Hyperspeed solved?

originally posted by: Phage

originally posted by: Alien Abduct

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Alien Abduct

You seem to have a misconception of what a gravitational wave is. As did Lazar.

It is not a wave of gravity. It is a "ripple" in spacetime. A very tiny one.

What gave you the idea that I have a misconception of what a gravitational wave is?

Your sketch. It shows a spaceship projecting gravitational waves which attract the spaceship?

Oh that’s not my sketch. I had quoted a previous poster in this thread, it’s his sketch.

I said it reminded me of Lazar’s Stuff. Doesn’t it?

originally posted by: Phage
Your sketch. It shows a spaceship projecting gravitational waves which attract the spaceship?

A gravity wave, like any other kind of wave, isn't going to push anything longitudinally. Like a surfer waiting for a decent swell, the wave will only lift the surfer up at right angles to the direction of the wave unless he paddles like hell and starts to approach the speed of the wave enough to catch it.

But this is more like what happens when you use a parabolic mirror or a magnifying glass to generate a point of heat with light. Heat builds up a little closer to the focal point, but the heat around the mirror itself is all ambient. The waves are clustered and combined at the focal point to create a spacetime warp that mimics mass. The ship is pulled toward the artificial mass, the focal point and the mass move away from the ship. It could potentially become like that old physics question about why a sailboat won't move if you blow the sail with a fan attached to the boat, except in this case, the gravity well is separated from the ship, so the ship falls toward it, always accelerating, and the phantom mass keeps moving faster and faster away from it.

originally posted by: Blue Shift

originally posted by: Aliensun
It is painfully obvious that about any active UFO witnessed by humans is power by a means that makes them without mass. That, of course, entails a device within them that allows that feature. So it can be a bubble that produces a massless state and therefore allows for phenomenal velocities probably approaching SOL.

Sure. The theory is that "real" UFOs sometimes use a kind of "consciousness amplifier" to get where/when they want to go. Basically, the machine amplifies the imaginations of the pilots somehow and shifts the machine into the new reality. How this happens is anybody's guess, since we human monkey animals don't really consider concepts as having any inherent energy to amplify. But apparently the aliens don't have that limitation, and it bypasses that whole SOL thing because there's no real mass involved. You imagine where you want to go -- anywhere in space and time -- and you are just there. Pretty nifty.

Better get that meditation down real good first eh? Wouldn’t want to accidentally think about driving into a star hahaha

a reply to: Alien Abduct
Oops. Sorry.

Lazar said (wrongly) that gravity is a wave, so yes, it does sound like his stuff.

a reply to: Blue Shift

That's how I interpreted it. But if you are able to generate (and "focus") gravitational waves you are messing with spacetime and if you can do that you can use the Alcubierre effect which will get you going a lot faster than falling.

What do you mean the Fibbonacci Sequence?

The Fibonacci Sequence is the series of numbers:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ...

The next number is found by adding up the two numbers before it.

The 2 is found by adding the two numbers before it (1+1)
The 3 is found by adding the two numbers before it (1+2),
And the 5 is (2+3),
and so on!

How does this relate to your concept? I'm just not sure I understand how the growth of a population of rabbits correlates to warp drive/hyperdrive...I digress, but nonetheless I believe that under your model and current understanding of physics you would be constrained by E=MC^2 and the paradox that if you were able to achieve this speed that time would bring you backwards (because the object would then violate time returning to a time before such speed was achieved--at best light speed at worst groundhog day...)

That is the beauty of the Alcubierre warp drive (kudos to projectvxn for realizing this!) in that the object does not violate these principles since it never even accelerates but rather time/space does all the wonky stuff- if you ignore Hawkings radiation. BUT...while I want to believe in this method I see multiple problems with both Acubierre and your concept:

1). If you had the energy required for such you would be on a kardeshev scale unimaginable. AND at that point you would likely be immortal (like God) so what difference would it make how fast you got anywhere?

2). Even if we could "Fold Space" similar to Frank Herbert's Dune wouldn't we have the same problem which he presented in which you would have to have a prescient course set to avoid absolutely every particle to avoid catastrophic collision (and/or somehow avoid Hawkings radiation)? Remember any particle is probably the end of the journey at this point...How to circumnavigate such an environment?

3). The tidal forces presented by such gravitic events would be enormous to say the least (galactic if not universal or multi-universal in retrospect) How does the ship (point of origin) survive or the destination remain undisturbed or destroyed in the aftermath of such?

I love thinking about such things though and probably haven't done a very good job of explaining my opinion on such matter so check out universetoday

I guess if we are successful in our endeavour we may only be heated into light at the end...set free to travel at 186,282 miles per second but unconscious or uncaring of our ultimate destination. A very expensive but extremely cool way to light oneself on fire!

a reply to: sillyrabbit

Good catch, I meant to say Alcubierre drive but for some reason the OP got me saying Fibonacci sequence.

originally posted by: Phage
That's how I interpreted it. But if you are able to generate (and "focus") gravitational waves you are messing with spacetime and if you can do that you can use the Alcubierre effect which will get you going a lot faster than falling.

Certainly that would be an option. The hope would be that it wouldn't take a couple of colliding supermassive black holes to generate the gravity waves, because that might not be in the budget. Maybe there's a way to tap into some kind of virtual right-angle force lying in some other dimension and manipulate that to generate the waves. Kind of like spinning wires through a transdimensional magnetic field to generate electricity. Passing intention waves through morphic resonance fields somehow?

??? It's unfortunate that we don't have the semantics in place to describe this accurately yet, so it all sounds like Theosophical horse crap. Maybe there's nothing to it, or maybe I'm just smart enough to realize there is, but not smart enough to functionalize it.

a reply to: Blue Shift

You've been hitting that technobabble generator again. Admit it.

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: lostbook

I'm not sure how it would work. If you are stretching spacetime you are doing weird things to local gravity, seems you'd be stretching yourself too.

I don't really see where the acceleration would come from either. With a slingshot, the pellet is being pushed by the pocket holding it. Bent spacetime (gravity), as we understand it, doesn't seem to have a pushing effect. Pulling maybe? How is that different from falling into a strong gravity well?

I'm thinking either a push or a pull based on where you base your bend from

The Fibonacci sequence has nothing to do with spaceships, at least not as you have used it. I hesitate to read any farther into the theory.

a reply to: lostbook

I like the concept but don't forget about what will happen to the occupants of the ship when they go from 0 to FTL. You'll need to create some sort of counter force but as that needs to be in the opposite direction it will likely cancel out the force applied by the "rubber band".

With the FS you can put the counter force behind the ship to push the occupants foward. I imagine that the counter force would combine with the pull of the compressed space in front and increase the overall velocity thus requiring more counter force ad nausuem.

Keep dreaming and make that dream a reality

a reply to: lostbook

Fibonnaci?

Please explain exactly what you THINK Fibonnaci has to do with faster than light travel?

a reply to: lostbook

A couple issues:

• You are assuming that space-time exists separately from the spaceship, like how a rock exists separately from a sling. It does not. Matter is really little more than a permanent 'warp' in space-time. If one were to stretch space-time around a ship, they would also stretch the ship. When the space-time reverted to 'normal' (snapped back), the ship would do the same. Likely, no one in the ship would notice it even happened.
  
  
• A slingshot concentrates energy. When one pulls back on the sling, they are expending energy which is stored in the sling. When the sling is released,all that stored energy is then released into the rock, which propels it forward at a high rate of speed. Thus, the astronomical amount of energy needed to propel the ship would still need to be expended, and the result would be no more speed than if the same amount of energy were expended over time.
  
  In other words, a slingshot does not make the rock go faster than if one were to continuously push it during its trajectory... it's just much easier to store and release the energy than design a rock which can be continuously pushed while it travels tens of meters away. That's no real issue for a spaceship.

TheRedneck

a reply to: TheRedneck

The most effective method, is to stretch time and space behind, compress it ahead, and leave the craft in a bubble of normal space in the middle of the two.

a reply to: TrueBrit

That's the theory. I personally have wondered if there might be a way to simply stretch space in front before the ship enters, thereby shortening the distance the ship has to travel (as in a 'wormhole'). Think of it as injecting relativistic effects into a specific area of space-time without using the (assumed) requisite of near-light-speed velocity.

I have a nagging doubt that the energy requirement would change, however.

TheRedneck

a reply to: TheRedneck

I think its probable that creating an Einstein-Rosen bridge, and maintaining it, would require finer control over the ebb and flow of the relating energy and mass involved, than would creating a localised bending of spacetime for the purpose of moving a craft.

originally posted by: Phage
You've been hitting that technobabble generator again. Admit it.

As I said, we don't really have a good vocabulary to discuss this kind of thing, and the mathematics of it is flawed from the beginning because of its inability to frame things from a specific point of view. For instance, I have a notion in my head that has to do with "multiple dimensions." The best way I can kind of explain it is to reference the Left Hand Rule:

Three dimensions delineated as being at right angles to each other. These are the ones we experience and define without our own system of understanding. But I'm imagining another finger in there somewhere, coming out of the central point, which is also at right angles to all the other dimensions. X, Y, Z, and Ψ or something. Or multiple fingers representing other dimensions, all at right angles to each other. Then others that are not at right angles. Most of them are "empty" dimensions, but maybe some of them are filled with various unknown fields or types of energy that interact with our normal 3-D EM-filled dimensions. To me it seems plausible.

But it all sounds like a mix of technobabble and New Age voodoo. I've thought about taking the time to learn the math behind it, but I think it order for it to work I need to use a kind of "POV" geometry where all the various infinities are accounted for from a specific hypothetical viewer's point of view from the inside of the equation, not the outside looking in like most math. But I'm too lazy. So I'll try to put this stuff into words and mostly fail. It's all fantasy anyway, right?

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: lostbook

Fibonnaci?

Please explain exactly what you THINK Fibonnaci has to do with faster than light travel?

My mistake. Not sure what I was thinking.

originally posted by: TheRedneck
a reply to: lostbook

A couple issues:

• You are assuming that space-time exists separately from the spaceship, like how a rock exists separately from a sling. It does not. Matter is really little more than a permanent 'warp' in space-time. If one were to stretch space-time around a ship, they would also stretch the ship. When the space-time reverted to 'normal' (snapped back), the ship would do the same. Likely, no one in the ship would notice it even happened.
  
  
• A slingshot concentrates energy. When one pulls back on the sling, they are expending energy which is stored in the sling. When the sling is released,all that stored energy is then released into the rock, which propels it forward at a high rate of speed. Thus, the astronomical amount of energy needed to propel the ship would still need to be expended, and the result would be no more speed than if the same amount of energy were expended over time.
  
  In other words, a slingshot does not make the rock go faster than if one were to continuously push it during its trajectory... it's just much easier to store and release the energy than design a rock which can be continuously pushed while it travels tens of meters away. That's no real issue for a spaceship.

TheRedneck

It will require technology that doesn't exist yet, but I think my idea is possible.