FTL Travel

Was unsure where to put this, this was the closest match. This is based on speculation and science as I know of it, so please keep the criticism to a minimal. So i'm writing a scifi novel as some of you know, wanted to get as close to truth as possible. How do you travel near the speed of light, you basically have to strap a weightless high powered engine unto something with the weight of a feather. How do you do this? You remove it's mass, ie the speculative design of the TR3-b aircraft. If the theories are even close to accurate, then reduces the mass of the craft by at least 11%. Strap say an anti-matter engine, or even nuclear powered engine onto something with very little mass, what is going to happen? Its going to fly and its going to fly very very fast. Okay so you have little mass, which is one of the biggest obstacles in obtaining FTL because as the speed increases, so does the mass and the need to provide an endless amount of energy to push this mass. But, if the mass can be reduced substantially by what I call "spinning the rings", doesn't this act as a work around for Einstein's equation? If yes then good news, if not, then the The Alcubierre drive still stands a chance whether or not it could be related to this theory. I think the secret is in gravity control, the one force we've failed to realized... publicly of course, who knows what is being worked on in real life. Whether it be with "rings" or The Alcubierre drive, in either case gravity has to be manipulated. Einstein was a smart guy, but he never said FTL was impossible as far as I know...just difficult. It was one of the things he could not include in his equation. So lets designate this thread as a discussion regarding FTL or even NEAR light speed travel. Granted near light speed will come in handy in regards to traveling our our solar system or even our nearest star(s)...but FTL can take us beyond the reaches of known science. We also come across the theories that you cannot get to your destination before the day you left, this is also relevant I think. So if by simply mass, you can go FTL, what would happen? I split this up in two ways, doing it by simply pushing weightless matter(pedal to the floor), and by using something to work around relativity such as The Alcubierre drive which expands and contracts space to introduce an effect that basically works around the laws of physics.

If nothing else its certainly worthy of discussion, a topic i'm more than happy to introduce and take part in.

yay, a sci-fy book

OK, E=mc^2 basically says that you can't travel faster than light if you have any mass. (note that even light has some insignificant quantity of mass. Note that I am talking about mass not weight therefore changing gravity doesn't change it.) also note that newton's second law claims that F=mX(V1-V0)+VX(m1-m2) therefore if you are going to lower your mass (not weight) which means that that a good part of your ship temporarily disappears, than the force that your thrusters (or whatever alternative you are using) will need to exert). Unfortunately this boils down to smaller ship needs smaller engine) BUT since it's a Scy-Fi novel you can try messing with alternate dimensions, or different dimensional space (EX 4th or 7th or such dimensions) which could hypothetically "hold" part of your ship for you, but you would need to work it out that it jumps through different dimensions exploiting many different methods of acceleration such that it lines up with the ship when it's time for it to return...

Regardless there is one HUGE problem with FDL which we may as well address. Even if you go faster than light relative to some planet, light will still be going 3X10^8 m/s faster than you. (urg how do I enplane relativity of light in one post...?) Think of it this way, our planet revolves around the sun which revolves around a black hole which is accelerating away from it's point of origin. Now were you to be sitting on earth, or actually not moving, outside of the galaxy than light would still appear to travel at speed "c" (3X10^8 m/s) relative to you. Therefore in a sense you can never go faster than light regardless. Though you can go faster than light in the eyes of any observer. T also seem to recall that time passes faster for you as you speed up. =p

Hope this helps.

One of the reasons we say that it is impossibe to travel at light speed is that the mass of the object increases as the object goes faster and faster. Use this formula to figure out the new mass:

M = m/√1-(V^2/C^2) M=mass, m = rest mass V= velocity C= speed of light

You will see that no matter what your initial mass is, it will be infinite at light speed. Not possible.

Photons (light) have no mass imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov...

reply to post by Sundreez


Photons do have some mass due to wave particle duality, (gonna look up a neat little link... OK, I can't find one as good as yours : abyss.uoregon.edu... but I can attempt to back it up through physics (and it's not that it's necessarily bad, yours is just more official looking) black holes gravitational force can pull in light: gravity = (m1)(m2)/d^2 light is usually unaffected by gravity for the most part. due to it's nanoscopic mass, but black holes are just that heavy that multiplying in it's mass can trap light. also your site claims it has momentum (mass X velocity) with out mass, but I won't bother attacking that one due to my lacking sufficient education in the field, than there is the oversimplified reason that screams "I am running out of ways to prove this, so let me just come up with an uneducated reason out of the blue that may help my argument, or ruin my credibility." How is light prevented from going where it will, such as the light bouncing off your wall, or that radiation behind the lead shielding? (guess it's more a question than an argument, but that definitely requires momentum right?... oh... yah...)

As to the mass thing, that is another theoretically explanation for it, but you must be careful to mention that this additional "mass" is really EM static energy so that I can't simply say "well in that case I'll take my matter and antimatter and use their infinite increasing mass to generate infinite force and pass that universal speed limit all the same."

Its easy!
Just have a ship with a device that takes 100% of the enursha from the ship. Then if it hits some thing or some thing hits it. It will just move it with a equal force. And do no damager at all. So you need a shield of some kind. Or you will bounce off ever speck of dust like a pinball. It would need a lot of power. It would extend a needle point about 1000 miles in front of it. That slowly spreads out like a cone. And then closes up behind it. For an engine you use a powerful laser. Not to powerful! With a range of about 100,000 miles. After that the beem is to week to damager a ship or planet. ( so you could use it as a weapon close up!) you are pushing out photons at the speed of light and your ship has no mass! So you will move in the opposite direction at the speed of the beam, light speed or just under?!. The laser beam would stay still behind you. So only if some thing crosses your path will it be hit by the laser.
I hope this helps. I read a lot of sci-fi.
And maybe one day some one Will make this work.
You never know.