FTL Drive In The Real World

[Toadnuke]

How hard would it be to actually create an engine that could achieve at least the speed of light? I was wondering how this could be achieved and how it could work. The closest star, Proxima Centauri is only 4.22 lightyears away from the sun... which means with a lightspeed capable probe and after a 4.5 year mission, we could have a probe orbiting an alien star? Too good to be true

Anyway, I'm trying to have a good discussion on how a FTL Drive in the real world could work.

[Lazar]

As far as we know, impossible. People have created theoretical models of FTL travel, but they would require amounts (and varieties) of mass and energy that we couldn't dream of attaining.

[Sonic Glitch]

How hard would it be to actually create an engine that could achieve at least the speed of light? I was wondering how this could be achieved and how it could work. The closest star, Proxima Centauri is only 4.22 lightyears away from the sun... which means with a lightspeed capable probe and after a 4.5 year mission, we could have a probe orbiting an alien star? Too good to be true

Anyway, I'm trying to have a good discussion on how a FTL Drive in the real world could work.

As of right now? It couldn't.

[Lt. Staplic]

How hard would it be to actually create an engine that could achieve at least the speed of light? I was wondering how this could be achieved and how it could work. The closest star, Proxima Centauri is only 4.22 lightyears away from the sun... which means with a lightspeed capable probe and after a 4.5 year mission, we could have a probe orbiting an alien star? Too good to be true

Anyway, I'm trying to have a good discussion on how a FTL Drive in the real world could work.

Using traditional methods of velocity and accelleration it is impossable, the faster you go the slower time passes for you and the more you weigh, meaning it requires more energy to accellerate you, this increases at an exponential scale until it requires infinate energy to get to c. the fastest we've made anything go is sub atomic particals traveling at ~.99c but that's in a closed loop.

The three ideas for theoretical FTL travel are the
Albuquerque drive - which is basicly warp drive, it creates a large gravity wave in the fabric of space time and the wave pushes the ship faster than the speed of light. However this requires the use of negative energy, something we don't know how to get or control.

Another method is to use negative energy focused on a single point in the fabric of space, which would cause the tiny fluxuations in the quantum state, known as the universal foam to super size creating a worm-hole, however again we have the problem of negative energy, and there's no control over where the worm hole would take us.

Finally there's the "Tachyon drive" which uses a concept similar to Impulse engines in Trek, in that they reduce the mass of the ship, down to an imaginary number (sqrt (-#)) like a tachyon, because the mass is imaginary, physicist believe the laws of the universe won't permit it to "exist" and so it wouldn't be able to travel slower than the speed of light. However we don't even know if tachyons even really exist off the note book.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Okay... whys i it called 'Albuquerque' drive?

[Aaron]

Okay... whys i it called 'Albuquerque' drive?

Because Albuquerque sucks so much you can't get away fast enough?

[Lazar]

Okay... whys i it called 'Albuquerque' drive?

It's not an Albuquerque Drive, it's an Alcubierre Drive, named after Miguel Alcubierre, the Mexican theoretical physicist who thought it up.

[Lt. Staplic]

ya what he said

I thought that looked wrong but I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to be to save my life.

[Lazar]

Now I'm imagining Bugs Bunny traveling faster than the speed of light.

[Lt. Staplic]

[Toadnuke]

How hard would it be to actually create an engine that could achieve at least the speed of light? I was wondering how this could be achieved and how it could work. The closest star, Proxima Centauri is only 4.22 lightyears away from the sun... which means with a lightspeed capable probe and after a 4.5 year mission, we could have a probe orbiting an alien star? Too good to be true

Anyway, I'm trying to have a good discussion on how a FTL Drive in the real world could work.

Using traditional methods of velocity and accelleration it is impossable, the faster you go the slower time passes for you and the more you weigh, meaning it requires more energy to accellerate you, this increases at an exponential scale until it requires infinate energy to get to c. the fastest we've made anything go is sub atomic particals traveling at ~.99c but that's in a closed loop.

The three ideas for theoretical FTL travel are the
Albuquerque drive - which is basicly warp drive, it creates a large gravity wave in the fabric of space time and the wave pushes the ship faster than the speed of light. However this requires the use of negative energy, something we don't know how to get or control.

Another method is to use negative energy focused on a single point in the fabric of space, which would cause the tiny fluxuations in the quantum state, known as the universal foam to super size creating a worm-hole, however again we have the problem of negative energy, and there's no control over where the worm hole would take us.

Finally there's the "Tachyon drive" which uses a concept similar to Impulse engines in Trek, in that they reduce the mass of the ship, down to an imaginary number (sqrt (-#)) like a tachyon, because the mass is imaginary, physicist believe the laws of the universe won't permit it to "exist" and so it wouldn't be able to travel slower than the speed of light. However we don't even know if tachyons even really exist off the note book.

Interesting. The first theory makes the most sense. The second seems too random and the third seems... kind of strange.

From what I understand, the first theory basically says the ship technically doesn't have to move at all, the gravity well just propels the ship at staggering speeds. I was aware of this theory for a while, but wan't sure of many details about it.

Also, this 'negative energy'... are there any websites that you know of that have any more information about it?

Thanks.

[Vic]

There is also the Heim theory, make a magnetic field strong enough to enter a higher dimension and thus bypass Einstein. The really cool thing is we are building cyclotrons close to powerful enough to generate the magnetic fields he theorizes that is needed.

[Lt. Staplic]

Here is an article that will tell you about neg. energy, neg. mass, imaginary mass.

Basicly:

We are composed of matter it what we call the base state

you also have antimatter which has an opposite charge to regular matter and explodes releasing pure energy when it interacts with regular matter, however it still follows the laws of physics as we know them (i.e. antimatter falls toward the center of gravity)

then we have negative matter which is the opposite of normal matter, it has negative mass, will fall away from the center of gravity, and basically does everything backwards.

negative energy is the energy associated with regular matter, so negative gravity instead of pulling objects in push it apart, it is this phenomenon that is receiving credit for causing our universe to continue expanding.

[Monroe]

I heard something interesting- that if you build a partacle accellerator in orbit you could launch nanobots at near the speed of light to other solar systems. once they arrived they would begin looking for materials to contruct probes and before too long you would have a probe. I think I saw the article here in the politics section.

[Lt. Staplic]

I heard something interesting- that if you build a partacle accellerator in orbit you could launch nanobots at near the speed of light to other solar systems. once they arrived they would begin looking for materials to contruct probes and before too long you would have a probe. I think I saw the article here in the politics section.

that is interesting....I'll have to look that up