Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Scientists Say

Originally posted by -PLB-
I find the argument that if interstellar travel is possible, other lifeforms must have figured it out already and would have colonized the complete the galaxy, a good argument against the possibility of such technology, as there is no evidence of any of this having taken place. So I find the chances of such technology being possible extremely slim.

Though a warp drive would not necessarily mean that interstellar travel is possible. It could also be a good propulsion system for travel inside our own solar system, or even on earth.

I don't think you realize how big a single galaxy can be. an advanced civilization could stay in one galaxy for millenia and not see it all. This is a wonderful find, will watch developments with great interest.

Originally posted by rigel4

Originally posted by MrSpiderMonkey
This seems too good to be true. Is the source legit?

Please let it be true!

...actually, it might very well be true, they'll make an announcement at the 2012 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston.

sensitivity analysis started by White in 2011 and completed this year has shown that the energy requirements can be greatly reduced by first optimizing the warp bubble thickness, and further by oscillating the bubble intensity to reduce the stiffness of space time. The results, to be presented at the 2012 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston

www.icarusinterstellar.org...

All those wishes as a kid would have come true. Now Sit back and weight for the Vulcans to detect the ripple caused by the warping of space time during their first lab test, and decide come visit us to make first contact!

edit on 17-9-2012 by MrSpiderMonkey because: further digging

If the warp drive ever does work, and if said aliens turn up because we have broken the warp
barrier, then said aliens will likely quarantine us as soon as they see wtf we are doing down here.

Funny you should mention that.

The U.S. Navy successfully warped spacetime during World War II.

- The Philadelphia Experiment - 1943

We became a Post - Warp Civilization in 1943.

Yes, the aliens showed up. We were children playing with matches back then.

----------
However, here in the year 2012 we have figured it all out and have moved on.

Are you ready to go to the asteroid belt and the moon?

- Planetary Resources -

- Helium 3 -

reply to post by TheProphetMark


No worries, I'm glad someone found it interesting

I'm thinking that this could provide some legitmacy for UFO phenomina as well if proven to really work. The biggest detractor about extraterrestial visitors is how they would get here. If this NASA project proves that it indeed does work on a small scale, then holy crap! Maybe Roswell did happen!

In either case, I find the Bob Lazar story very interesting. Let me see if I can find that link which talks about him.

Here we go - this was a good website to check out Bob Lazar and Element 115

Originally posted by zeeon
It appears that Bob Lazar may not have been as crazy as everyone thought he was.

His information about Element 115 and it's supposed "Properties" just happen to provide the needed "fuel" that the now NASA proposed "Warp Drive" requires. Interesting at least.

Bob Lazar

There is another website out there that also has additional information about the particulars of Bob Lazar. I know that his W2 looks legitimate, and that he was in fact listed in the Los Alamos phone directory at one point...

Not saying the guy is legit - but now that NASA is saying the Alcubierre drive is possible, I find it interesting that Lazar said element 115 would " provide large-scale gravitational effect that would be a distortion of the surrounding space-time continuum that would, in effect, greatly shorten the distance and travel time to a charted destination" which is exactly what an Alcubierre drive (what NASA is saying) does.

Yes, Bob Lazar really did see a Sport Model hover around at S4.

According to Timothy Good there is a better solution to traveling around the Milky Way Galaxy.

It's called a Cigar Shaped Starship that - folds space -.

Smaller craft dock inside of it.

It can travel from Earth to the Pleiadian Star Cluster in 7 hours.

That's 420 Light Years away.

Hit the brakes when you reach the Taygeta Star System. - Planet Erra -

If warp travel became possible, and the idea that countless workers would be needed in any colonization or mineral reclamation project, medical scientists would be forced to focus on eradicating diseases vs the current profitable treatment of diseases. Someday maybe this will be a great universe to live in.

Originally posted by Eurisko2012

Originally posted by zeeon
It appears that Bob Lazar may not have been as crazy as everyone thought he was.

His information about Element 115 and it's supposed "Properties" just happen to provide the needed "fuel" that the now NASA proposed "Warp Drive" requires. Interesting at least.

Bob Lazar

There is another website out there that also has additional information about the particulars of Bob Lazar. I know that his W2 looks legitimate, and that he was in fact listed in the Los Alamos phone directory at one point...

Not saying the guy is legit - but now that NASA is saying the Alcubierre drive is possible, I find it interesting that Lazar said element 115 would " provide large-scale gravitational effect that would be a distortion of the surrounding space-time continuum that would, in effect, greatly shorten the distance and travel time to a charted destination" which is exactly what an Alcubierre drive (what NASA is saying) does.

Yes, Bob Lazar really did see a Sport Model hover around at S4.

According to Timothy Good there is a better solution to traveling around the Milky Way Galaxy.

It's called a Cigar Shaped Starship that - folds space -.

Smaller craft dock inside of it.

It can travel from Earth to the Pleiadian Star Cluster in 7 hours.

That's 420 Light Years away.

Hit the brakes when you reach the Taygeta Star System. - Planet Erra -

I think Frank Herbert wrote a book about it called Dune if I'm not mistaken....don't mean to sound condenscending, but that does sound ALOT like the plot of Dune. Except perhaps the part about the Spice.

reply to post by zeeon


It's all in the book Alien Contact by Timothy Good.

The cigar shaped starships have a propulsion system that folds space.

-----------
The USA probably built a few with the Star Wars $$$ billions.

Now we can travel around the Milky Way Galaxy.

Lockheed Martin guy Ben Rich also spilled the beans.

----------
BTW, that was a good movie. - Dune -

Patrick Stewart was in it.

This is neat. Exotic matter still seems rather difficult if not practically impossible to come by though... Which seems like a limitation.

I think there may be a work around for that too, but one would have to have an educated guess about how gravity works. We pretty much all know that mass distorts the spacetime field to cause gravity, but it's probably not exactly clear by what mechanism mass distorts the spacetime field. (My guess is that the energy in matter displaces quantum pair interactions where virtual particles show up only to annhilate each other. Those annihilations then act to push matter together. Gravity and zero-point energy would be closely related. Something like that.)

So instead of exotic matter, perhaps using "virtual exoctic matter" by creating special conditions and exposing some manufactured material to them.

The way I picture the first possible warp drive is something like a stacked array of fairly large superconducting gyrator coils with dielectric based metamaterial in between them. These might be sufficient to create something like a "super-vacuum" within the metamaterial that affects virtual particle formation, and thus gravity. But to make it useful in a drive system you need to make moving ripples in this kind of field. So there would be some other element in the drive that purposely and sequentially quenches the superconducting gyrators down the stacked array to cause a moving collapsed field. That gets pushed through the metamaterial as the next coil is quenched, and then the coil that was just quenched snaps back fairly quickly to the active state from induction by the adjacent active coil. I'm guessing hard part here is to make a superconductor repeatedly survive this without overheating or breaking down in some other manner.

Star Trek has "warp coils" so that idea might be close to how they would work.

Of course the idea is still crazy as anything. So I'll leave it up to a real physicist to consider and see if it makes any sense.

Generalized Conclusions

Hawking radiation requires a black hole to have a negative entropy, the influx of scalar negative energy increases S, thus to restore the original entropy positive energy is absorbed. Therefore in a static black hole when a negative energy flux encounters the horizon its entropy increase temporally but the inflow of positive energy counters the effect preserving the GSL. With a rotating mass the angular momentum produces the negative energy by a violation of the WEC, in which the flux of positive energy is unable to conserve the GSL. Therefore the excess negative energy is ejected, resulting in the production of a warp drive metric (or wormhole) thereby satisfying the IGSL (which is an effect one would expect from Hawking radiation). When coupled to a scalar field this would be limited, the ejected matter of the warp drive would be limited to particles violating the WEC possessing two-dimensional radial angular momentum.

posted on 17-9-2012 @ 09:45 PM page two this thread.

If memory serves this is more like a Romulan technology,that uses a singularity to generate a warp feild.



It is possible that since the Higgs Boson was found this year, the resultant permutations have lended to to the conclusion that Warp Drive is possible . The Large Hadron Collider was supposed to have the capacity to develop microscopic black holes and it sounds like they have succeeded.


Any thoughts?

Originally posted by -PLB-

1) Sure, it can take a billion years. Thats not such a long period on a cosmological scale.

2) You can argue this point by simply looking at humans. If humans were to discover interstellar travel within the next 1000 years, we would colonize the entire galaxy. It is in our nature and a result of evolutionary processes. Which would undoubtedly also count for life forms on other planets. The urge to multiply and spread out are in general if favor of a species being prosperous.

3)I think the Indians, aboriginals, Zulus, Incas, etc etc. wont agree with the assessment.

4) I don't see why there would be a practical low limit to a warp drive, though I do see a practical high limit.

1) On the grand scale of things, it's not a long time, but for that of a single species it is because there is no way it's gonna be around for any length of time even close to that.

2) I don't see us colonizing the whole galaxy even if we had FTL travel for a multitude of reasons! Nor any advanced race either for that matter. It's just simply not feasible given the scale of the galaxy & how long it would take to accomplish via crazy amounts of generations. Too many things would get in the way & no species would be able to do it!

3) Doesn't compare.

4) The lowest limit for a warp-drive would still be faster than the speed of light. Since light goes round the world 7 1/2 times per second, then it would never be used to travel within the planet.

Originally posted by powerdrone
If done within the earths atmosphere would this warp bubble also act as a counter measure to the effects of gravity and g forces? Could it be used on a small scale to allow Mach 20 speeds with people not turning to mush?

It you were in the ship & it could be activated within an atmosphere, then yes it would stop you from splatting against the walls when you cranked it up. The problem is that once it was activated, in less than a second, you would be sent whizzing out into space.

reply to post by big_BHOY


The nearest star is about 4 light years away meaning such a vessel could arrive there in 1/0th the time it would take to get their at the speed of light. Literally, it allows humans access to the mineral resources of our solar system. From an astronomical point of view, we have pretty much mapped our own solar system to an extent we do not have to worry about hitting anything solid. As far as the space between stars there is little if anything we have to worry about. The idea that such a space craft would attract matter would be incorrect and if anything it would repel anything that came close to it. See that only thing we need is an accurate map, that tells us what we can run into.

This is actually much easier than some might think....

Any thoughts?

Exotic Matter

Isn't exotic matter hypothetical at present?

Originally posted by big_BHOY

1) On the grand scale of things, it's not a long time, but for that of a single species it is because there is no way it's gonna be around for any length of time even close to that.

Because? I see no reason why an alien race would all in a sudden die out after for example 100 million of years colonizing the galaxy. Especially when spread out over millions of planets. On the contrary

2) I don't see us colonizing the whole galaxy even if we had FTL travel for a multitude of reasons! Nor any advanced race either for that matter. It's just simply not feasible given the scale of the galaxy & how long it would take to accomplish via crazy amounts of generations. Too many things would get in the way & no species would be able to do it!

Reasons such as?

3) Doesn't compare.

Its not to compare anything, it is to point out the eagerness of humans to expand.

4) The lowest limit for a warp-drive would still be faster than the speed of light. Since light goes round the world 7 1/2 times per second, then it would never be used to travel within the planet.

Why would the lower limit be faster than light?

Originally posted by LightsideAssassin

I don't think you realize how big a single galaxy can be. an advanced civilization could stay in one galaxy for millenia and not see it all. This is a wonderful find, will watch developments with great interest.

I don't think you realize how fast humans are capable of multiplying

Say it takes 10000 years to build a world the size of earth and it requires 100 million colonists to do so. A planet the size of earth is capable of producing 100 million colonist every 1000 years.

So here we go: After 20000 years there are 10 earth sized planets. After 30000 years there are 100 earth sized planets. After 40000 years there are 1000 earth sized planets. After 50000 years 10000. After 60000 years 100000. After 70000 years 1000000. After 80000 years 10000000. After 90000 years 100000000. After 100000 years 1000000000.

I think we can now consider the galaxy colonized (depending on the amount of habitable worlds). After 100000 years already. Using in my opinion conservative values.

Of course this is a very simple model and if you take in account that the new worlds will also be able to colonize other worlds in between the 10000 year interval, the growth rate is even higher. Also, I think my estimates are way in favor of slow growth. The population of earth grew from 1 billion in 1800 to 7 billion now. That is a growth of about 350% each 100 years. This means that earth sized planets are capable of producing way more colonist, but it also means that new worlds will be populated way faster.

So I disagree, I think I do realize how large our galaxy is, but I think you underestimate the expansion rate of humans.

reply to post by roblot

States of matter which are not commonly encountered, such as Bose–Einstein condensates and quark–gluon plasma, but whose properties are perfectly within the realm of mainstream physics.

Negative mass

Main article: Negative mass

Negative mass would possess some strange properties, such as accelerating in the direction opposite of applied force. For example, an object with negative inertial mass and positive electric charge would accelerate away from objects with negative charge, and towards objects with positive charge, the opposite of the normal rule that like charges repel and opposite charges attract. This behaviour can produce bizarre results: for instance, a gas containing a mixture of positive and negative matter particles will have the positive matter portion increase in temperature without bound. However, the negative matter portion gains negative temperature at the same rate, again balancing out.

Despite being completely inconsistent with a common-sense approach and the expected behavior of "normal" matter, negative mass is completely mathematically consistent and introduces no violation of conservation of momentum or energy. It is used in certain speculative theories, such as on the construction of wormholes. The closest known real representative of such exotic matter is the region of pseudo-negative pressure density produced by the Casimir effect.

Casimir effect


In the above cases no as well as the issue of dark matter. Like the difference between understanding one can breath and later in history, understanding Oxygen, Molecules and Elements? We have identified these phenomenon, as to how exactly they function, is something we are still working on.

Actually, Black Holes behave very much like Electrons...

Any thoughts?

Lol. But I already have a warp drive in my garage

Originally posted by zeeon
For example - You are travelling on a train. The train is moving at 60 mph. If you run on the train at a speed of 5mph are you moving at a total velocity of 5mph, 60mph or 65mph?

The correct answer (I believe) is 60mph. This is because of the frame of reference that you are in.

Nope.

If your reference frame is on the train, you're going 5mph relative to the train.
If your reference frame is on the ground outside the train, he's going 65mph relative to the ground.
The train itself would be going 60mph but not the person moving at 5mph.

But that only applies to sub-light velocities. If you shine a flashlight on the train, the beam of light goes the speed of light and not the speed of light plus 60mph, no matter which reference frame you are in.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
, it's actually warp 2 which is 10 times the speed of light:

Nope warp 2 is c^2 and warp 3 is c^3 and so on