Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Technology => Topic started by: Nobody's Confidant on 08/11/2007 17:38:31
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You've all remember Star Wars right? Lightsabers? "Luke, I am your father."? The movie where all evil people are British?
They had hyperspace, where they would move so fast, trips of entire generations would take 12 years. Is that possible?
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That would be so cool if it were ....
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WOULDN'T THAT MEAN WE WOULD HAVE TO TO INVENT A MODE OF TRAVEL WHICH WOULD ENABLE US TO MOVE AT LIGHT SPEED OR FASTER, IF THATS POSSIBLE? CAN ANYTHING MOVE AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT, BESIDES LIGHT ITSELF???
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Does anyone want to contemplate the Alcubierre drive? Instead of trying to make a vessel travel faster than the speed of light this essentially encapsulates the vessel in a "bubble" of spacetime. You take regular time along with you while pushing yourself along by bending the fabric of space around you. At least, I think that's how it works. Could anyone explain this better? I can't find much by way of explanation on it.
Takes a heck of a lot of energy, though. That much I know.
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Ah! Forget hyperspace. Those Star Wars people have no clue.
Subspace it is !!
The Star Trek (first broadcast 1966) universe equivalent of hyperspace is known as subspace. Although similar in concept to hyperspace, subspace plays a slightly different role in FTL travel. Subspace exists in layers, all of which are "below" normal three-dimensional spacetime much like the different layers of a cake. When a starship is traveling at FTL speeds (commonly known as "warp" in the Star Trek universe), the ship itself does not enter subspace. Instead, the ship either reacts a steady stream of deuterium and anti-deuterium together, or else taps the massive energy of an artificial quantum singularity in order to power large subspace field-generating coils ("warp engines"). The field (known as a warp field) extends into subspace, allowing the enclosed starship to travel at FTL speeds while it remains within an inner sphere of normal spacetime (similar in concept to a 20th century hydrofoil). Wrapping a spaceship within the warp field prevents the relativistic time dilation normally associated with standard FTL travel, and allows interstellar travel to continue in a reasonable amount of time.
Source: Wikipedia on Hyperspace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspace_(science_fiction)) of course ~ besides, ALL treckies will agree with me [;D]
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.futurehi.net%2Fimages%2Fwarpdrive.gif&hash=b239b71a71c940c33c70a0fac9b539a4)
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And all Star Waries disagree!
It's much better to have all evil people with a British accent! It just works!
The above joke is meant to offend, if you are not offended change it so you are.
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Ah! Forget hyperspace. Those Star Wars people have no clue.
Subspace it is !!
The Star Trek (first broadcast 1966) universe equivalent of hyperspace is known as subspace. Although similar in concept to hyperspace, subspace plays a slightly different role in FTL travel. Subspace exists in layers, all of which are "below" normal three-dimensional spacetime much like the different layers of a cake. When a starship is traveling at FTL speeds (commonly known as "warp" in the Star Trek universe), the ship itself does not enter subspace. Instead, the ship either reacts a steady stream of deuterium and anti-deuterium together, or else taps the massive energy of an artificial quantum singularity in order to power large subspace field-generating coils ("warp engines"). The field (known as a warp field) extends into subspace, allowing the enclosed starship to travel at FTL speeds while it remains within an inner sphere of normal spacetime (similar in concept to a 20th century hydrofoil). Wrapping a spaceship within the warp field prevents the relativistic time dilation normally associated with standard FTL travel, and allows interstellar travel to continue in a reasonable amount of time.
Source: Wikipedia on Hyperspace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspace_(science_fiction)) of course ~ besides, ALL treckies will agree with me [;D]
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.futurehi.net%2Fimages%2Fwarpdrive.gif&hash=b239b71a71c940c33c70a0fac9b539a4)
Nice Job Alandriel!!!YAYYYYYYYYY!
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Does anyone want to contemplate the Alcubierre drive? Instead of trying to make a vessel travel faster than the speed of light this essentially encapsulates the vessel in a "bubble" of spacetime. You take regular time along with you while pushing yourself along by bending the fabric of space around you. At least, I think that's how it works. Could anyone explain this better? I can't find much by way of explanation on it.
Takes a heck of a lot of energy, though. That much I know.
WELCOME KALAYZOR !!
Just wanted to welcome you and let you know that I found this wikipedia entry for ya http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
Here's a clip from it :
In 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed in the Journal of Classical and Quantum Gravity a method of stretching space in a wave which would in theory cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand. The ship would ride this wave inside a region known as a warp bubble of flat space. Since the ship is not moving within this bubble, but carried along as the region itself moves, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation do not apply in the way they would in the case of a ship moving at high velocity through flat spacetime. Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move faster than the ship; it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a light beam restricted to travelling outside the warp bubble. Thus, the Alcubierre drive does not contradict the conventional claim that relativity forbids a slower-than-light object to accelerate to faster-than-light speeds. However, there are no known methods to create such a warp bubble in a region that does not already contain one, or to leave the bubble once inside it, so the Alcubierre drive remains a theoretical concept at this time.
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Yeah, the energy costs of the Alcubierre drive definitely make its use beyond our current technological ability, even if we could build one.
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What about blackholes? They bend spacetime perpindularly to ours so if you bend it like that 4 times in a row you are back to ours but at different coordinates in spacetime. Keeping the time one constant would allow us to move about in space by disappearing here and appearing somewhere else.
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One problem with all of these issues of bending/warping space is that if you do it on a massive scale (e.g. the size of a galaxy), then no problem, but if you do it on a very small scale (the size of a space ship), you would have massive tidal forces where the warped space meets normal space, and these massive tidal forces (apart from consuming massive amounts of energy) would create massive amounts of radiation (and would tear apart anything that got even close to it).
Black holes are indeed a good example, but small black holes quickly evaporate through their generation of Hawkins radiation. Similarly, whereas as you can easily slip through the event horizon of a hugely massive black hole without too much harm, a very small black hole has massive tidal forces near its event horizon, so you would get torn apart as you get near its event horizon.