so lets go warp speed

Ok a very simple yet difficult concept to ponder on. I have just been thinking about a shuttle traveling light speed and so on, with these new patents of antigravity machines and fields could this be the answer? I would think that if there was enough energy we could create an antigravity shield for a space ship and than power up the space ship in the antigravuty shield sphere and travel at light speed. From there the shuttle can reach any speed it desires and as soon as you want to slow down turn off the Antigravity shield. I think in some way well some I mean some small way in the future this could be possible, but I am not sure if this sounds at all possible.

Patents mean nothing. Often times peeople patents things so they have the patent. Trust me, anti-gravity is AGES away from being useful for transportation. And by ages, I mean it's nonsense.

I agree with the Pumpkin King - anti-gravity is not a real way of getting around physics. It was only loosely thrown together for television and movie purposes - and has been misused ever since.

There would be no "antigravity thrusters". Anti-gravity would be a force which, like gravity, could not be easily changed. Repulsors - that's a different matter. Those could exist, in theory, with some really funky understandings and equations for the relationship between gravity and electromagnetism - of which there are none.

However, even Repulsors, or repulsor tech, could not negate general relativity and the speed of light - nor would antigravity. An anti-gravity shield would not stop your mass from increasing to infinite, and thus you could still never go above light-speed. Equating UFO engines and drives to anti-gravity is a mistake of gravest proportions, since nobody really knows exactly how anti-gravity would function and affect things.

You want a ship that can travel at faster than the speed of light, then you need to enter different dimensions (if you consider the 4th dimension to be time, then technically you are time-travelling to get to your destination - and thus not breaking the laws of physics on the subject of the speed of light), use black holes to warp space-time, or spontaneously have all the bonds of matter in your body and ship break apart, and by freak coincidence materialize randomly out of the particles at where you want to be (aka: Infinite Improbability )

Which is why I am pretty confident that those visiting our planet are time travellers in one sense or another - even if they're not human.

Oh, and why black holes? Well, to be frank, you need something that breaks physics in order to break physics - and a Black Hole's effect on space-time is thoroughly messed up enough to allow some funky shi-at.

Originally posted by Amorymeltzer
Patents mean nothing. Often times peeople patents things so they have the patent. Trust me, anti-gravity is AGES away from being useful for transportation. And by ages, I mean it's nonsense.

Would you still say it was nonsense if Boeing, the largest aircraft company in the world, had it's most advanced research agency - Phantom Works - working on the technology? How about BAE? Or NASA?

The head of the Phantom Works, George Muellner, told the security analysis journal Jane's Defence Weekly that the science appeared to be valid and plausible.

link

Frankly, if he says it appears valid, and the Phantoms Works, BAE, and NASA are being given money to work on it, it must not be complete "nonsense".

Originally posted by promytheus
Ok a very simple yet difficult concept to ponder on. I have just been thinking about a shuttle traveling light speed and so on, with these new patents of antigravity machines and fields could this be the answer? I would think that if there was enough energy we could create an antigravity shield for a space ship and than power up the space ship in the antigravuty shield sphere and travel at light speed.

There's no evidence that gravity effects are instantaneous... nor that you could use them to move things. And in space there's only "microgravity" (meaning teeny amounts of gravity that's almost too small to be measured. Remember that the gravitational forces at the range where the space station orbits aren't strong enough to keep things from floating.

The farther you go from the planet, the weaker the effects are.

With just tiny graviational forces, it'd take a very long time (millennia) to get any sort of motion going. You could get to your destination faster if you walked rather than waiting for microgravity (or anti-microgravity) to push you there.