NASA: Alfa Centauri in two weeks?

reply to post by Utnapisjtim


"Ok, so it was Jules Verne who invented the submarine?"

Actually i think you may find that Leonardo had his hand in the design concept of the submarine way before Jules Verne came up with the Nautilus.

www.google.co.uk... 0

andy06shake
reply to post by Utnapisjtim

 

"Ok, so it was Jules Verne who invented the submarine?"

Actually i think you may find that Leonardo had his hand in the design concept of the submarine way before Jules Verne came up with the Nautilus.

Sure it wasn't Archimedes?

AthlonSavage
reply to post by Utnapisjtim

 

Gets his calculations and put them up for us all to see instead of sticking him on a pedestal. Then we will all see how incredibly tough his calculation is and from that we will judge collectively what credit he should deserve. if your not willing to do that then shut up.

No need to go all ad hominem here. I am not NASA and it's not I who claim to have invented relativity and is planning to go to Alfa Centauri by warping space. Please don't empty your frustration out on people you don't know and science you most likely have no understanding of. Not that I am so clever. I found a webpage and posted it here. That's it. Deal with it and smell the roses.

reply to post by Utnapisjtim


"Sure it wasn't Archimedes?"

Well you can see where this is going? The point I am trying to make is that technological innovations such as these have most lightly been designed, built and destroyed many times throughout recorded history and most lightly beyond into antediluvian times.

Just look at the Antikythera device. Any civilisation capable of building and designing such an object is quite capable of building say a submersible.

andy06shake
reply to post by Utnapisjtim

 

"Sure it wasn't Archimedes?"

Well you can see where this is going? The point I am trying to make is that technological innovations such as these have most lightly been designed, built and destroyed many times throughout recorded history and most lightly beyond into antediluvian times.

Just look at the Antikythera device. Any civilisation capable of building and designing such an object is quite capable of building say a submersible.

I get it. No point in science and research. It's all been done before. Any scientist knows that we are but dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. What's the point in making new music. Music was invented by the birds and the crickets…

Aliensun
reply to post by JadeStar

 

I find it interesting that I give good reason for a massless capability of a vehicle and nobody wants to take that up. They go off on ion drives, etc. that still don't escape Einsteinian physics. Not very forward thinking.

I have, someplace, and old clipping from Popular Science as I recall from about 1962 in which it was stated that at that time there were 15 different universities and laboratories in the US that were working on anti-gravity/massless devices. One must wonder, was all of the efforts fruitless

Look at the chart above. Only the greyed out boxes proved fruitless. Other stuff is still under investigation but any working "warp drive" or "massless device" is a long, long way off without a major breakthrough.

reply to post by Utnapisjtim


"I get it. No point in science and research. It's all been done before. Any scientist knows that we are but dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. What's the point in making new music. Music was invented by the birds and the crickets"


Well Solomon did say "There is nothing new under the sun" but I think the point at least for our current iteration of civilization is that we progress to or rediscover how the hell to get off this rock, Sharpish!

AthlonSavage

proposed by Miguel Alcubierre in his 1994 paper "The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity".

The idea of warping space around an object was around before this guy, wow startrek in 60s used the idea. Im sick of seeing some physicist come along and do some calcs and get the credit for an old idea.

NEWSFLASH: Hollywood is not real.

One can imagine anything is possible. That doesn't make it so.

One can sit down and you know, actually do math to figure out what is PROBABLE and that's why he gets the credit.

BTW: Einstein was the first to determine that space/time was warped by nature. Star Trek then used that as a mechanism for faster than light travel.

Alcubierre actually determined what it would take for US to warp space.

Big difference.

JadeStar
NEWSFLASH: Hollywood is not real.

Wait, are you trying to say Gene Roddenbery didn't invent the internet?



-Peace-

andy06shake
Well Solomon did say "There is nothing new under the sun" but I think the point at least for our current iteration of civilization is that we progress to or rediscover how the hell to get off this rock, Sharpish!

Indeed. The funny thing is that if we leave this rock at some point and come to a new world, we would have to work and form that world in much the same way as Genesis 1 describes. Genesis 1 is basically a short description of terra-forming written as a poem or a song with seven verses. Science and religion will meet again, no doubt. For science without mystery is like bread without water.

reply to post by Utnapisjtim


Ancient alien terraforming/colonisation, the only way to travel!

Only thing there is it will start "In the beginning there was the Corporation" instead of the word.

reply to post by andy06shake


Or "In the beginning Einstein misspelled A=πr^2 into E=mc^2 and suddenly everything made sense."

Came to think of a passage in the Gospel of Mark:

Mark 13:24 But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened , and the moon shall not give her light, 25 And the stars of heaven shall fall , and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken . 26 And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. (KJV)

Could be our favorite son of man is using a warp drive to get from Sirius to Sol

The first step is to prove that the theory works on an incredibly tiny scale. Harold "Sonny" White and NASA are actually testing that now. The initial experiment apparently produced a measurable effect but not yet enough to be conclusive.

Assuming the theory is proven experimentally, then the next hurdle is scaling it up and being able to produce enough power. Many think it's impossible to produce enough power for the scale necessary, but I'm guessing that either further breakthroughs will make the power requirements less or the ability to generate enough power will be developed. 100 years ago, the last wagon trains were still going west in America.

As the saying goes, "those who say something is impossible should stay out of the way of those who are doing it."

My guess, and it is only a guess, is that the physicists abandoned the 'aether' theory too soon. What if all the relativistic effects we can measure are caused by something we eventually found that we could control or mitigate?

For instance, what if it were actually this so called 'aether' resisting displacement from a moving body that caused these relativistic effects. Shouldn't we be able to apply some sort of hyper-dimensional mathematics to aero- and hydrodynamics and come up with an 'aether-dynamic' shape for our spacecraft that will cut through this 'aether' like a super-sonic jet through the atmosphere or the hull of a racing boat through water?

Think about it. Certain shapes cut through air and water better than others because those shapes produce less drag. The air or water isn't distorted or disturbed as much as these shapes travel through them. What if relativistic effects are a four or more dimensional analog to three-dimensional aerodynamic drag?

You wouldn't need to warp space-time. You just figure out how your craft would have to be 'shaped' to cut the aetherdynamic drag. My guess is it isn't really about the physical shape of the surface of the craft so much as the shape and makeup of any 'shielding' you project and figuring out if certain types of motion cut this aether better than others. It would probably have to be some sort of electro-gravitic shielding. I think it would be generated by some sort of spinning apparatus. You can search for articles all over the web that tell how Von Braun's calculations were thrown off be cause spinning spacecraft somehow traveled to the moon more quickly than they should have.

ikonoklast
The first step is to prove that the theory works on an incredibly tiny scale. Harold "Sonny" White and NASA are actually testing that now. The initial experiment apparently produced a measurable effect but not yet enough to be conclusive.

Assuming the theory is proven experimentally, then the next hurdle is scaling it up and being able to produce enough power. Many think it's impossible to produce enough power for the scale necessary, but I'm guessing that either further breakthroughs will make the power requirements less or the ability to generate enough power will be developed. 100 years ago, the last wagon trains were still going west in America.

As the saying goes, "those who say something is impossible should stay out of the way of those who are doing it."

Great post.

Here's something to ponder. Suppose they test this and it is a success but for the foreseeable future the largest thing we could send into "warp" was something about the size of a nanobot due to the energy requirements of sending anything larger.

Now many non science people would balk at that and say, 'meh, who needs to waste money on that? big deal so we can send something the size of a width of a human hair to Alpha Centuari?"

Consider this.... Back in 1958 a communication's satellite was this size and designed by teams of NASA engineers.



Today, just a few weeks ago high school kids designed a satellite this size and it was launched into earth orbit:




How small will they be in 2053?

Or 2103?

It could very well be that the galaxy is crawling with nanoprobes from other intelligences. One could be crawling across your computer right now and you'd never know it. They'd be exceedingly difficult to locate unless one knew where to look.

If all we can send to the stars is nano-scale probes, that still would be amazing. And there are ideas of how one could send a bunch of those machines to a location and essentially build a 3D printer to reproduce us, from information.

Perhaps the way we travel to the stars, will not be on massive starships of sci fi at all. Perhaps it will be as bits and bytes on tiny little ones.

obiwanbeeohbee
My guess, and it is only a guess, is that the physicists abandoned the 'aether' theory too soon. What if all the relativistic effects we can measure are caused by something we eventually found that we could control or mitigate?

It wasn't abandoned just refined. Today we call these "virtual processes".

Look up Alan C. Holt of NASA JSC's Field Resonance Propulsion work....

Here's a link to one paper referencing some of it..

Space Testing of Electromagnetically Sensitive Materials for Breakthrough Propulsion Physics

Authors:

Alan C. Holt, Senior Member
NASA Johnson Space Center*, Houston, TX

Eric W. Davis, Ph.D.
National Institute for Discovery Science, Las Vegas, NV

Hal Puthoff, Ph.D.
Institute for Advanced Studies, Austin, TX

It won't work, ever. There's simply too many insurmountable problems with Alcubierre space warp and other spacetime geometries designed for global FTL. The exotic matter requirements are more than enough to dismiss this idea as nothing more than fantasy, seeing as none of our most successful models on the structure matter predict any form of exotic matter. Also, by some extensions of these models to include gravity, it's been shown the larger the negative energy is "brought" into existence, the more unstable it is and the less time it takes to collapse. Something that would be used in a hypothetical warp drive would only exist on the order of 10^-32 seconds.

Sorry, but it seems we really are limited to sub-light velocities. The universe, after all, does not have to conform to human ambitions.

andy06shake
reply to post by Blue Shift

 

I think the way ahead where FTL propulsion is concerned lies in our understanding of inertia. Once we have this pesky concept better understood then maybe we will be able to progress further along the road with our colonisation requirements. Still need to locate a second Earth all the same.

edit on 6-12-2013 by andy06shake because: (no reason given)

I disagree. While you do make a good point that searching for violations of the strong equivalence principle might give us leads into new and interesting physics, such effects could never be used for anything practical as the enormous energies required to reach such small scales where these effects would manifest would be too colossal for even super-civilizations to harness.

reply to post by Diablos


I would have thought any stage one civilisation(I know we are not quite there yet) with the ability to produce antimatter would have met the energy requirements necessary. Then you also have dark matter/energy to consider, any stage two or three type civilization will almost certainly be able to manipulate those energy sources which for all intents and purposes are infinite.