Interstellar travel impossible, therefore...

reply to post by eezveeneetee


If you can Imagine it then it will be possible.. right?
Someday by someone or some species.. all a matter of
infinite possibilities.

reply to post by seabhac-rua


A termite mound has a lot of termites investing their time and labor. Everything anything does has a cost attached.

True, the maps to our closest neighbour are only 4yrs old. But the further we go the more useless they become and a lot can happen in 4yrs.
The majority of the map would be billions of years out of date however.

reply to post by Krahzeef_Ukhar


Of course, but a highly advanced species will have figured out very efficient ways to produce energy at minimum costs, as we will eventually if we don't allow our primitive violent tendencies to get the better of us.

Whether you find him credible or not, Bob Lazar at least provides a comprehensive explanation of one plausible method of interstellar travel in this video:

Secrets From The Government Bible

reply to post by seabhac-rua

The video doesn't seem to work. edit: works fine now

I accept that there may be some ways toward FTL travel. I'm as confident as those who laughed at the idea of flight that it won't be in my lifetime if at all.

My point is that FTL travel my not be the hardest obstacle to overcome. It may be making it worthwhile for those funding (with their own time a least if not energy wise).

Krahzeef_Ukhar


If we have a ship travelling a 10% C or about 108 Million km/h a marble would be catastrophic if the ship ran into it.



Bending Spacetime seems to be the only practical solution, and by practical I mean could possibly need more energy than exists in the universe and could destroy wherever you are travelling.

With our current understanding it is a fair assumption to say that FTL travel by propulsion is impossible.

If you could manage to bend space or create wormholes there are still problems...


How do you navigate?

everybody mentions collision damage. no one calculates the odds based on the density of such particles in the interstellar medium. here's a hint. you would have to be pretty damned unlucky to run into anything bigger than a dust mote and there ARE ways to avoid them. period.

Bending space time does not require that much energy. that is false. after Alcubierre did his work both he and a succession of investigators have steadily found ways to bring the energy requirements down to more reasonable levels.

balderdash! Relativity does not forbid either FTL or wormholes. the solutions for both actually come directly from th relativity math framework. Scientists just don't like that fact and even evoke unknown theories that they feel must forbid it beyond relativity. now they actually pin their hopes on quantum gravity what ever form that takes in the future. they even get all mystical about it. "nature (capital N) abhors a traversible wormhole so much it conspires to prevent them with active countermeasures" they get quite religious about that. when i think of it that's pretty hilarious. they all found a religion they could agree with. next they'll be dressing robes and holding ceremonies in druid circles.

to navigate a wormhole you harness quantum back pressure. by taking advantage of natures attempts to destroy the worm hole you can move the apertures easily. in fact the quantum back pressure actually makes a wormhole useful beyond just travel. you can make monopoles with them. you can make negative energy and mass with them. with the above they become magickal. monopoles lead to controllable mini black holes and all that implies. they lead to fantastical materials with unbelievable properties. and negative mass-energy solves a whole lot of other problems too.

but to be brief: anything you do to one end of the wormhole has an effect on the other as well. if you pass a flux line into the one mouth it causes a opposite charge on the other end. and mind blowingly: this actually goes beyond charges. you can impart momentum directly. inertia. mass. gravity. you can even produce negative mass and negative energy simply by tossing positive mass and energy into the wormhole. in fact you can get cosmic levels of negative mass/energy for free if you just can get hold of a wormhole.

so the upshot is you can easily direct the far end of the wormhole by doing stuff to or through the near end.

Now if you mean navigation through normal space you can do that computationally or with XNAV receivers.

reply to post by Krahzeef_Ukhar


If FTL became a reality, an open reality, for mankind then the rewards would far exceed the costs, in my mind anyway. Imagine a lucrative lunar Helium3 mining operation that could be undertaken for example, let alone the exploration and resource exploitation of our own solar system, add to that what our immediate galactic neighborhood has to offer, I think it would be worthwhile, but given our tendency as a species to covet personal wealth and power over the greater good of mankind I think it would probably all end in tears.

There are many here on ATS who would contend that we(namely the US black projects world) have already mastered FTL.

BTW, does the video work for you now?

rigel4
If you can Imagine it then it will be possible.. right?
Someday by someone or some species.. all a matter of
infinite possibilities.

Well, there do seem to be some limitations created by the laws of physics. A hard as you might imagine it otherwise, a hydrogen atom is pretty much always going to have proton at its center. And that speed of light thing is a tough one to get around, too.

But what good is it really to imagine that there is some super alien species out there that can hypothetically generate enough power to do all the miraculous things we have so much trouble with? It isn't us. We're not going anywhere soon. And we, specifically, are just going to die on this soggy planet like our monkey ancestors did for millions of years.

UltraverseMaximus
How does organic material survive outside a planets atmosphere? I have read mixed results with some of the radiation being beneficial to seeds.

I would say FTL travel will not be achieved by organic life forms due to the fact that the energy required would have to exceed the energy available for the mass to reach such an acceleration.
This would actually for lack of better words make something non existent to a physical reality.
Sucks to be a lame time traveller lol

I tend to believe that a micro-mini black hole installed on a starship [google: Black hole starships], would be energy efficient enough to easily get the starship up to or at the speed of light --- if not beyond --- into the superluminal realm. Since we have possible evidence of interstellar capable starship arrivals here on Earth --- I can only speculate that these starships have broken the speed of light barrier....and have achieved this feat with black hole starships/saucers. The black hole on the starship should conceivably create it's own magnetic field/fields, which should negate the effects of FTL on mass.

Cheers,

Erno

reply to post by eezveeneetee


Your premise is an assumption based on your interpretation of the physical laws regarding and necessary for interstellar travel.

Because of that, you are incorrect as youve only presented us with a "premise"-your "opinion"...not based on any real science.

Im agreeing with Phage. It absolutely is possible, even probable....but would take very long times to travel great distances.

And that is not a "premise"...but "science".

reply to post by stormbringer1701


The odds of flying into something increase the further you go. This is only applicable for propulsion based travel but you would be going in a straight line and I wouldn't trust going in a straight line for 4 billion light years.

Bending space around you avoids this issue but still leaves you with a lot of effort for possibly little or no gain. Keep trying and eventually you'll find someone out there but how many trips do you do before you are disillusioned by the emptiness of space?

100? 1000? A Million?

Even assuming that instant travel to anywhere in the universe is quick and easy. It could still be a billion years before you find something worthwhile.

reply to post by Krahzeef_Ukhar

A map is useless in the case of FTL travel as it will be horribly outdated by the time you get there

the maps on my GPS get updated automatically.

Dr. Harold White at NASA is currently working on the production of a small space warp. He has already had encouraging preliminary results.
He has accomplished this using a very modest amount of electrical power. He believes he can reduce the power requirements ever further.
If this much has already been accomplished, I think it premature to declare that travel at effective speeds faster than that of light is impossible.
By the way, this does not violate the principles of relativity theory. In a space warp, the distance between point a and point b is reduced, making local speeds below that of light sufficient to travel at effective velocities well above it.

reply to post by stormbringer1701


I tend to believe that wormhole starship travel is not a viable method of interstellar travel --- because some scientist's claim --- that you would need the energy of a supernova, in order to create a wormhole. The vibrations from the starship --- as it enters the wormhole --- would cause the wormhole to collapse unto itself.

reply to post by seabhac-rua


I'm watching the vid now. It's interesting however I am pretty skeptical and consider it enjoyable science fiction.

The whole FTL thing is an interesting concept and I love learning about the theories and the physics. I think motivation is equally important and whilst mining makes sense, secret meetings with governments seems laughable to me.

Krahzeef_Ukhar
reply to post by stormbringer1701

 

The odds of flying into something increase the further you go. This is only applicable for propulsion based travel but you would be going in a straight line and I wouldn't trust going in a straight line for 4 billion light years.

Shall i tell you what the odds are? the odds are 1 dust mote sized collision per day for each square meter of the front face of the vessel. these sorts of impact carry the energy of a high powered rifle bullet. fairly easy to shield against. and easily deflected out of the way by a electrical or magnetic field.

larger impacts are exponentially more rare still and there are techniques to avoid or destroy them as well.

furthermore the nearest stars would take years not billions of years. alpha centauri is 4.4 light years away. please explain how at .90 light speed it would take billions of years to get there? and even if they did thanks to time dilation the crew would experience just months for such a trip.

Bending space around you avoids this issue but still leaves you with a lot of effort for possibly little or no gain. Keep trying and eventually you'll find someone out there but how many trips do you do before you are disillusioned by the emptiness of space?

100? 1000? A Million?

contact with other sentient life is just one reason to go into interstellar space. colonization, resource exploitation and economics are others. however; chances are there are civilizations out there.

Even assuming that instant travel to anywhere in the universe is quick and easy. It could still be a billion years before you find something worthwhile.

wrong. virtually every red dwarf has a planet. most other stars do as well. even if these are lifeless they hold untold motivations to go to any of them. even boring ones like we think barnard's star or alpha proxima or wolf 359 are.

reply to post by Ross 54

He has already had encouraging preliminary results.

If by "encouraging" you mean inconclusive, yes.

You might want to jump to somewhere around 18:00.
www.youtube.com...

Erno86
reply to post by stormbringer1701

 

I tend to believe that wormhole starship travel is not a viable method of interstellar travel --- because some scientist's claim --- that you would need the energy of a supernova, in order to create a wormhole. The vibrations from the starship --- as it enters the wormhole --- would cause the wormhole to collapse unto itself.

its not that you need that much energy to create a worm hole. it's that (absent negative mass and energy) it would take that much or more to enlarge the wormhole to usable size. but you see; you don't need to create a wormhole in the first place. there are literally an infinite number of them available for free in every cubic meter of space. even solid objects like your body are permeated by an infinity of them.

so the technological challenge really isn't creating them or even aiming the far end and moving it. the challenge is in capturing one and knowing it and knowing it's initial position and orientation. and then in getting it to a useable size. once you have done that the rest of it is simple.

Phage
reply to post by Ross 54

 

He has already had encouraging preliminary results.

If by "encouraging" you mean inconclusive, yes.

You might want to jump to somewhere around 18:00.
www.youtube.com...

actually he thinks he has positive results. it's just that because of the extraordinary nature of the claim he wants an incontrovertable above sigma or else no one will try to replicate his work. he knows that. that is the only sense in which his claim could be considered inconclusive. it's the same thing with Dr Woodward's mach principle work. he knows not to go all crazy prematurely. he had trouble replicating his results reliably so he plods on improving and gathering more evidence. it's sound philosophy.

I respect Dr. White's judgement and scientific repute all the more because he is being careful and conservative about what he says. Both his project and the independent one he mentions in the video have, by various methods, detected tentative signs that they have created a warp field. He seeks to confirm these preliminary results, just as a good scientist should.

I posted a thread here on this exact subject about a year ago, for those interested in the read.

Since then, though, I've long abandoned the notion that interstellar travel is completely ruled out. I've been fortunate to come to know people (who are much smarter than I) that are tangentially working on this problem and think it can plausibly be done sometime in the distant future. It's incredibly difficult and possibly impossible in practice, but there are no physical laws that completely rule out travel between the stars.

However, almost no real scientist thinks FTL is at all plausible and it can ever be done in any meaningful. Hence if ET is coming here, it's probably been camping somewhere nearby (