Near-Light-Speed Starships May Not Fly

reply to post by Gazrok


I admit there are alot of technical issues as far as Navigation using a Fold Space/Time Gravitic Drive...however...as far as the Energy requirements...using a Matter/Antimatter reaction by introducing Antimatter to a specific element not currently found on the periodic table...Atomic Number around 115...this specific element combined with Antimatter creates what is known as a STONG FORCE OF GRAVITY MULTIVERSAL CASCADE OF QUANTUM ENERGY.

This only works when Antimatter is introduced to this ONE and only one specific element. Since the reaction is occuring in a Multiversal State....energy can be accessed and directed from INFINITE Numbers of Divergent Universal Realities.

This is necessary to create enough energy to fold Space/Time as there is not enough Antimatter in our one Universal Reality to generate the Energy Requirements necessary to create such a Fold or drastic Warping of Space/Time.

Split Infinity

reply to post by ImaFungi

So is it known now the minimum velocity at which this radiation becomes a problem while traveling through interstellar space?

The theoretical calculations could be done quite easily. Maybe the author of the blog I linked to in my OP would supply you with the numbers if you wrote in and asked.

Basically, you're looking at:

1. The velocity at which the ambient temperature is Doppler-inflated to a level where more heat is falling on the spacecraft than can be radiated away from it;
   
   
2. The velocity at which CMB photons would be blueshifted to frequencies high enough to penetrate the shielding;
   
   
3. The momentum of incoming protons would be sufficient to exert more drag than the spacecraft's engines could overcome, causing it to decelerate.

Obviously, if you treat it as a real-life engineering problem, then you'll have to put in data such as the rest mass of the spacecraft, hull material, thickness and permeability, available thrust, etc., etc.

It's a sad conclusion to arrive at, but interstellar travel within the lifespan of the travellers is simply impossible according to our present state of knowledge. Of course space warps, wormholes or some other idea based on exotic theoretical physics may come to our rescue. Or maybe a solution will come to us from some hitherto unsuspected quarter. Only time will tell.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by ImaFungi

 

So is it known now the minimum velocity at which this radiation becomes a problem while traveling through interstellar space?

The theoretical calculations could be done quite easily. Maybe the author of the blog I linked to in my OP would supply you with the numbers if you wrote in and asked.

Basically, you're looking at:

1. The velocity at which the ambient temperature is Doppler-inflated to a level where more heat is falling on the spacecraft than can be radiated away from it;
   
   
2. The velocity at which CMB photons would be blueshifted to frequencies high enough to penetrate the shielding;
   
   
3. The momentum of incoming protons would be sufficient to exert more drag than the spacecraft's engines could overcome, causing it to decelerate.

Obviously, if you treat it as a real-life engineering problem, then you'll have to put in data such as the rest mass of the spacecraft, hull material, thickness and permeability, available thrust, etc., etc.

It's a sad conclusion to arrive at, but interstellar travel within the lifespan of the travellers is simply impossible according to our present state of knowledge. Of course space warps, wormholes or some other idea based on exotic theoretical physics may come to our rescue. Or maybe a solution will come to us from some hitherto unsuspected quarter. Only time will tell.

Ok ok. So it seems then the people of the past who thought of cryogenically freezing travelers is the best bet. If we can perfect that method/tech then the ship can just cruise along and the passengers would in essence be 'subjectively time traveling'... go to sleep, wake up a second later and your at another solar system... just hope its not Hal whose driving the ship.

Our other bet is running into aliens who have already figured it out... but if they can do it we can do it eh

reply to post by ImaFungi

So it seems then the people of the past who thought of cryogenically freezing travelers is the best bet.

I like the idea of generation starships—though of course the processes of social evolution on board might compromise the mission in the end (see, for example, Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss and the Long Sun novels of Gene Wolfe).

But perhaps spaceships are the wrong idea altogether. If exotic physics is going to pull us out of this bind—wormholes, spacewarps, quantum teleportation or what have you—then the most efficient solution may not be to put passengers and luggage into a vivarium and sling it out across the interstellar void. Hulls, engines and life-support systems may be irrelevant. Interstellar travel may come to involve walking down the street from your house, stepping into a room in some kind of building, and stepping out of an identical room in an identical building on KOI 172.02 a few seconds (in either frame of reference) later.

Not sure I'd want the inhabitants of a multi generational starship representing me at the interstellar level.

The kids of achievers (which you'd invariably choose as the first generation of astronauts) tend to be underachievers because their parents are too good at making life easy for them.

Also in terms of timescales; if you seperated a group of people 3 generations ago they would be poor representitives of todays wider society.

We need to cover distance in space quickly if this is ever going to be a reality with actual usefull applications ( researc/discovery/diplomacy etc) we are going to need a giant leap in our fundamental understanding of how space causes distance if it is "empty".

My hypothesis is that space cannot be warped, curved or otherwise manipulated for locomotion locally as it is not empty but is in fact the underlying structure of all things we percieve.

reply to post by Jukiodone

Not sure I'd want the inhabitants of a multi generational starship representing me at the interstellar level.

Whatever gave you the idea they were representing you?

:shk:

The moment scientist will understand what light and its properties exactly is they will soon after realise there must be a way or ways to go faster.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by ImaFungi

 

So it seems then the people of the past who thought of cryogenically freezing travelers is the best bet.

I like the idea of generation starships—though of course the processes of social evolution on board might compromise the mission in the end (see, for example, Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss and the Long Sun novels of Gene Wolfe).

But perhaps spaceships are the wrong idea altogether. If exotic physics is going to pull us out of this bind—wormholes, spacewarps, quantum teleportation or what have you—then the most efficient solution may not be to put passengers and luggage into a vivarium and sling it out across the interstellar void. Hulls, engines and life-support systems may be irrelevant. Interstellar travel may come to involve walking down the street from your house, stepping into a room in some kind of building, and stepping out of an identical room in an identical building on KOI 172.02 a few seconds (in either frame of reference) later.

hm, cool. that seems more far fetched then anything to me, stepping into a building and being sent to another planet, how do you suppose that would be possible, first sending out robots to planets programed to build those portals; stuff with entangled particles? Is it feasible to "download" all the information of the human body into em radiation and send it in a secure package through space (like we send packets of information via radio waves across distance that can be encoded and interpreted etc.)?

as far as space ship traveling, what direction do you think would be the best to travel, deffinitly not ahead of our suns path, but I think if we traveled in the opposite direction our sun is traveling we could get to that/those solar systems faster because they would be traveling towards us, but also to consider either traveling towards the center of the galaxy to the nearest star or away from the center, if maybe their orbit speeds or different or we can 'cross paths' as they are traveling around their orbits.
also would it be possible for a space craft to create a strong enough gravity field to bend all EM radiation around it? Nothing with mirrors would work because basically your point is nothing made of matter would work because the radiation would tear any material apart?

Originally posted by Jukiodone
Not sure I'd want the inhabitants of a multi generational starship representing me at the interstellar level.

The kids of achievers (which you'd invariably choose as the first generation of astronauts) tend to be underachievers because their parents are too good at making life easy for them.

Also in terms of timescales; if you seperated a group of people 3 generations ago they would be poor representitives of todays wider society.

We need to cover distance in space quickly if this is ever going to be a reality with actual usefull applications ( researc/discovery/diplomacy etc) we are going to need a giant leap in our fundamental understanding of how space causes distance if it is "empty".

My hypothesis is that space cannot be warped, curved or otherwise manipulated for locomotion locally as it is not empty but is in fact the underlying structure of all things we percieve.

So I think the best solution then is to turn ourselves into robots/immortal beings... so that we dont have to worry about time, who cares if it takes thousands of years to travel to a few near stars when you have xbox 1080.. and our goal can be to look for aliens smarter then us who have already figured out the advanced tech,, get them to teach it to us,, use it to fly back to our planet, turn our selves back into humans (if we want), and then use the new tech to go on some interstellar road trips, maybe intergalactic then, even though thats much more daunting.

Hogwash
Humanity can do absolutely anything within the laws of the universe
It just takes a little lateral thinking to move around our limitations and laws.
And even thenthe Laws of Physics isn't monolithic and unmovable.
In some places its as hard as diamond and in others its like silly putty, don't underestimate the ingenuity of man.

We WILL become an interstellar civilization.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by ImaFungi

 

So it seems then the people of the past who thought of cryogenically freezing travelers is the best bet.

I like the idea of generation starships—though of course the processes of social evolution on board might compromise the mission in the end (see, for example, Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss and the Long Sun novels of Gene Wolfe).

Oh and if we have the tech to travel in that manner, im sure our species would be mature enough to function socially fine. If the mission would be to travel through space and time peacefully and remain alive, that is the same mission we are apart of now on spaceship earth. This process on star ships would seem easier in my mind, especially if the members were tolerant and intelligent.

The solutions to these problems will be so so
different than anyone can even imagine right now.

It's like asking a monkey to design the space shuttle.

No offence to anyone, but we don’t know what the solution will be.
Our generation will never know. The solution is thousands of years into the future
in my honest opinion.

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by Diablos

 

A very pertinent contribution. Thanks very much.

So there's a question about the theory. I'm afraid the concept of Doppler temperature inflation is a bit beyond me. What kind of experiments might yield results that would settle the theoretical argument?

Until we can get something up to those speeds in the first place (not individual particles, but rather more complex systems, I'll explain below), we will never know. It will solve a controversy that is almost a century old.

Originally posted by AstyanaxI believe the fastest object ever observed was the so-called Oh-My-God Particle, which was detected by a University of Utah cosmic-ray experiment in 1991. Particle accelerators like the LHC can get protons moving at a few metres per second less than the speed of light. Is there any way such experiments might be able to help us understand the issue, I wonder?

Unfortunately, no. This is because individual particles don't necessarily have a temperature. Temperature itself is an emergent phenomena that results from the interactions of many particles.

Originally posted by AstyanaxIThe author of the article linked above seems to believe that blue-shifted CMB radiation would pose yet another obstacle to relativistic space travel:

I'm assuming he's using the same model of relativistic temperature that the researcher you linked in your OP is using, namely the relativistic temperature correction derived by Einstein. Except this time, it is more problematic because he is using a model that most experts think is outdated and does not allude to this fact but rather talks in absolutes.

Even if experiments end up verifying Einstein's/Pauli's model for relativistic temperature, I still don't think it is a complete show-stopper for interstellar travel. Anything below 0.5 c is potentially doable, because these relativistic problems aren't so apparent for such speeds due to the Lorentz Factor γ ~ 1. Even at 0.5 c, the Lorentz Factor is only 1.15. At this speed (assuming no acceleration/deceleration in this calculation), it would take 8.7 years earth time while the astronauts only experience 6.5 years to get to the nearest star. That's not such a big time dilation affect, but the upside is most other relativistic affects which would be fatal at speeds close to c wouldn't be so pronounced. This could make quite a few nearby stars and potential planets accessible to future humans assuming the monumental engineering problems are eventually worked out.

reply to post by ImaFungi

hm, cool. that seems more far fetched then anything to me, stepping into a building and being sent to another planet, how do you suppose that would be possible, first sending out robots to planets programed to build those portals; stuff with entangled particles? Is it feasible to "download" all the information of the human body into em radiation and send it in a secure package through space (like we send packets of information via radio waves across distance that can be encoded and interpreted etc.)?

I haven't the faintest idea how it might work. Nobody has. All I'm suggesting is that the solution to the problem might be a lot less obvious than physically moving human bodies through space.

*

reply to post by ImaFungi

Oh and if we have the tech to travel in that manner, im sure our species would be mature enough to function socially fine.

This statement contains some unquestioned assumptions, which may turn out to be wrong. Rather than detail them, allow me to describe the setting of Gene Wolfe's Long Sun novels (spoilers ahead: anyone who wants to read these books should skip the rest of my post).

The action of these novels takes place aboard a generation starship called the Whorl. It is huge—a self-contained worldlet like one of those space habitats people were getting all excited about back in the 1970s—and contains hundreds of thousands of people, living in communities dotted about its interior surface, which is landscaped in an Earthlike way with hills, valleys, rivers and small 'seas'.

The Whorl is the work of a far future age. Humanity has made great scientific and technological progress, but the world has fallen into the hands a tyrant, known as Typhon, who rules by exploiting technology and military might. Knowledge of the world and enjoyment of the fruits of progress are only available to a tiny elite; most people live the poverty-stricken lives of mediaeval peasants. To them, the technology of their superiors is magic.

The Whorl is Typhon's bid to extend his empire beyond the bounds of Earth. Its destination is a pair of earthlike planets orbiting a star some light-years from here. This fact is not known to its passengers. Indeed, they do not know that they are aboard a spaceship at all; the very concept would be alien to them. Over the generations they have lost (or might never have had) the knowledge of their mission and situation. The Whorl is the only world they know. They have never seen the stars; their 'sky' is the opposite side of the great rotating cylinder they inhabit. Recruited from among Earth's peasant masses, the people of the Whorl are governed and ruled by the dictates of their 'gods'. These are actually video or holographic projections of Typhon and members of his family produced by the AI that runs the ship; it contains uploads of all their personalities. Their dictates are delivered to the people by a priestly caste (who are just as ignorant of the reality of things as the masses) and enforced by various robotic entities, some humanoid, some monstrous.

The technology of the Whorl is hidden behind the scenes: buried deep in its hull, far beneath the natural-appearing landscape that is its inner surface. The humans aboard play no part in the running of the ship, which runs itself; they are just gene carriers, raw material for colonisation. Meanwhile they are peasant farmers, fishers, merchants, smiths, craftsmen—all the usual occupations of pre-industrial society.

The AIs and robots are also expected to keep things running once the Whorl reaches its destination; the society to be founded there will be an extension of Typhon's Earth, ruled by Typhon himself—in the form of a personality downloaded by the AI into a suitable human body. Of course, things go spectacularly wrong with this plan, but to find out how you would need to read the books...

Obviously, this is fiction with a healthy dose of fantasy blended in, but the scenario is not altogether implausible. Technology is not necessarily on the side of democracy, and we have no idea how humanity and society will evolve in the future. Already, some scientists are predicting that the human race may split into two—a genetic upper class and a lower. Given such a scenario, something like the society of Typhon's age may yet come to pass. And from it may arise a generation starship whose passengers are completely ignorant of their mission, their origins, their destination and even that they are aboard a vessel travelling through space.

*

reply to post by Diablos

You give us hope! More like this, please...

Originally posted by Blue Shift

Originally posted by Kody27
Which incidentally might actually be the solution to the presented heat problem since wormholes remove the whole friction aspect from the dilemma.

Who says there is no friction in a wormhole? Seems to me that the event horizon of a wormhole would pretty much be infinite friction. A sphere of solid space that a real particle couldn't even get through. Unless you're going to somehow magically switch all your real particles to virtual to jump the barrier. Good luck with that.

I never said that there was no friction inside of a wormhole, I said that wormholes remove the current dilemma of normal friction. They open up space-time itself, so how could normal friction laws apply?

reply to post by ChaoticOrder

This is theoretically possible but scientists say it would require dark energy to power the ship, and we don't yet know how to harvest such energy

We're not even sure it EXISTS, let alone how to HARNESS it....

Traversing a wormhole (as we theorize about them) would present the same problem as a transporter. You need to be converted to energy, then converted back to mass (and converted back correctly).

Let's say that we even could build a transporter, you'd be committing suicide every time you use it, as you were smashed down at the atomic level and converted, then rebuilt. No thanks. I'll take the long way. Same problem going through a wormhole. Unless you could maintain a "real" space around you and the ship, and then slip through one some other way, you'd be committing suicide with every trip. (and we've all seen enough Star Trek transporter accidents to know better...)

Originally posted by Diablos
Unfortunately, no. This is because individual particles don't necessarily have a temperature. Temperature itself is an emergent phenomena that results from the interactions of many particles.

Maxwell and Boltzmann would like a word with you.

Omitting the internal energy of the particle (qm states) which will be dwarfed by the kinetic term at relativistic speeds, yes you can calculate a temperature given an average kinetic energy of incoming particles.

reply to post by Astyanax

some form of shielding is needed. i'm not talking about the panels we currently use, i'm talking about creating something like a miniature magnetosphere around a craft.

it is also noteworthy to mention that the fastest way to travel isn't necessarily at the fastest possible speed, but rather on the shortest path. i'm talking about bending space in such a way as to reduce the distance between two points.

i think this technology is quite reachable before 2100, assuming we don't blow ourselves up first.

reply to post by Gazrok


Wormholes being held open depends on negative (aka exotic) energy, not dark energy. If negative energy even exists.

However, you get all sorts of other oddball effects like the wormhole boundary appearing as near infinite masses coming into the opening and having catastrophic tidal effects as you traverse the opening. So maybe you could get into it, but you'll come out as quark soup.

If it's a Kerr metric wormhole, you might also end up traversing timelike, spacelike, anti-timelike or anti-spacelike manifolds, and come out as antimatter or going backwards in time. Or both.

However, none of it matters if you can change the character of space around the ship - if the values for permeability and permittivity are altered in a region around the ship, the speed of light increases (if you do it that way) in the area around the ship. Incoming particles enter the field, slow down relative to the ship, then accelerate on exit with no net loss or gain of energy. It does, however, scatter some of them so you see a blue glow around the thing. Just can't get rid of it.

Originally posted by Bedlam
reply to post by Gazrok

 

However, none of it matters if you can change the character of space around the ship - if the values for permeability and permittivity are altered in a region around the ship, the speed of light increases (if you do it that way) in the area around the ship. Incoming particles enter the field, slow down relative to the ship, then accelerate on exit with no net loss or gain of energy. It does, however, scatter some of them so you see a blue glow around the thing. Just can't get rid of it.

So what is it about the vacuum that makes 'c' c? What slows light down to that value in the absence of matter?