An Argument for Plausible UFO Travel

Greetings fellow ATSers!

For some time now, one of the key arguments against the plausibility of interstellar travel by aliens is the idea that they would have to be able to travel large distances in a relatively short time, while carrying with them a sustainable amount of supplies. (keep in mind i am aware of the possibility that aliens could possibly have incredibly long lifespans, or require no sustinance, or even have the ability to replicate foodstuffs. I am removing these ideas from my argument, and i am in no way arguing against these hypothesis, nor am i going into or debating teleportation and the like)

Science tells us that the faster one travels in a frame, the more energy is required to accelerate the object due to an increase in inertial mass, whereas upon reaching C, mass would become infinite, requiring an infinite amount of energy to accelerate/propel it forward.

impossible you say?

not so much. the speed of c, or the nature of the maximum speed that a photon can travel in a vacuum is proportional to the density of spacetime wrt that frame. photons travel at c in a straight line in regards to thier own frame of reference. yet light will appear to bend from an outside frame based upon the curve of spacetime due to mass objects and the gravity that they impart.

to travel faster than the speed of light from an outside frame of reference (which is the ultimate goal, our frame of reference doesnt matter really) all we need to do is to create a curvature and compression of spacetime just ahead of our craft, allowing it to "fall" and accelerate forward into an ever moving area. the effect of the space would not be limited to c, as it has zero mass, it is just an effect, not an object, and our craft would fall into it, reaching an eventual speed of light (maybe faster) because it is the nature of the inconsistency that allows for an acceleration.

thus, we can alter spacetime and allow travel inside of the area to be less than c, while achieving faster than light travel when observed from outside our craft, similar to the time dilation that was hypothsised by plank and measured to be true in relation to a particles speed!

anyway, just an idea, and its super crude, but makes for some good brainstorming.

anythoughts?

reply to post by wx4caster

create a curvature and compression of spacetime just ahead of our craft,
allowing it to "fall" and accelerate forward into an ever moving area.

Alcubierre drive

Sounds great, as long as there is still a holodeck to get drunk on.

www.youtube.com...

reply to post by wx4caster


Actually OP you are right on the edge of basic warp mechanics. Terrestrial science has notices that around a spinning mass (like Earth) there is what they call "frame dragging". This is where the inertial frame an object is in is dragged a short distance. This has the effect of compressing space in front and enlongating the space behind the object. A very basic warp field. In the case of an ordinary mass, the greater the mass the greater the effect. If out mass is near the speed of light, then its mass will begin to increase. Thus to an outside observer, at some point the object will appear to exceed the speed of light, while to the object itself, it has not reached the speed of light.

This is fundamentaly how the Alcubierre drive works, except that the technology makes the mass "appear" to increase by generating an artifical warp field ... this requires a great deal of energy. Another way is to use a more mechanical method of "increasing mass". A way to do this is by spinning a massive niobium disk [Terrestrial science has found that this can create artificial gravity, and more effects).

You can check some of this out at: www.hpcc-space.de...
en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...

These links will show that Humans already have a good grasp on the mechanics of interstellar travel, and very likely already have ships employing that technology.

Or we could just spend enough energy to come to a complete stop and wait for the galaxy to spend past. We could visit a few hundred planets and catch Earth as it comes back around.

Ever wonder how those UFOs could take off at such great speeds without the occupants being mushed into a paste on the floor? They are just hitting the brakes and we are moving away from them.

My theory but it blows the mind doesn't it?

Earth rotates
Earth revolver around the sun
The sun revolves around the galaxy
The Galaxy is moving away from the point of the big bang

How fast are we moving through space you ask

179,000 mps just shy of the speed of light. I can't verify this speed but I remember reading it somewhere, maybe in A Brief History of Time.

Or I could be completely wrong.

at least i am not crazy!!

to the poster talking about stopping...

wouldnt that create just as much of a smooshing force as instance acceleration?? just the frames change....

good stuff!!!

reply to post by wx4caster


Probably but you have to admit that I think like no other.

reply to post by ChicUFO


like few others at least, if not like no other...

its outside of the box thinking that gets us further ahead. kinda like einstiens thought experiments

Actually, someone asked me once if I believed in UFOs. My instant answer was no! He asked why and I said that the distances and the time are just to great between planets. A few minutes later I began to think to myself that this was a closed minded opinion. I spent three years reading every physics book I could find. For three years I thought how this could be done from an alien point of view.

And now I'm a member of ATS. Dang! the power of suggestion.

reply to post by ChicUFO


ChicUFO...your last post has pleased me no end...I was starting to worry that there weren't many people like you on here, but you have restored my faith!....

On topic, although i have only really skimmed the subject I'm wondering if anyone has a rough idea of the energy that may be required to acheive FTL using the Alcubierre drive?...

There doesn't seem to be much interest in this thread, it's probably too advanced for most ATS readers. Since there aren't a lot of posts and those who are posting here seem to know a lot about physics, I would like to ask a question. First I will need to set up three scenarios, these are based on what I know about Einsteins theory stating that traveling at the speed of light will effect time. Although I do understand much of it, I am lost in the math that explains it.

From what I understand:
Einstein worked out his idea with the use of a magic clock. Einstein used a magic clock in his example because if we were actually moving away from the clock we would loose sight of it very quickly. What we see when we look at a clock is not the clock but the light that is reflected from the clock. If we move away from the clock at the speed of light, we would always see the same light particles and therefor time would stop for the people on the ship that are moving away.

Scenario one:
The occupants of the ship leave Earth at the speed of light. To them time has stopped since they are traveling at the speed of light. They travel to a star system that is four light years away.
Results:
To the crew this trip would be instantaneous but to an observer on Earth the trip took four years.

Scenario two:
In this scenario we will use the same set up as in scenario one except we will look at the return journey
The crew leave the new world for the journey home. The crew still see the magic clock back on Earth.
Results:
From an Earth perspective the trip to a new world took four years and the return trip took four years.
The crew of the ship would see this completely different. To the crew the journey to the planet was instantaneous but the return trip took eight years. They are moving toward the magic clock at the speed of light and the light being reflected from the clock is moving toward them at the speed of light. Just as two cars traveling at 55mph collide at the same rate as a single car hitting a wall at 110mph the collision of the light particles would be doubled and therefore time would appear to double for the crew.

Scenario three
For this example I will add two new timepieces, a magic clock on the new planet and a wristwatch on the crew member of the ship. Again we will look at the complete trip to and from the new world
Results:
From Earth the trip to the new world has taken eight years, four years to get there and four years to get back.
To the crew they would look at Earth and time would seem to stop but when they turn around they would see the clock on the new world spinning at twice the normal speed. The wrist watch on their arm would be traveling or ticking by at normal speed/time. To the crew, the journey to the new planet takes four years and the return trip takes four years. The exact same as the witness on Earth sees.

As I said, I really don't know much about Einsteins theory but this seems to present a paradox. I hope that a member of this forum has the knowledge to explain the mistakes in my theory. If I am correct then the whole idea of time traveling at the speed of light is incorrect.

reply to post by wx4caster


That's thinking like a scientist.

Saying "We don't currently know how to travel faster than light, therefore we will NEVER know how to travel faster than light" is a logical fallacy, which is ironic, considering it's pretty much what most of the scientific community is saying.

Additionally, if you admit that it MIGHT one day be possible to travel faster than light, then you must also admit that, with roughly the same odds, it MIGHT be possible for an alien species to be visiting Earth right now, considering the current theories on the evolution of life suggest that there should be many intelligent races out there that are thousands or millions or even billions of years older than we are.

Still not getting many posts here so just to keep it going, I will add a little more.

Will faster than light space travel ever be possible? Even if we achieve the speed of light, could we survive long enough to explore? We couldn't just blast off into a direction and explore because we don't know what is out there. Can you imagine hitting a baseball sized asteroid at the speed of light, what would that do to your ship? I suppose we could send slower ships to map the rout ahead of time but that would defeat the purpose of building a FTL ship in the first place. You have to admit that a FTL ship would be flying blind, we couldn't use radar to scan in front of the ship if we are traveling at the speed of light and our hand eye coordination would be too slow to react.


@ the OP
If you would prefer that I didn't post anymore then please feel free to say so. I don't want to take over anyone's thread.

[edit on 15-7-2010 by ChicUFO]

Originally posted by wx4caster

to travel faster than the speed of light from an outside frame of reference (which is the ultimate goal, our frame of reference doesnt matter really) all we need to do is to create a curvature and compression of spacetime just ahead of our craft, allowing it to "fall" and accelerate forward into an ever moving area. the effect of the space would not be limited to c, as it has zero mass, it is just an effect, not an object, and our craft would fall into it, reaching an eventual speed of light (maybe faster) because it is the nature of the inconsistency that allows for an acceleration.

thus, we can alter spacetime and allow travel inside of the area to be less than c, while achieving faster than light travel when observed from outside our craft, similar to the time dilation that was hypothsised by plank and measured to be true in relation to a particles speed!

anyway, just an idea, and its super crude, but makes for some good brainstorming.

anythoughts?

Yes, of course. This is why Gene Roddenberry called the U.S.S. Enterprise's engines "warp drives" back in 1965 or so, because General Relativity was already well known.

The problem is that we don't know ANY physical way to accomplish this. The coupling from matter to spacetime geometry in known physics is very very small. For example, something of the mass of the Sun is enough to warp space sufficiently to deflect starlight by a few arc-seconds.

We would need to find a specific physical coupling involving new physics and elementary particles. Known physics knows of no such thing nor has there we seen any reliable evidence of such in laboratory experiments. Nor have we seen any lab phenomenon which may even suggest such an effect is present.

There are unknown anomalies at the galactic and up scale (dark matter and energy) but this doesn't mean that there is any engineerable physics on the human scale.

What known physics does mean is that if such an effect did exist, it would have to fit into the framework of General Relativity (i.e. GR would be a subset of it or describe it with additional source terms).

One could then also predict that successful "antigravity/faster-than-light" drives would necessarily also induce optical effects (gravitational lensing) as a consequence of physics: changing the space-time metric changes ALL physics "inside" it. (that's the entire point and fundamental physical recognition of Einstein).

It's actually more complicated, the Einstein equations or any superset of them shows that you cannot set the energy/matter/magic-dilithium-crystal-stuff distribution independently from the geometry of spacetime. Thus one can look for "warp drive" solutions of the gravitational equations which hypothesize "if you had this magic source of space warping what would the effects be", this is in itself not simple because of the nonlinear partial differential equations, but that problem is nothing compared to the actual physics problem: what stuff makes it do that?

(this is the Albucierre 'drive'----he already supposes the existence of some unknown exotic physics. And BTW more recent computations show that the configurations are likely to be stupendously unrealistic, like incinerating anybody with Hawking radiation).



[edit on 15-7-2010 by mbkennel]

[edit on 15-7-2010 by mbkennel]

[edit on 15-7-2010 by mbkennel]

[edit on 15-7-2010 by mbkennel]

[edit on 15-7-2010 by mbkennel]

[edit on 15-7-2010 by mbkennel]

Originally posted by uptheirons!
reply to post by ChicUFO

 

On topic, although i have only really skimmed the subject I'm wondering if anyone has a rough idea of the energy that may be required to acheive FTL using the Alcubierre drive?...

I don't have a "fair guess" as the the number of gigawatts that would be required. And, I read some where that some think it may take exotic energy or matter to make it work.

However, I do think that the output of a large dam or reactor should be enough to get going, at least at low warp speeds. This would place near-by stars within reach (a few days to weeks travel time).

You might also check out this link: www.calphysics.org... This is zero-point energy, which could potentialy create a virtually unlimited amount of power in a very portable form.

Edit to fix link.

[edit on 15-7-2010 by AnthraAndromda]

Originally posted by Magnus47
reply to post by wx4caster

 

That's thinking like a scientist.

Saying "We don't currently know how to travel faster than light, therefore we will NEVER know how to travel faster than light" is a logical fallacy, which is ironic, considering it's pretty much what most of the scientific community is saying.

No, the scientific community is saying something different. This is not like "men have never run a four minute mile", and then they do. After all they've seen horses and lions run fast enough for a four-minute mile, just not people.

The scientific theories which are exceptionally powerful in correctly describing almost all experimentally accessible phenomena known to humans also present very strong reasons why one cannot travel faster than light. Furthermore, we have never observed any single physical macroscopic thing doing this and yet we can observe astrophysically very violent and extreme phenomena far outside the reach of human experimentation to achieve. And our theories can describe them extremely well (e.g. neutron stars).

Before getting people to travel faster than light, let's get a proton to travel faster than light.

I'd love to have warp drive, of course. Just don't see any obvious direction from here to there.

[edit on 15-7-2010 by mbkennel]

[edit on 15-7-2010 by mbkennel]

reply to post by AnthraAndromda

The link is broken, could you fix it please. Thanks

Originally posted by mbkennel
The scientific theories which are exceptionally powerful in correctly describing almost all experimentally accessible phenomena known to humans also present very strong reasons why one cannot travel faster than light.

They present strong reasons why one cannot travel faster than light using current experimentally accessible technologies. They do not suggest that one cannot travel faster than light AT ALL. Science is a collection of experimentally verifiable knowledge of the world around us, which is constantly being modified and changed. It is NOT, and has never been, a doctrine of absolute truths.

Furthermore, we have never observed any single physical macroscopic thing doing this and yet we can observe astrophysically very violent and extreme phenomena far outside the reach of human experimentation to achieve. And our theories can describe them extremely well (e.g. neutron stars).

To say that we can explain astrophysical phenomena with our current scientific models is a moot point. Nobody is arguing that there is substantial evidence for the process of star collapse. The question is whether or not we can cheat the speed of light, which has nothing to do with neutron stars. And we certainly have observed faster-than-light behavior in the form of quantum entanglement. Additionally there are enormous secrets in the universe's inner workings - gravity, dark energy/matter, universal expansion, unification theory - which we can only hope to unlock in the near future.

Before getting people to travel faster than light, let's get a proton to travel faster than light.

Sounds good to me. Wait, are you now suggesting that it might be possible?

I'd love to have warp drive, of course. Just don't see any obvious direction from here to there.

Neither do I, though there are some intriguing theories going around. But my point is this:
Just because you don't see a way to get from here to there doesn't mean no such way exists. And if you accept that such a way MIGHT exist, then you are forced to accept that intelligent alien species MIGHT be capable of visiting our planet right now.

The way it would work is like this, you have to warp space/time its unavoidable if your target is a number of light years away. Exotic matter having a negative energy density is what is required to warp space/time.

Think of the analogy of throwing a stone, if the final target is very far away then the amount of energy you need to put into throwing that stone is equally large (proportional)

If your ships target is several light years away it is ridiculous to think you are going to be able to generate in one burst enough exotic matter to warp a channel all the way to something 100 light years away. Even if you could the sudden release of that amount of energy would generate a dangerous rift in the space/time.

So we can count out the idea of warping a channel with us at one end and the target say 100 light years away.

Second analogy, think of skimming a stone over the surface of a pond. It takes several jumps until it lands at its final destination.

This second analogy is how we would do it. Rather then warping a channel 100 light years in length across space the ship would make multipul jumps but each jump would only take a second in time.
In practice how it works is the three projectors focus on the triangulated target, the ships drive emits a burst of energy and jumps, charges up emits a burst and jumps again.

In other words a chain of micro worm tunnels are artificially produced from the origin to the target.

This chain of tunnels is something like the vapour trail of a aircraft, you can track where a UFO originated by studying the trail of gravity pulses left behind it.

Originally posted by Magnus47

Originally posted by mbkennel
The scientific theories which are exceptionally powerful in correctly describing almost all experimentally accessible phenomena known to humans also present very strong reasons why one cannot travel faster than light.

They present strong reasons why one cannot travel faster than light using current experimentally accessible technologies. They do not suggest that one cannot travel faster than light AT ALL. Science is a collection of experimentally verifiable knowledge of the world around us, which is constantly being modified and changed. It is NOT, and has never been, a doctrine of absolute truths.

No, the theories actually do present strong reasons why one cannot travel faster than light regardless of technology. This is specific to the actual content of the physics.

This is different from breaking the sound barrier in level flight, where it really was a matter of technology---engine power, aerodynamic control and understanding of transsonic fluid mechanics. (Bullets were known to travel faster than the speed of sound of course).

Furthermore, we have never observed any single physical macroscopic thing doing this and yet we can observe astrophysically very violent and extreme phenomena far outside the reach of human experimentation to achieve. And our theories can describe them extremely well (e.g. neutron stars).

To say that we can explain astrophysical phenomena with our current scientific models is a moot point. Nobody is arguing that there is substantial evidence for the process of star collapse. The question is whether or not we can cheat the speed of light, which has nothing to do with neutron stars. And we certainly have observed faster-than-light behavior in the form of quantum entanglement. Additionally there are enormous secrets in the universe's inner workings - gravity, dark energy/matter, universal expansion, unification theory - which we can only hope to unlock in the near future.

It would be nice, but again the theories of quantum entanglement explicitly do not permit even transmittable information flow faster than light even though something in correlations clearly can propagate faster.

The point about astrophysics remains: we have seen stuff in Nature explore weird and wacky states of matter that we can't easily achieve in the lab. And it works according to relativity and quantum mechanics. (Just like natural life has explored more weird and wacky corners of organic chemistry than we have synthesized in a chemistry lab.)

But we have NOT seen any evidence that Nature actually does send macroscopic matter faster than light. It would be pretty remarkable if it were possible to do and yet there is no natural situation in which it does.

More to the issue, there would need to exist some "source term" in General Relativity (something which can actively cause space-time warpage) which has a coupling strength quadrillion quadrillion (or more) times larger than known gravitation.

And yet this new term would have to somehow exactly cancel out in all situations we presently know about on Earth, and even out in the galaxy (maybe not big bang time), and yet somehow be engineerable to be turned on with practical technology.

If the laws of physics have a very strong interaction, even just the minor 'leakage' from that interaction (e.g. van der Waals force versus straight up electromagnetism) would have significant effects. And that interaction would have to be seen in particle accelerators.

Before getting people to travel faster than light, let's get a proton to travel faster than light.

Sounds good to me. Wait, are you now suggesting that it might be possible?

I'd love to have warp drive, of course. Just don't see any obvious direction from here to there.

Neither do I, though there are some intriguing theories going around. But my point is this:
Just because you don't see a way to get from here to there doesn't mean no such way exists. And if you accept that such a way MIGHT exist, then you are forced to accept that intelligent alien species MIGHT be capable of visiting our planet right now.

OK, but skittle-pooping unicorns might exist too, and they aren't even against known laws of physics.

[edit on 15-7-2010 by mbkennel]

[edit on 15-7-2010 by mbkennel]

[edit on 15-7-2010 by mbkennel]