meds tinkerdan. nor do i recreationalize with pharmaceuticals, though the jury is still out on whether life would be funner, excetera. cookiedough icecream is a different matter though.

who needs meds when you can have higher math anyways? london forces, basic physics and chemistry explaining the small force bond interactions between the little things.. the idea that a quark can be anywheres and still here and that dark matter has its own version of a naked singularity is much touted about on the science network. and also the idea that dark matter is an attractive force to itself. ... and repulsive to anything of the reverse stuff, basically us and everything we know. so if you try to push at this stuff it repells you or bounces you. force applied.

 

[AlexanderSen]

Normally it's always FTL, but I wanted to explore other ideas, as that is the beauty of Sci-fi: we can conceive new ways of doing the same thing - sometimes with extraordinary results.

Personally I don't know if FTL is possible, so I thought of slowing time down around the ship another possibility for humans to traverse such a great distance. But it sounds like a Standard Hyperspace Jump Engine, that teleport the ship from one spot to another, is the best solution so far. I just need something to get people from A to B, but I just didn't want it to be the same thing. Unfortunately it looks like it's going to be another standard rote solution.

It hurts trying to think up new ideas...

 

[Tyburn]

I liked the idea of a ship that moves forward in space and backward in time at the same time. With the right ratio, the ship can go anywhere instantly. Though it has since been pointed out that the journey would still take ages onboard ship, so I had to create a side-effect where time got stretched to an immense degree onboard so it didn't seem so long.

 

[psychotick]

Hi Tinker,

Just an odd question. Your antimatter with negative mass. I get that it rejects normal matter and so "falls away" from it. But would normal matter actually be attracted to it?

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Mirannan]

Exotic matter (matter with negative mass) isn't the same as antimatter. Antimatter has been shown to exist, for a start, and it has positive mass. This can be shown in two ways; charged antimatter particles such as antiprotons behave as would expect them to if their charge is the same as the corresponding particle, but opposite to it, and matter/antimatter annihilations produce energy. Negative-mass antimatter and ordinary matter might annihilate, but the resulting energy would be zero.

This does still allow the possibility that the gravitational mass of antimatter is the same as of the corresponding matter but opposite in sign; we can't tell so far because the strength of gravitational interactions is so incredibly weak compared to all the other forces.

However, allowing this as a possibility would blow a HUGE hole in relativity; the principle of equivalence is fundamental to general relativity, and one of the formulations of that is that inertial and gravitational mass are equivalent.

BTW, as far as I know nobody has yet detected any negative-mass particles. The still-hypothetical tachyons would have imaginary mass, I believe - but they haven't been found yet either.

 

[jastius]

wouldn't they balance out? if you think of the two masses as being each on opposite balances of a scale, wouldn't they almost have to balance out perfectly? basically subsume each other into a nill balance? like forces in the nucleus of an atom. any partner forces on either side of the scale would have to be expressed as a negative wieght. not really there but there. more of a possibility of existence then actual residence at that place in time.
from the repeat patterns of wave forms we see that there is balance to the form. this can only happen by a continuous cycle of reflex of the same degree. what exactly does that mean if there is nothing to refract from. it cannot refract from itself, but it does refract. then it bounces off of nothing.
to me it just makes more sense if there is something to bounce off of.
that no one has found what it bounces off of yet, i just consider to be a lack of possessing the proper equipment to look with as of yet.
(puts fox in henhouse, backs out quietly and shuts door)

 

[chrispenycate]

Light (= electromagnetic energy, but I type too slowly, and actually this holds for sound waves too) can only refract if it passes into a region where it travels at a different speed (it's the speed of light in a vacuum that's a constant - and even that doesn't hold for intense gravitational field). It doesn't need to refract 'from' anything.

Not all waveforms are symmetrical or repetitive; particularly impulsive ones. Despite this they all seem to refract perfectly adequately, without the possibility of the interference patterns I can use to predict refraction; wavicles are like that.