Warp Drive Possible???

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Dr Van Den Broeck was reanalysing ground-breaking calculations made five years ago by Mexican mathematician Miguel Alcubierre. Alcubierre said that it was possible to imagine how a warp drive would work by distorting the fabric of space. Starships would ride along waves in so-called spacetime, like surfers do along waves in the sea.
The starship would have to be microscopically small on the outside but large enough on the inside to carry passengers, just like the Tardis in the British sci-fi series, Dr Who.

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Article found here...

I thought this was fascinating... what do you think?



http://www.antionline.com/images/ieimages/2002/11/1.gif
I got that here:
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw81.html

It would be cool to do, but to what cost?

The way they weight they ideas, I think we'd run out of resources before we could go.

There's actually a lot of stuff out there on this... here's a couple of links.

NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics

Warp Drive When?

Remember to aim for the stars. If you miss, you'll still end up in the heavens.

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It would be cool to do, but to what cost?

The way they weight they ideas, I think we'd run out of resources before we could go.

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all the more reason to leave this planet, i get a little miffed when people get all militant about saving the environment at the cost of social advancement.. this environment will be fine, WE are the ones who are screwed if we dont leave this planet, if for no other reason than to learn to live elsewhere.. we need to go to mars, we need to develop warp speed, it is imperitive, because we won't be around for much longer, regardless of how we treat the environment, our sun will fry us long before we do, because it is getting hotter. not the ozone (that's just our problem, and the difference is negligible.) but because thats what stars do, they get hotter, they burn out, get heavy, collapse, implode, become black holes... granted this will take 50billion years to happen but the solar system will be unsurvivable long before then. as far as resources go, we got nine planets in this solar system alone chock full of resources. besides, the more we learn about matter and energy, the more stuff we can use for feul... imagine a warp drive that runs on garbage and releases daisies, farfetched, but on a subatomic level far from impossible. hehe

Warp drive would be cool to have... Imagine all of the places one could go... I recall reading a while back that in theroy it is very possible to get a ship into warp once they figure out how to build it... the problem comes from the acceleration of what is inside the ship... nothing like being mashed into jelly against the rear bulkhaed of the ship as it zips to warp :eek: THere is a book called the Physics of Star Trek in whinch a bunch people a hell of a lot smarter then me talk about all of the technology in Star Trek and if /when it might work... Inertial Dampeners would be needed to keep people from being smooshed when the ship hit warp... But they say it will work one day... I'd like to see it myself if not be able to take a ride :p

Talk about a rush.. Zero to light speed instintaneously. I have actually been contemplating warp speeds my whole life and have gotten pretty far. Again in my theory you would need all the mass in the universe, which is pretty far from possible, but you never know what the fules of the future will hold. The basic idea behind this, that I have read in the past, is that you create a big gravity bubble in front of the ship, and the gravity will pull the ship towards it. Kind of like dangling a carrot in front of a donkey. Sounds like its possible to me.

Here is the JPL Labs Link

http://sec353.jpl.nasa.gov/3533/

Regards

So far what I've read up on it since this post came up, seems to suggest that, the person(s) inside the ship wouldn't feel any movement themselves but would feel/see space rushing towards them. But obviously from an observer's point of view the ship would be moving. So I dont know if you would feel the rush...hell I WOULDN"T WANT TO at that speed :D

for my money (not that its worth a lot) anything similar to warp drive is a non starter.... in terms of practical considerations (e.g. the famous inertial dampners problem for a start off) there are many things that could put a total stop to travelling anywhere near light speed (although to be honest to get anywhere in the universe other than the 'local' star systems in a decent time we would have to develop hyper luminal speeds i.e. travelling much faster than light speed). I think we'd be better off pushing research into extra dimensional physics and learning how to 'step' outside of time.... then it won't matter how 'long' it takes to get to anyone else cos time won't exist as such whilst the traveller is outside of time.... having said that though... extra dimensional travel could present some of its own problems... mainly to do with a persons psychological cohesiveness i.e. their sanity

anyway just my .02 pennies

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.

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.