Warp Drive Possible???

It's totally true that travel is an advancement in the evolution of man, I'd just hate to see mankind fall to another depression before they reach Warp Speed and have the project scrapped (similar to the Canadian Arrow Plane - Althought that had more then just money in issue) I'm all for it, like you said, hell I'd be first in line to ride the "Enterprise" :) just hope that it won't cause too much hardship on mankind.

Just thinking of NASA Challenger and how the ship blew up before she fully left earths atmosphere and how a Warp Drive ship (or test engine) might "accidentally" warp into (or thought) Earth, causing serious problems (like possibly taking earth off it's axes, or reversing it's spin, or increasing it?) Just catastrophic theories :p

Ok lets say we can travel thru space at warp speed using our antimatter fuel (diluthiem crystals) how do we avoid hitting any planets , asteroids , stray flying saucers and the ocasional space highway builders :)
regards
Mike

When you consider the mass of a starship "moving" in excess of the speed of light (didn't Einstien postulate that mass would be near infintessimal (sp?) at that speed?) it should be safe to say that the asteroid would absorb nearly all the energy of the collision (even without infinite mass). A planet would likely be a different story however.

If I recall the "Warp Bubble" would actually resemble a football if you could see it... As for propulsion one could use now ion engines would be the way to go I supose... They have them now... From what I have read they can propel a ship to lightspeed in about two years... You start the in space and keep them on and they will steadly increase the ships speed until it hits light speed... The nice thing is that it takes very little fuel to get them started and that they can gobble up "space dust" and use that to sustain them... Only problem is that they only produce about 50 lbs of thrust which is way it would take over 2 years to get up to speed...

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Originally posted here by 4MidgetHitmen
If I recall the "Warp Bubble" would actually resemble a football if you could see it... As for propulsion one could use now ion engines would be the way to go I supose... They have them now... From what I have read they can propel a ship to lightspeed in about two years... You start the in space and keep them on and they will steadly increase the ships speed until it hits light speed... The nice thing is that it takes very little fuel to get them started and that they can gobble up "space dust" and use that to sustain them... Only problem is that they only produce about 50 lbs of thrust which is way it would take over 2 years to get up to speed...

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Ion propulsion could potentially reach light speeds, but they would actually be moving through space, not encased in a gravity bubble like warp, so they would be vulnerable to the affects of lightspeed travel.

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Two consequences of Special Relativity are a stationary observer will find (1) the length of a fast-moving object is less than if the object was at rest, and (2) the passage of time on the fast-moving object is slower than if the object was at rest. However, an observer inside the fast-moving object sees everything inside as their normal length and time passes normally, but all of the lengths in the world outside are shrunk and the outside world's clocks are running slow.

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Meaning that an object could approach the speed of light, but never attain it... the object's accelleration exponentially decreases as it's speed increases.

His experiment was later proven flawed, but his theory is still considered valid.

Maybe someone can explain this. Theoretical warp drive would essentially leave a spaccship at rest in space, while moving space around itm and therefore 'exempting' it from the laws of relativity. I see one problem with this.

The speed of the spaceship cannot be measured relative to the space around or inside it. This is the entire premise of General Relativity. To measure the speed of the ship relative to the space araound it would be assuming the presence of either somne kind of ether or a universal coordinate system, of which there is neither, to all of humankind's scholarly wisdom.

So even if a spaceship were able to move space around itsleft, the laws of Relativity should still hold, as the ship would be travelling faster than light relative to everything in the surronding neighbourhood.

In short, it does not matter whether the spaceship is moving through space, as speed cannot be measured relative to space. It can only be measured relative to other objects in spacetime.

Has this paradox been solved yet? :confused:

People tend to forget about a very big problem with faster than light theory. One of the consequences of Special Relativity is that, because of relativity of simultaneity, if one could move faster than the speed of light one could also travel back in time. Nature has shown us time and time again that she hates paradoxes, and time travel would certainly lead to some big ones. So to be able to go faster than light, there is a requirement that time travel is also possible.

However, faster than light drives aren't strictly necessary for covering large distances. Another trick of SR is length contraction and time dilation. You could go to Alpha Centauri and back in much less than 8 years, if you were travelling close to the speed of light., the only problem is that when you got back home everyone would be 8 years older.

'Copter.

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Originally posted here by Striek
From what I understand the ship would actually have to create a 'warp bubble'. The space inside this bubble would not move, however the surrounding space in front of it would be compressed, and the space behind it would be expanded. This is all done in several layers, constantly expanding and contracting. So the ship is not actually moving through space, and to my knowledge, no acceleration would be felt.

However we are far from developing the types of matter and the energy production required to attain this. It IS theoretically possible, though.

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what about relative acceleration it has to be felt ... our bodies are relative to ship .. ship to the bubble and bubble to the space surrounding it....

just a hunch

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what about relative acceleration it has to be felt ... our bodies are relative to ship .. ship to the bubble and bubble to the space surrounding it....

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the force felt during accelleration is caused by the movement through space. however in warp drive, one does not move through space.. one stays still in a portion of space which moves through space. just like being in a plane... when you are traveling in a plane, you are traveling through air at hundreds of miles an hour. the plane creates a bubble of air that doesn't move. the air outside the plane moves at speeds that would pound a person's face to smitherines, but since the plane is designed to withstand it, the people inside don't feel it.