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Originally posted by jimbo78
i think travelling at the speed of light i am pretty sure you would not be able to spot the smallest little piece of space rock. even the size of a golf ball. which would be my biggest worry. they cant even spot an asteroid the size of a school bus flying towards us at 170000mph. so fling through space at a billion mph you would never see what lies ahead. so it would be stupid to even try.
Originally posted by Arbitrageur
Let's see, we're still using mostly chemical propellants which also have this problem:
Originally posted by Astyanax
My research supports the contention that at speeds very close to the speed of light, the temperature of this heat bath is high enough to melt all known materials.
Depressing if true. Anyone care to discuss this? And let's try not to derail the thread into discussions about faster-than-light travel, please...
www.nasa.gov...
So, in addition to not having enough mass in the universe for chemical propulsion to travel to just the nearest star, according to NASA, oh by the way it would also get hot?
Here are four examples [large graphic] of what it would take to send a canister about the size of a Shuttle payload (or a school bus) past our nearest neighboring star...and allowing 900 years for it to make this journey.
Well....If you use chemical engines like those that are on the Shuttle, well..., sorry, there isn’t enough mass in the universe to supply the rocket propellant you’d need.
Of course there are alternate propulsion technologies but to be honest none look that promising for interstellar travel...see this graphic:
I think if technology advances to the point we can overcome these propulsion problems, then it might also be advanced enough to solve the heat problem. As others have suggested, a shield of some sort made of fields might be able to divert the heat, and since a field isn't made of matter, we don't have to worry about the melting temperature of the field.
Originally posted by Blue Shift
Originally posted by abeverage
Um...Deflector shield hello...
What, exactly, is this deflector shield supposed to be made of? Some kind of manipulated magnetic field? It's still going to be essentially "attached" to the ship, and will accumulate the same amount of drag, or possibly even more because it's going to be so much larger than the ship itself.
My problem with near lightspeed travel is the potential for a virtual particle shockwave pushing ahead of the bow.
The faster you go, to the point where you're compressing spacetime ahead of you as you travel, the more you're going to get an extra load of virtual particles being pushed into reality in the shockwave.
Wormhole travel? Sure. All we'd need is to generate the gravitational force of a black hole in the center of the galaxy, and then a counter-force to keep us from becoming a thin film of information on the surface of that black hole. Piece of cake!
Bottom line is that we'll likely never be able to physically travel any great distance in space, so we'll have to rely on our video games to satisfy that desire while we sent our immortal artificial intelligence machines out to do the real exploring for us. If we still care about it. We'll probably eventually lose interest in the whole idea.
Unfortunately, even assuming you found a source for the energy it would take and invented a means to accelerate yourself and Intergalactic Vessel Omega Point to this velocity, you wouldn't get far before being disrupted into subatomic goo due to interactions with photons in the ubiquitous cosmic microwave background radiation. Sokolsky has calculated that at 3×1020 eV, even a single proton could travel no farther than 10 megaparsecs, about the distance of the Virgo galaxy cluster, before losing energy in this manner.
Originally posted by Monkeygod333
What if one was able to pass THROUGH the particles, with a magnetic barrier that separates the craft from all other matter outside the barrier?
Whatever the shield is, would it be possible to make it so that energy can be harnessed from the photons impacting the shield, and that would take care of the problem of needing lots of energy for the shield.
Also can superconductors be used in anyway to generate a magnetic field.
Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by ImaFungi
Whatever the shield is, would it be possible to make it so that energy can be harnessed from the photons impacting the shield, and that would take care of the problem of needing lots of energy for the shield.
Well, it's the energy of the impacting photons that is precisely the problem. 'Using them for the shield' means transferring energy to the shield from the photons. But on impact, that is exactly what happens anyway. And Newton's Third Law is physics enough to tell us what happens next.
Also can superconductors be used in anyway to generate a magnetic field.
That's what the 'Meissner field' poster meant. But whatever you do, you're going to have to deal with the energy of photon collision somehow, and the only way you can do it is by opposing its effects with an equal amount of energy (or mass equivalent). Otherwise you wouldn't just have a starship, you'd have an over-unity generator. And the Second Law of Thermodynamics is physics enough to tell us that can't happen.