Who thinks Faster Than Light travel is possible?

[Swank]

I just took a bath in negatively heated water and traveled back in time to the pre-shampoo era.

 

[BAYLOR]

At this time. No we don’t. But when we acquire time-travel (see details in my links above) all the future discoveries and inventions will be available to us.
Extrapolating from that - then FTL travel will lead us rapidly to joining the best Intergalactic Federation or equivalent, and we’ll acquire their future stuff as well. Why should they give them to us?
Maybe we’ll be the first with time travel, and we can trade

If a civilization were to develop Time Travel, that might bring about the end to that Civilization.

 

[Harpo]

If a civilization were to develop Time Travel, that might bring about the end to that Civilization.

But they would know about that end, and could take steps to move beyond it

 

[paranoid marvin]

Let's just try to concentrate on being able to travel at the speed of light before we even start to think about going any faster.

As I think I mentioned earlier in this thread, we have to stop thinking of travelling in a straight line to get from A to B.

It's the equivalent of speaking to someone on the telephone; your voice travels faster than the speed of sound because it doesn't have to travel in a straight line.

How do you get from point A to point B on a piece of paper? You can either draw a line, or you can simply fold it.

Travel in space will come about through such technology.

 

[paranoid marvin]

If a civilization were to develop Time Travel, that might bring about the end to that Civilization.

Or the beginning.

 

[Bick]

It's the equivalent of speaking to someone on the telephone; your voice travels faster than the speed of sound because it doesn't have to travel in a straight line.

Hmm, I'm pretty sure telecommunications are faster than sound for reasons other than the fact that the wires aren't straight! I seem to remember electricity being involved somewhere.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Hmm, I'm pretty sure telecommunications are faster than sound for reasons other than the fact that the wires aren't straight! I seem to remember electricity being involved somewhere.

I meant that we can get sound to travel from one place to another faster than the speed of sound precisely because we circumvent the point and ditch the straight line A to B mindset.

At the moment we only consider travelling to the Moon and other places in the Universe by pointing a great big rocket at it and going as fast as we can.

 

[Swank]

Let's just try to concentrate on being able to travel at the speed of light before we even start to think about going any faster.

It may be much easier to travel significantly faster than light than just about light speed.

 

[J Riff]

we know 'em f'sure i tell ya

 

[Serendipity]

I respectfully disagree that the items mentioned in your article constitute progress toward FTL. The Alcubierre drive, for instance, is just a thought experiment that says that you aren't breaking one sort of physics as long as you have broken another sort first - "negative mass". This is just kicking the can down the road, since negative mass is the fiction you get out of an equation based on presuming FTL when you solve for mass. Or, when you presume that going back in time is possible.

It's like saying that I am a billionaire as long as you postulate something called "negative paychecks" and solve for X.


There might be a way to travel FTL. The universe has lots of secrets. But we don't know any of the pertinent ones at this time.

This is what is in the article about Alcubierre's Drive:

"In fact, ‘Star Trek’s warp drives inspired Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 to find a theoretical solution to Einstein’s theory of general relativity to travel at superluminal speeds. It works on the principle of distorting the fabric of space so the spaceship can travel in a bubble at sub-light speed, which allows Einstein’s lightspeed law to remain unbroken.

Science Fiction had moved to the theoretical possible, but can theory be made into reality?

Every scientist who could had and continues to have a go at sussing this out. There are those who point out problems with Alcubierre’s theory, like the enormous amount of energy needed to make the drive work, down to the equivalent of three Solar masses at the time of writing. There are others who nibble away at these problems towards making the warp drive actually work in practise. However, there are major obstacles that do not yet seem amenable to being solved by engineering alone.

The headline headache is the need for not only a lot of energy, but it being negative energy. A popular suggestion to supply this is via the Casimir Effect, a quantum physics phenomenon that can produce very small quantities. There is a catch: it is negative energy with respect to vacuum energy which itself is a positive quantity. So, it is not really the negative energy as needed by the Alcubierre Drive. This is the bad news. The good news is there are quantum phenomena that are being investigated for their negative energy. It is a case of ‘watch this space.’

There is one aspect of using a faster-than-light Alcubierre drive to be considered: the limitations of the human body. People can quite happily travel at 1g. It would take a year at this acceleration to reach lightspeed, in which time travel in a straight line would get you from Earth out into the middle of the Solar System’s Oort Cloud. Then there is the necessary deceleration at the destination. It means it is at least a two-year journey for humans who want experience travelling faster-than-light. This is on top of need to have enough fuel on board for the engines to function continuously for at least two years, which makes it very expensive.

Having said that, from a systems engineering perspective, developing the feasible Alcubierre drive for sub-lightspeeds would give us faster transport than we have at the moment. I suspect that a nations or large corporations will take up this challenge in due course. This will certainly reduce travel times within our Solar System, which in turn will change the storylines of our Science Fiction set there."

The last paragraph basically says development of the Alcubierre Drive would give us noticeably faster speeds than we have now, but remain at below the speed of light. In fact, they're talking of up to about 70% of light speed. Therefore, when balanced with other considerations in getting people into space, it could be cost-effective for governments and corporations to develop it for sub-light speeds in the near future.

What the article does not say is that Alcubierre's Drive will become available - it says it might. It might because there are currently promising research results in quantum physics that suggest negative energy might be found. Even if it is, there is a massive engineering issue to get enough such energy into the Alcubierre on an as required basis. It really is a case of wait and see what the research will discover.

 

[SilentRoamer]

At this time. No we don’t. But when we acquire time-travel (see details in my links above) all the future discoveries and inventions will be available to us.
Extrapolating from that - then FTL travel will lead us rapidly to joining the best Intergalactic Federation or equivalent, and we’ll acquire their future stuff as well. Why should they give them to us?
Maybe we’ll be the first with time travel, and we can trade

But if we ever acquire it in the future, then we have already acquired it now. Depending on how you want to square that hole there might be a myriad of reasons for that.

More broadly speaking FTL itself is time travel, if you travel faster than information exchange, then you can send a message to someone and receive a reply before you sent the message.

Maybe FTL is possible in some far future, although our understanding of physical limits imposed by the nature of reality will either need to change completely or evolve.

 

[Harpo]

Now? Nah, you didn’t see my links. Not until the invention of the first time machine

 

[Ray Zdybrow]

Well so far we've almost got everything else from Star Trek including sliding doors!


Personally I always think its important to remember that science can only tell us what is impossible at the point in time at which science currently is. The future is unpredictable

I agree, science isn't something that tells us what is or isn't possible. And what we can learn through experiment and theory only tells us (some of) what is true within the confines of the experiment; we can't learn what is true of the cosmos as a whole

 

[Ray Zdybrow]

Your gaze is moving between photons arriving at your eyes, not between the galaxies.

I love the idea of your eye actually moving from one object to another as you look at them - as if you were touching them with your eyeball.

Read this and thought of Rupert Sheldrake!

 

[BAYLOR]

Yes, all you need is a quantum slingshot However, there is the problem of the gigantic rubber band and where to mount it so that you get maximum tension so you can achieve maximum velocity.

 

[Ursa major]

More broadly speaking FTL itself is time travel

I realise that weird ways have been suggested for making this happen in a way that would make some sort of significant difference (dragging, at FTL velocities, the ends of wormholes about being one, I believe)...

...but if one took two days to reach Proxima Centauri and then immediately took another two days to get back to Earth, one would arrive on Earth four days after one had left.

If one had, while at Proxima Centauri, sent a light-speed message to Earth saying that you'd arrived there, one would, of course, have reached Earth about 4 years before that message did... but how is this significantly different from posting a letter to somewhere then immediately driving to that somewhere (however far away it was)?

 

[Daysman]

I realise that weird ways have been suggested for making this happen in a way that would make some sort of significant difference (dragging, at FTL velocities, the ends of wormholes about being one, I believe)...

...but if one took two days to reach Proxima Centauri and then immediately took another two days to get back to Earth, one would arrive on Earth four days after one had left.

If one had, while at Proxima Centauri, sent a light-speed message to Earth saying that you'd arrived there, one would, of course, have reached Earth about 4 years before that message did... but how is this significantly different from posting a letter to somewhere then immediately driving to that somewhere (however far away it was)?

I've not done the maths, but I think someone aboard a ship moving at maybe 10% of the speed of light between the two stars, due to their differing sense of simultaneity, would see you arrive before seeing you depart, and therefore, guessing your origin, and equipped with the same FTL drive (or a better one), could arrive on Earth in time to prevent your leaving in the 1st place. Fun.

 

[Ursa major]

I've not done the maths

Then you should, because it's at the very least counterintuitive.

Whatever the observer has seen, the ship must have left the Earth before it can arrive at its destination, so just because the observer sees the ship's departure after they see its arrival (both in their own time frame), it doesn't mean that they can get to Earth before that departure. How could they?

 

[Daysman]

Then you should, because it's at the very least counterintuitive.

Whatever the observer has seen, the ship must have left the Earth before it can arrive at its destination, so just because the observer sees the ship's departure after they see its arrival (both in their own time frame), it doesn't mean that they can get to Earth before that departure. How could they?

Apologies, I was unclear - they need to depart having seen the arrival but before they saw the departure. Actually, I'm guessing they'd be quite close to the destination and would not see the departure for 4 years. Their speed relative to the destination system would need to tilt simultaneity just a few days so that they can to make it to earth by FTL before the departure. I was hoping to clarify the comparison often made between FTL and time travel. It's a little like questioning if the time traveller will appear in the historical record before they depart... not a deal breaker, perhaps, but... any how, making food, must be off.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

If FTL turns out to be wormholes and folded space then a lot of the routes as to where you could travel to would be predetermined in advance. There might be some variability in new routes being formed by shifting space patterns but to be on the safe side and usefullness, it would be better if the wormholes were extremely stable. If they were here today and gone tomorrow it would change our idea of space exploration from planned trips with future goals and established bases to limited trips that could end at any moment.

I don't think the wormhole would be filled with ordinary space but some sort of transitional area that would act as a barrier to ordinary forces. It would be much easier if it was wide open space. The machinery to travel through wormhole space might be accomplished by phase matching or some sort of transformation to allow matter to travel through the wormhole not by brute force faster than light engines. It would be a sort of crude time travel as you wouldn't be able to get there so soon without appearing to travel through time. Going back would be the same thing. The real problem would be finding them in the first place. If there was a transitional phase that acted as a barrier to normal space time that might increase the number of wormholes available for use, making it easier to find one.