Poll: Should Faster than Light propulsion technology be released to the public?

If any of you have seen my posts you might know that I believe the U.S. government has faster than light gravitational propulsion technology locked up in highly classified Special Access Programs.

I have discussed this with a couple close friends, both of them do not think this technology should be made public because of the potential to use this technology as a propulsion system for a weapon.

I was wondering what you guys think, I have created a poll called:
Should Faster than Light propulsion technology be released to the public?

If you have a few moments Please Take My Poll!

Any comments or other opinions are welcome, please post them here in the forum.

Thank you.

What would it be used for is my question?

Would it be used to commercialize space travel?

Could we afford to purchase it?

YES. people should be able to come and go as they please to and from this planet. Obviously details and some restrictions would need to be worked out for security reasons but still. If enough people wanted it once it was released supply and demand would take care of the price. After awhile it would be as normal as getting in your car and driving to a different state or city just on a much larger scale, and there would be a lot of uncharted areas. We would need to establish borders, probably on the edge of our solar system at first and then expand carefully outwards.

[edit on 31-1-2010 by Raverous]

Heck yes! With light speed the planets in our system are just minutes away, MINUTES! I say it's about time we colonize mars.

reply to post by Bobbox1980


I clicked the link to the poll site. Fresh new poll.
I voted yes. Ain't it about time, instead of how or if?

Originally posted by Bobbox1980
If any of you have seen my posts you might know that I believe the U.S. government has faster than light gravitational propulsion technology locked up in highly classified Special Access Programs.

I seriously doubt that — it would be impossible to hide testing on a vehicle that traveled even a tiny fraction of the speed of light.

Where do you test a vehicle that can travel a million miles an hour (which is slow compared to light speed)? You can't hide the testing!

Anyway, to answer the OP, the existence of FTL technology means nothing to the public on a practical level. It might excite the imagination, but there's nothing that FTL can provide for us. It's meaningless technology to us at this point in time. We're not ready for it.

You know, release the information to the public and what do you think would happen? Nothing. What's the public going to do? Demand that we build a full-size USS Enterprise and "take 'er out"? Ridiculous.

See, we need a thousand other technologies before we can even begin to use FTL... We need artificial gravity. We need stasis fields. We need deflector shields. We need a method of interstellar navigation. We need an unlimited power source.

And we need all this stuff and more BEFORE we punch the FTL button.

So, it doesn't matter if the public knows. We simply can't use such technology yet.

— Doc Velocity

reply to post by Bobbox1980


Would we notice if it were?

Serious question AND second line

Faster than light gravitational propulsion technology.

Light speed is the limit that this physical reality allows us to travel.
As nice as this sounds it really isn't that fast at all, in an OBE state one can travel the universe in a blink of an eye.

In the next stage of our physical evolution when we become lighter beings light speed will be the slowest speed we can travel for this reality does not allow us to break the law of physics. But the next higher reality will.

So I think what ever let them keep it we wont need it anyway.

I mean, IF "the government" was working on a FTL gravitational propulsion system, they would need an objective, right? The only possible objective would be military applications on Earth.

How do we know this?

We know this by deduction. The initial implementation of any technology is by the military. Every time. You cannot show me an important technology that wasn't first tested for its application in war.

And WHY do we need FTL technology on Earth?? What sort of weapons delivery system requires that sort of propulsion? A photon can circle the Earth 8 times in one second. How much faster do you need to deliver a weapon to its target?

I don't see FTL as a realistic military technology. For physics-bending shock & awe, our conventional and nuclear weapons have things sewed-up quite nicely as it is, so much so that our military is diversifying their R&D into more specialized areas, such as nano-weapons and invisibility camouflage.

Now, really, if the government was going to actually finance a FTL program, they would need one hell of an objective, and military aint it.

So, we're left with space travel to other worlds, which is more of a human interest gamble, a more whimsical objective. Space is also the only place where you could successfully test lightspeed or FTL technology (although I wouldn't want to be the first one to punch the button).

But, before we go leaping into space, we have a whole gauntlet of technological challenges to resolve FIRST.

For example, how do we keep humans alive in space? All the science seems to indicate that people start dying as soon as they leave the Earth. Those are just the facts. Space is Death. The Dead Zone. Deader than Dead. We have to CREATE a living bubble of LIFE that is self-sustaining, and that can be reliably utilized to negotiate the Void.

In short, we have to come up with Life-Support technologies that don't exit yet. We're centuries away from answering the questions of human survival in space. Centuries. Not months or years or decades.

We need a technology that gives us free energy, too, and a lot of it, on the order of stellar output, okay? We need star power to run our FTL missions, to provide life support, to grow our food in-transit, et cetera, et cetera.

See, if we were working on these technologies (which we aren't), then we'd be doing so with an objective in mind, we'd be looking toward the future, we'd be planning on going to the stars, and as we developed these technologies, we'd see spin-off tech trickling down to the public, anyway. Right?

You know I'm right.

So, where's the spin-off tech from gravitational propulsion technology? Where's the spin-off tech from all those other technologies that are necessary to FTL technology? We're not seeing it.

In fact, the U.S. government is now de-funding space exploration. We're going to use NASA to study the weather.

— Doc Velocity







[edit on 1/31/2010 by Doc Velocity]

reply to post by Bobbox1980


Your position is irrational, as there is absolutely no evidence that FTL travel is even possible, let alone that the technology to travel faster than light even exists.

I know this is a conspiracy board, but that doesn't mean we can all run around with our pants on our heads making stuff up and expecting others to take us seriously!

Yes it should, along with all other classified tech.

It is the only way for the human race to advance. If we are to become a type 1 civilization, every single person will have the power to absolutely destroy the Earth and kill everyone on it. That is an awesome responsibility. So the fact that nuclear weapons exist, and we have not obliterated ourselves completely yet, is a good step in the right direction.

If we really do have faster than light tech, which we do, I do believe it should be public knowledge.

The only reason it is not, is money, and control.

TPTB only have secrets only for reasons of control and money.

I don't think it would be prudent to release any faster than light propulsion technology to the public and as such, I would vote "No" for release to the public.

I would however, agree to license or certify someone to have access to such technology in order to conduct viable funded and controlled international projects but I would not think that such technology in the hands of the public is going to do anything but give someone somewhere in a cave a bright new way to jihad against the Great Satan, America.

It would be nice to think that we have advanced to a point of trusting the public to do the right things with such needed technology, but I just don't think we have come far enough to do so without serious consequences.

reply to post by calcoastseeker

What would it be used for is my question?

Well, if the technology and theories behind it were made public humankind would come up with boundless ways to use the technology. Governments of the world might try to put restrictions in place as to how it could be used but once the secret to how it works is out I imagine hoverboards, flying cars, spaceships, etc would all start to appear.


reply to post by Doc Velocity

Originally posted by Bobbox1980
If any of you have seen my posts you might know that I believe the U.S. government has faster than light gravitational propulsion technology locked up in highly classified Special Access Programs.

I seriously doubt that — it would be impossible to hide testing on a vehicle that traveled even a tiny fraction of the speed of light.

How would anyone on earth know that our government was testing FTL ships in our solar system? I think it would be very easy to hide such tests, space even in our own solar system is incredibly vast and our ability to monitor it is quite limited.

Anyway, to answer the OP, the existence of FTL technology means nothing to the public on a practical level. It might excite the imagination, but there's nothing that FTL can provide for us. It's meaningless technology to us at this point in time. We're not ready for it.

Perhaps my referral to FTL obscured that the technology could be used for sublight speeds as well. With conventional technology like computers and GPS we could create flying cars from the gravitational propulsion technology and navigate with these conventional systems. This would bring the dawn of a new era in commuting to and from work. In America the average one-way commute time to work is 24.3 minutes. At 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year that is 210 hours of commuting a year or 8.75 days. The average one-way commute time for the world is 40 minutes. Incredibly faster transportation technology could give people their time back to spend with family, friends, on hobbies or education.

We need deflector shields. We need a method of interstellar navigation.

The creation of the distortion in spacetime by the gravitational propulsion drive as well as the accompanying magnetic field would likely prevent things like dust particles and other small interstellar debris from hitting the ship. There has already been discussion on using several different pulsars in the galaxy to create reference points from which we can determine our location in reference to earth no matter where we were in the galaxy. There is no incentive for people to work on such projects though without propulsion technology that would need it. Necessity is the mother of invention.

I don't see FTL as a realistic military technology.

We already have difficulty in stopping missiles with our missile defense technology. Imagine now that those missiles were propelled by FTL technology, it could make missile defense technology completely useless.

Right now we can tell when ICBMs have been launched and who launched them, with FTL technology, it might be impossible to tell they have been launched or who launched them.


I think our military has been working with and on this technology for decades to maintain U.S. military superiority and to try and get military superiority against any possible alien civilizations in the universe.

reply to post by davesidious

Your position is irrational, as there is absolutely no evidence that FTL travel is even possible, let alone that the technology to travel faster than light even exists.

As I have said in some of my other posts on this site there is a testable theory out there right now called Extended Heim Theory. It makes specific predictions which if true would allow us to use gravity as a propulsion mechanism. By creating a dent or contraction in spacetime at the front of the craft and a hill in spacetime at the back of the craft, a craft can travel faster than light by warping and falling down spacetime.

alcubierre warp drive on wikipedia:

Since the ship is not moving within this bubble, but carried along as the region itself moves, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation do not apply in the way they would in the case of a ship moving at high velocity through flat spacetime. Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move faster than the ship; it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a light beam restricted to travelling outside the warp bubble.

Furthermore, the components that this theory predicts are needed to create a gravitationally propelled craft were present in the Alien Reproduction Vehicle aka "flux liner" recounted by Mark McCandlish to the Disclosure Project. If EHT turns out to be correct and the McCandlish ARV does exist then government has built that craft and therefore had working FTL technology for a good 40 years as a photo of a UFO matching that ARV was first seen in 1967.

reply to post by Doc Velocity


I always thought that traveling at the speed of light automatically increases mass exponentially thus requiring more energy to accelerate. What happens to a human body within a FTL thrust? Can the organism sustain the increased mass?

What happens if we hit space debris assuming we reach this magical velocity and the spaceship has the hull to support the effects of increased mass and gravity.

In an atmosphere, the friction alone will produce all manners of thermal exchanges and temperatures probably hot as or hotter then the surface of the sun.

FTL seems totally improbable; however in space one could assume without any friction that gradual energy would build up inertia that over time would allow for some very fast travel.

I just wouldn't want to come to any sudden stops, or clip a planet at these speeds. FTL = a kinetic bomb of expodential magnitude depending on what mass has been obtained by the acceleration.

Originally posted by Bobbox1980
reply to post by davesidious

 

Your position is irrational, as there is absolutely no evidence that FTL travel is even possible, let alone that the technology to travel faster than light even exists.

alcubierre warp drive on wikipedia:

Since the ship is not moving within this bubble, but carried along as the region itself moves, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation do not apply in the way they would in the case of a ship moving at high velocity through flat spacetime. Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move faster than the ship; it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a light beam restricted to travelling outside the warp bubble.

I think discussing the feasibility of the Alcubierre drive is on-topic for the science and technology forum as the concept was advanced by a physicist. However this theory in no way proves that FTL travel is possible as davesidious said.

But I think what makes this thread off topic in the science and technology section, is going beyond the science of the Alcubierre drive and assuming that the government has such technology and asking what the government should do with it. So without showing that the government has FTL tech, I would suggest that such a claim with no proof would be better suited for the skunk works forum, rather than the science and technology forum.

Regarding military applications, wouldn't being able to send a bomb to any destination on the Earth in less than 1 second using FTL delivery systems be a tactical advantage? And if you had such a system, would you want your enemies to be able to use it on you?

I think the obvious answer is "of course not". How could the white house be defended if someone could use FTL to deliver a bomb there nearly instantaneously from anywhere on Earth or from Earth orbit?

[edit on 1-2-2010 by Arbitrageur]

Originally posted by Doc Velocity

Originally posted by Bobbox1980
If any of you have seen my posts you might know that I believe the U.S. government has faster than light gravitational propulsion technology locked up in highly classified Special Access Programs.

I seriously doubt that — it would be impossible to hide testing on a vehicle that traveled even a tiny fraction of the speed of light.

Where do you test a vehicle that can travel a million miles an hour (which is slow compared to light speed)? You can't hide the testing!

Anyway, to answer the OP, the existence of FTL technology means nothing to the public on a practical level. It might excite the imagination, but there's nothing that FTL can provide for us. It's meaningless technology to us at this point in time. We're not ready for it.

You know, release the information to the public and what do you think would happen? Nothing. What's the public going to do? Demand that we build a full-size USS Enterprise and "take 'er out"? Ridiculous.

See, we need a thousand other technologies before we can even begin to use FTL... We need artificial gravity. We need stasis fields. We need deflector shields. We need a method of interstellar navigation. We need an unlimited power source.

And we need all this stuff and more BEFORE we punch the FTL button.

So, it doesn't matter if the public knows. We simply can't use such technology yet.

— Doc Velocity

Centrifugal force can create a FORM of 'artificial gravity'... Interstellar navigation has been proposed, and wouldn't be too hard ( GPS ), Deflector shields are on the way ( Deflector Shields )...

Stasis shields, and your UNLIMITED SOURCE OF ENERGY, at this time, are impossible... then again, you wouldn't need UNLIMITED source of energy, just some form which is easily created or found (possibly something with properties we don't fully understand at our current technologies)...

If you actually think about it, the amount of technologies coming from Star Trek, which are really becoming possible is quite staggering...

The enterprise isn't THAT far away... I think the 2300's timeframe of the show is pretty spot on!

Give us FTL. If we have the means to travel... How long do you think it would take the worlds scientists to work together to get the final pieces of the puzzle to fit?

A One World Government (not nwo control style, but governed by all, for the good of all humanity as a whole) would be the only way to get these tech's into the light...

it doesn't matter if the government might be sitting on such technology because it simply cant be done. theres no possible way to do it. No matter how secretly advanced we might have gotten over the past few decades, we simply haven't reached that point yet and i doubt we ever will.

And because of this i believe we will never be able to meet aliens from other planets physically but perhaps via some communications device. But the distances is just too far. It takes too much time to travel across solar systems compared to even galaxies and i cant believe we will ever figure out how to travel faster then light, or even as fast.

Just accept we're stuck on this planet until our race dies out.

reply to post by Bobbox1980


That still doesn't mean anything. We might as well be asking if the US should release, to the public domain, their infinite sandwich technology, where they can make a sandwich of infinite proportions. Cheese only, though, obviously.

Originally posted by andre18
it doesn't matter if the government might be sitting on such technology because it simply cant be done. theres no possible way to do it. No matter how secretly advanced we might have gotten over the past few decades, we simply haven't reached that point yet and i doubt we ever will.

And because of this i believe we will never be able to meet aliens from other planets physically but perhaps via some communications device. But the distances is just too far. It takes too much time to travel across solar systems compared to even galaxies and i cant believe we will ever figure out how to travel faster then light, or even as fast.

Just accept we're stuck on this planet until our race dies out.

Amazing that you, in your infinite wisdom, seem to have such amazing precognitional skills, to be able to say with 100% certainty that our race will in no way travel to remote galaxies, nor meet any type of 'Alien' beings, ever.

So amazing of you to produce irrefutable evidence to prove that what you say is the absolute truth. You say there is no possibility that these technologies could EVER exist, and I'd like to see your mathematics behind each idea in this thread. Show your work, please. I'd like to see your credentials, as well. Do you have any published papers? Are you even a scientist of any kind? I mean, really?

Prove to me that it is indeed IMPOSSIBLE FOR ALL TIME, and I will concede, and immdediately cease to believe in the unknown, as you do. I will immediately say that the human race knows EVERYTHING about the universe, and its inner-workings. I will immediately claim to know the highest reaches of our technologies, AS WELL AS how effective these technologies will EVER grow to be.

Think about the speeds we're developing... We have computers now designed to think up, and execute their own experiments, and then create more experiments from those results. Imagine, if you can, what the potential of that, on its own, is. We're only held back on THAT front by our current AI technology... Which, in another 20 years, will be exponentially better than our understanding of it only just yesterday...

But, please, I'll stop when you can prove that none of these ideas will EVER be developed.

Furthermore, how many 'things which simply aren't possible' have been derived from star trek (for instance), which are actually becoming a reality... there's only a handful of ideas which we are still unable to grasp...

The amount our race has evolved (technologically) in the last 100 years alone should possibly be a marker for you...

And you think in another, say, 400 years, even 200 years, we could NEVER find a better way to transport ourselves, than the current 'primitive' force-fuelled technologies?

With that, I'm actually surprised you WOULD subscribe to the fact that there IS intelligent life out there, let alone that we would be able to talk to them at any point in the future...

Isn't that 'simply impossible'?
You must keep an open mind, and think outside the box.
It's great to keep a skeptical mind as well, I always do.
Hypothetical thinking is also a plus.

A hundred years ago, Man would NEVER go to the moon...