The only way to travel the speed of light is to use it as a propellant.

originally posted by: BASSPLYR
a reply to: andy06shake

my guess. they're useful but not weaponizable yet. probably for other things than direct weaponry

Actually they do not due to a stipulation in the tech sharing agreement with the breakaways. if they are weaponized the deal is off.

a reply to: BASSPLYR

I knew what you meant, I'm just obsessed with the positron trick and particle decelerators....

a reply to: yuppa

It wouldn't be one algorithm by any means, and really I'd bet that in reality it's an entire ecosystem of day zero exploits hardware and software backdoors, very sophisticated self altering code, and "corporate and government cooperation".

For something like that you wouldn't trust one two or even 5 separate and distinct layers, you'd have a huge patchwork of things all in place.

If it exists at all and I'm not just paranoid and believing what I want to believe that is, because human memory is very fallible.

Also, the certainty with which you say x or y about "the breakaways" and the specifics of these platform's operating principles etc.... You can't know any of this for sure!

It's not cool to state it like this is 100% confirmed ground truth when you're just guessing like everyone else is.

a reply to: yuppa

The only incident I can say anything for sure about is the one where I called someone involved in the project at the university whose site I had originally gotten the information from which I no longer had and wanted to get back.

And even that one the sum total of what I can say is that the person on the phone told me that if I did have such data at one point and lost it I wasn't going to get it back and please don't call and ask about this ever again.

So basically I got told that I was putting them in an impossible position and asked pretty stridently not to do it anymore. There was no acknowledgement or even oblique suggestion that data could be remotely destroyed or etc. I feel like it's important that i make this part clear.

What happened to the data is entirely my speculation which happens to match up with speculations and anecdotal evidence from others.

a reply to: roguetechie

So when it comes to the triangle things I feel like it's very safe to say that they exist since far too many people who know nothing about UFO lore etc have seen and continue to see them to this day.

The only thing I have, is a video I shot 9 years ago about a glowing orb that was just sitting there. There are three lights visible, two white lights that are streetlamps in the city. The point where that red orb is sitting is exactly above an industrial site. There are no lamp posts there and I went there the second day, there is nothing that could have produced that. There is nothing that could reflect. You could hear something like arcs or high voltage humming. This was before LED drones.

I ran inside to grab my camera, binoculars and mobilephone but couldn´t find to binoculars and the camera was dead (battery). So I had to use the K800.

I was really a bit nervous and even tried to cover the display of my phone (it was a Sony Ericson K800) to not get seen by that thing. At one time when I was on maximum zoom that thing got way brighter for a short pulse and that freaked me out so much, that I just went inside the house and checked the reflection in the window for about 5-10 minutes then I got bored of it.

It´s the worst quality ever.
vimeo.com...

So mass increases in relation to speed as you get closer to the speed of light.
But light itself traveling at light speed has no mass.

Here's what I love about theoretical sciences. It's just that. Just theory in the majority of cases.
You can do the math. You can make educated guesses. But well until someone actually travels at the speed of light.....

This is why I wish was immortal. I'd love to be around 500 years from now and see what the humans (if they still exist) from then think about our science today.

I imagine it will be somewhat how we view science of 500 years ago. They were pretty sure back then they knew it all too.



I personally always thought the biggest problem of light speed would be terminal velocity and that as long as you accelerated slowly enough light speed would be achievable, just that it would take a hell of a long time to get there.

I mean honestly for all any of us really knows, we could turn into unicorns once light speed is reached.

a reply to: verschickter

I don't know what that is either...

It's cool though, thank you for sharing.

a reply to: yuppa

Why would we need to worry about breakaway civilisations if our own goverments possessed such sophisticated technologies?

Why would we need a deal, to what end and purpose?

originally posted by: andy06shake
a reply to: yuppa

Why would we need to worry about breakaway civilisations if our own goverments possessed such sophisticated technologies?

Why would we need a deal, to what end and purpose?

The BAs are also humans but have access to tech the rest dont.

a reply to: AtomicKangaroo

Educated guesses that are constantly tested in experiments.

Ever heard of particle accelerators? Particles in them are accelerated very close to speed of light (like 99.999999% of c). And guess what, they behave as predicted by theories.

a reply to: AtomicKangaroo
Except as iv already said, mass doesn't increase as you approach the speed of light. A parameter that is largely incorrectly named 'Relativistic mass' increases. It doesn't mean the physical mass of a particle or object increases at all.

E does not equal mc^2.... the true form is

E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4

basically energy is a quadrature addition of momentum and rest mass.

a reply to: ErosA433

Ok so photons... They have no rest mass, but somehow have momentum right?

This seems really counter intuitive because without mass it would seem like photons couldn't have momentum because momentum implies... Yeah I don't want to finish this thought because I'm basically certain I'd say something stupid and completely wrong if I tried. (I've already said something stupid or wrong already haven't I? I feel like I've already messed this up)

Please do correct whatever I've said that's not right if it's not too much trouble. (Just saying no you have this totally wrong but it's complicated is fine too)

The way it is that most of this stuff really requires a large amount of sophisticated math to explain in a way that's anything close to how it actually works. So basically any time you don't see large blocks of math you know you're getting approximations and sometimes even outright incorrect descriptions which are still used because they are able to be visualized and described with the written word.

Sort of like how they still teach the orbital atomic model which we know is not true but can be illustrated only even more so when it comes to light. Is this right?

I'm also really surprised that no one has brought up the EM drive yet in this conversation.

Or that gyroscopic propulsion really works or how maybe those two weird little things together might be very interesting...

Photons having momentum but no mass seems counter intuitive because of how we understand classical mechanics. That Momentum is a function of mass x velocity.

It is a stipulation of Special Relativity that E^2 = P^2C^2 + M^2C^4 that is the total energy of a particle is the quadrature addition of both its rest mass, and its momentum.

So for a Photon, all that happens is m=0, so the energy is entirely momentum. So E = PC

Other quantum mechanical results, such as wave particle duality predict for example that wavelength of a particle is related as
Lambda = h/p where h is plancks constant and p is the momentum.

Sub in for p and you have lambda = hc/E
aaaand that gives you the classic energy of a photon as a function of wavelength
E = hc/lambda, it is all consistent.

In terms of gravitation and how we treat photons in a gravitational field, often people like to use relativistic mass as a manner in which to say - 'Well a photon has relativistic mass, thus is effected by gravity' it is a nice way of seeing it, but ultimately isn't really correct.

a reply to: ErosA433

Thank you for the explanation. I need to look up several things in the explanation before I can play with the explanation and make sense of it, but that's ok I fully expected that to be the case.

The one thing it confirmed for me (and hopefully other lay people in this thread caught it too) is that most of what I think I know about light is wrong, ridiculously over simplified, right for the wrong reasons, or was just me thinking analogies were actual explanations.

Basically, I don't know jack about light, lightspeed, or relativity based concepts!

... LOL...

I'm glad this thread came up now, it's way more fun than arguing with flerfers.

Its why i keep nagging about relativistic mass not really being actual mass.

Its one of those things which is said in a throw away kind of manner because it sounds really cool. It does have its usefulness in some calculations etc, but is more a construct than a fundamental.

Its the same manner in which we understand radiation pressure. Which can be measured. So it goes really that Energy E doesn't really have any form, it is just a number, a magnitude conceptually. Momentum however does have property and it can be understood or measured.

So if you say, The energy is X, it is meaningless without context. So if you then say, I have a 511keV gamma, We now know that, 1) Mass is zero (probably) , 2) all of that energy is in the form of momentum

The assumption here is that a photon carries zero mass, at this point in physics, it has been measured extremely well that it is either massless, or so close to massless that it remains undetectable/unmeasurable. Given for example that we know that neutrinos have mass, and that it is small, and yet we still haven't been able to measure it directly, tells you that for photons.... saying it is zero isn't such a bad bet really...

a reply to: TheJesuit

The primary problem I see with traveling faster than the speed of light is one of navigation.

Traveling that fast, how would you be able to see where you are going and how could you tell when you got to your destination. Of course, you would have to spend half your time slowing down so you could stop. A sudden stop at the speed of light could leave a mess on the inside of your crafts "windshield".

You would have to know where earth was going to be many years in advance or you could not come back. Remember, you are traveling in four dimensions in space, not two as you do on earth. Mean while the earth is traveling in three of those dimensions.

Sensors like radar would not be much good as you would be moving as fast, or faster, than the sensor beam itself. By the time you saw something in your path, it would already be behind you.

a reply to: tinymind


inertial mass on a massless object is zero.

A flashlight is a rocket ship in outer space, with the emitted photons from the flashlight having momentum, thusly pushing the flashlight in the opposite direction.

"If I'm floating in space and I turn on a flashlight, will I accelerate?

Source:

physics.stackexchange.com...

a reply to: TheJesuit

A starship would have to have a propulsion method that uses constant acceleration, in order to reach the speed of light barrier. The craft would have to use an infinite fuel source, like starlight photons, emanating (at or near the speed of light) from the polar jets of a spinning micro mini black hole propulsion unit, that is housed, harnessed and controlled safely aboard the starship.

The speed of light barrier could be safely broken --- imho --- if the starship could mimic 'no rest mass' with magnetic shields radiating from the micro mini black hole that surrounds the off board area of the starship itself and travel on into the superluminal realm.

originally posted by: Erno86
a reply to: TheJesuit
...

The speed of light barrier could be safely broken --- imho --- if the starship could mimic 'no rest mass' with magnetic shields radiating from the micro mini black hole that surrounds the off board area of the starship itself and travel on into the superluminal realm.

Aka technobabble.