The only way I see crossing inter-stellar distances is possible

NoRulesAllowed
You will not have to "cross interstellar distances" in a classic, Newtonian sense.

NOT if you can warp/bend the ST continuum. And there is evidence that this is possible, aka. Warp drive, manipulating S/T via electromagnetic fields. What is NOT possible is conventional, Newtonian speed at or near light speed. But with a warp-drive and the manipulation of S/T this is not even needed.

Nice to see that some understand basic reality of true space travel.. I find it odd that 9 tenths of the outspoken scientists in the media are still claiming impossibilities because of the limits of solid rocket fueled space travel..

In a strange lower science, error science, fossil fuel science universe that doesnt exist maybe. But in reality , if you start to research Keely's Secret, Walter Russel, Cavitation, Electric Universe, and Holographic Universe, that inside of atoms are waves, and we're in the spirit world too, in fact life is life and the real world is all there really is, but there are pockets and lower frequency places, and some may even be training manuals that we're in, where its denser, and seems like the water of energy waves is solidified enough to be matter. But its just denser forms of the higher realms. And when it comes to those Higher ETs, they know what is the real way it is, their crafts are not made of lower frequency stuff and Mind over Matter is the way many things are done, portals open, they pick where they want to emerge. Higher Ups don't need our fossil fuels for their travels.

crazyewok

yorkshirelad
Not possible using sub-light propulsion.

Yes it is.

Usieng Nuclear pulse propulsion which we have the tec to do right here today you can get between 10%-30% speed of light, though 30% is pushing it. Thats puts our nearby stars 40-100 years away. This would be good fro probes.

With antimatter drives that can go up to 90% light speed. Thats puts our nearby stars in Human travel distance. We cant do that quite yet but it is a very very real possibility. Infact we could do it today its just the cost of Anti matter thats the problem.

edit on 20-2-2014 by crazyewok because: (no reason given)

OK maybe I didn't add the word "practical" but I assumed that that was a given otherwise what's the point!

Anti matter makes no difference unless you are talking about some , as yet undiscovered, method of propulsion (ie warp drives). If you are using the anti-matter to react with matter as a controlled explosion you are still governed by newtonian mechanics ie exceptionally slow method of wandering around the galaxy. Your grandchildren would be dead before they reached one habitable planet.

It would take decades to travel star to star.

yorkshirelad


If you are using the anti-matter to react with matter as a controlled explosion you are still governed by newtonian mechanics ie exceptionally slow method of wandering around the galaxy. Your grandchildren would be dead before they reached one habitable planet.

NO you wouldnt.


It possible to get 50% light speed easy with antimatter and 90% has been declared possible.

That puts alot of nearby starts within a decade travel. At 90% you would get to alpha Centuri and Barnards star in 5 years! And to top it off due to time dillation it would feel alot quicker to those on board the ship.


So no you are wrong.

Basically, the project would require multiple rocket missions to space, almost weekly, in order to build it.

It would need a modular design with components that can easily be bolted together.

To garner the cooperation of the people and to organise a substantial amount of time, education, and resorces, into an experimental mission, would require unquestionable leadership.

I do understand that there are alternate methods of propulsion.

When it comes to bending time, this would mean that between two points in space, you can reduce the time it takes to move across that distance, however, in my mind, time is what we perceive as sentient beings, and not something that is external to us. In this sense "time" is divisible by our own perception of it.

reply to post by SystemResistor


A feasible experiment would be to render a subject into a hypnotic trance, and monitor all his nervous functions into an electrographic simulation, providing feed-back to his brain with a stable pulse, and also mechanistic connections to his vital organs timed to a self-cancelling frequency-modulated equation - this equasion would also be the "null key" and the "command" used to render him into his hypnotic state.

The environment would have to be devoid of all light and sound, simulating near-death.

Additionaly, no other parties would be able to observe the subject, and all data and feedback into the simulation would have to be instantaneously deleted exactly upon his revival.

To maintain the subjects awareness, a simple hypnagoic hallucination would have to be programmed, usually the subject would be exposed to a simple animation on a screen, and programmed to remember it, the hypnotic command used also to function the animation as a continous loop, thus, also modulated into the frequency signature as a continuous loop.

When the subject is revived, tecnically, he should only rember slight discomfort and the animation looped only a single time.

The differences in readings, aberrant signals, would have to be substantially minute - e.g. if he "remembers" one second to every ten years, then one million years would equate, in his time, to 69.44 days.

swanne
reply to post by AliceBleachWhite

 

This thing requires negative mass. And a ridiculous amount of it, too...

the original alcubierre dirve required negative mass. and more energy than the universe holds. but that was then and this is now. since alcubierre first published his paper in the 1990s; subsequent work has reduced the amount of energy until now it would require

7.2 x 10^19 joules equivelent of 17.2 Gigatons of TNT or the equivelent of Converting the Voyager One probe's mass into energy, energy required by Alcubierre warp drive with doughnut shaped ring

Dr White says that by refining the ring shape and adjusting other factors such as cycling the field with AC current to change the permitivity of space* it could be dropped again.

also his technique does NOT require negative energy or mass any more.

that is still a huge amount of energy but it is feasible that we could produce that type of energy in the future especially if he manages to further optimize the design.

*apparently by oscillating the warp field carrier wave you alter the resistance of space-time to being warped (permitivity) making it take less energy to do it.

To elaborate further, as per quantum physics, the phenomenon was altered according to measurement devices, thus, to delete all data would render the phenomenon "not observed" assuming the equipment is not sentient.

crazyewok

yorkshirelad


If you are using the anti-matter to react with matter as a controlled explosion you are still governed by newtonian mechanics ie exceptionally slow method of wandering around the galaxy. Your grandchildren would be dead before they reached one habitable planet.

NO you wouldnt.


It possible to get 50% light speed easy with antimatter and 90% has been declared possible.

That puts alot of nearby starts within a decade travel. At 90% you would get to alpha Centuri and Barnards star in 5 years! And to top it off due to time dillation it would feel alot quicker to those on board the ship.


So no you are wrong.

one radical antimatter rocket design gets close to 92 percent Light speed more "conventional" designs top out at just under 70 percent C. and that is with an recent development with magnetic nozzle optimization. one that should apply to fusion rockets and some types of ion propulsion. in fact the magnetic nozzle optimization was originally for fusion drives if i recall correctly. basically the work doubles the top speed of a fusion drive and should do the same for antimatter drives too. with it a fusion drive can top out at 35 or so percent.

the radical antimatter drive is called a tethered antimatter drive. it was the basis for the ship in the movie avatar though they replaced the cable or tether with a rigid frame. see; the primary advance of the tether drive is that most of the superstructure and its weight is removed and replaced by a much lighter/less massive tether. without that handicap the already super powerful antimatter drive has a huge advantage in the thrust weight ratio and Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation.

here is the wiki for it the tethered design:

en.wikipedia.org...

here is an article on the nozzle design thing. looks like i was right the first time. it was originally for the antimatter drive not fusion. but it's the same sort of exhaust for the most part so it should still work for fusion.

www.gizmag.com...

crazyewok

NO you wouldnt.


It possible to get 50% light speed easy with antimatter and 90% has been declared possible.

That puts alot of nearby starts within a decade travel. At 90% you would get to alpha Centuri and Barnards star in 5 years! And to top it off due to time dillation it would feel alot quicker to those on board the ship.


So no you are wrong.

Something some of you, I think, are failing to consider in using conventional Newtonian travel methodologies is the concept of STOP.



Yeah. It's when you get somewhere you want to get to, and want to stay for awhile as opposed to keeping all that hard-fought velocity and just sailing right past.

Thus, sure, it might be fantastic to get to 90% C, but, there's a bell curve of time spent in Acceleration, time spent Coasting, and time Spent De-accelerating. One could also Accelerate halfway to any X destination and then flip it for de-Acceleration until the destination is reached.

In the end, however, even if one could get up to 90% C, the question remains; how long does it take and at what cost to reach that speed, plus when do you need to start putting on the brakes?

If you accelerate halfway to any destination X, then, that would mean putting on the brakes the entire second half of the journey.

In essence, some place 5 LY away will take, well, it all depends on how fast one gets to maximum V, and then how long it takes to put on the brakes. 7 years? 10 years? 15 years? longer?

All in all, Newtonian travel in sub-C space is all sorts of Buck Rodgers in the 21st Century and all, but, when it comes down to practical travel solutions on timescales that Humans can actually cope with, we're looking at solutions that will likely involve either;
The Alcubierre Drive , or something very like it, all depending how the proof of concept models currently being tested develop, as well as a combination of other propulsion systems that will probably include a fusion jet.

well there is a trade off sure but you have to consider the costs and benefits of your acceleration profile:

Consideration 1: if you accelerate as fast as you can take as an organism you get there faster true. but...
even though a human body can take an acceleration of about 8 gs for a brief time (measured in minutes or seconds) you would not want to experience that for a long journey. so practically speaking you want to keep the bulk of your trip at around 1 g. if you tried even 1.5 to 2 Gs the strain n your system or that of a crew would begin killing those vulnerable to heart attacks stroke and so forth. so you want them to feel 1 G.

Consideration 2: even at just 1 G you could accelerate to near light speed in about 4 months. so if you wanted to accelerate as fast as biologically feasible you could do so just adding a couple of months to each end of the trip. accelerate to top speed coast and then de-accelerate. you gain a time benefit of just a few months shorter trip time compared to the biologically optimum way to do an interstellar trip.

Consideration 3: if you accelerate slowly to the mid point and de-accelerate slowly the second half of the trip you have artificial gravity with no design complications or extra expense for complicated centrifuge designs. G force is not a function of velocity. it is a function of acceleration, de-acceleration or simply changes in velocity or vector. if you accelerate to the midpoint you have gravity to the midpoint. if you then de-accelerate the rest of the trip you have gravity until you reach orbit at the destination. your gravity needs be no more complicated than performing a flip at the midpoint so that you main thruster is pointing at the destination for the second half of the trip. Its slower but not too bad for a trip to nearby stars particulary the three stars in the alpha centauri system, barnard's star, or wolf 359, or the two WISE brown dwarfs (Luhman 16A Luhman 16B) that are 6.59 LY out.

Consideration 4: you do need to arrive at the destination with enough bone and muscle strength to perform the mission or colonize as the case may be. you would not be able to reacclimatize after 5 years in a zero G environment. so you need gravity. if you choose to accelerate as rapidly as possible you need a replacement for acceleration G force for the coast phase of your trip. but if you did choose to reject the free gravity slow acceleration would give you then you need another means to produce gravity. as it happens we have exactly one option already technologically proven. a centrifuge. but that is complicated. it complicates plumbing, wiring, pressurized access in some cases and of course its a moving mechanical part subject to
malfunction and breakdown. that said...you might want a centrifuge anyway because in orbit at the destination you again have no gravity.

consideration 5: future tech. it turns out that gravity manipulation appears to be possible. it's even predicted by general relativity. and there are experimental results that seem to show the ability to manipulate gravity by electronic means. if this is true then not only does it solve the gravity problem from a biological perspective but it lends itself to propulsion in more than one way even at the extreme edge of possibility allowing apparent global FTL.

consideration 6: you don't have to arrive at your destination to start doing wonderful science. your discovery and exploration begins when you leave earth orbit. and i don't mean minor stuff. i mean real new knowledge on the way out of the solar system in the kuiper belt, the void, the Oort Cloud and the target star's equivalent on the way in. there is so much to be gained at every point on the trip that it boggles the mind that we do not place the proper priority on doing this.

also time dilation is exponentially related to velocity so it does not really kick into full gear until you get going really fast. like above .7 C. but if you get that kind of speed it is significant logistically. So for the crew traveling at 90 percent C the trip passes in a few weeks. back home though it still appears to take 5 years.

I wonder... Does that mean that metabolically the crew only uses up a few weeks of food water, air and other consumables? it sure would lessen the logistical load and reduce ship mass if that was the case.

the first propulsion systems to use antimatter will almost certainly be mainly fusion drives that use antimatter to initiate fusion or to supplement and boost the power of fusion drives. examples are ICAN and AIMstar.

this is because both of those proposals only require small amounts of antimatter; a single nanogram or a microgram* (per 1000AU.) amounts that are more credibly available in the near future. a pure antimatter drive is currently infeasible due to the large amounts of antimatter required and the technical and safety issues even if we could procure the requisite antimatter.

so you should probably confine interstellar travel speculation to fusion or fusion hybrid drives for the near term as the most likely near term candidate. so we would be looking at speeds of .003 light speed to .35 percent light speed. the top end of that regime would not be available at the inauguration of the fusion propulsion era. but if it were that would mean travel times on the order of 12 to 15 years to the very nearest 6 stars. that is of course totally acceptable for probes (voyager has been going for over 30 years.) but not for humans unless they could be sure of someplace nice to stay at the destination. though i guess some military careers are 30 years long so a young crew could do a two way mission. they would do the one mission of their career and then retire.

* i think that means a trip to alpha proxima would require 30 or so nanograms of antimatter. add about ten more for visiting all three stars in that system. double that for a return trip. so we could probably do a mission with 80 nanograms of antimatter plus the fusion reactants. right now we can't make a single nano gram but our capacity is increasing quickly. plus there are many natural sources within the solar system and even around earth we might be able to harvest.


more passing thoughts...

if the antimatter is actually supplementing the fusion propulsion output then your top end should be corespondingly higher than a pure fusion drive. so for example if your antimatter contributes 10 percent of the engine's output then if your fusion top end is 35 percent then the hybrid top end should be 38.something percent C. ideally anyway. so that would be a little over two years per light year or less than nine years to alpha proxima.

and maybe just maybe if you added a quantum* thrust capture rail cage around the plenum between the reactor chamber and the nozzle you could capture a few percentage points of additional velocity. perhaps bringing the speed up to .5 C. or eight years to alpha proxima.

similar in concept to several Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster designs that were developed independantly around the world. the most famous being the QVPT used by Eagleworks lab at NASA's JPL. Another famous one was developed by a young female egyptian student and is being proposed for use in satellites.

the idea is basically the same thing as the ret-conned way that the impulse engines work in star trek now. the impulse engines are not rockets. instead the plasma created is ran through an apparatus that allows direct transfer of kinetic energy from the exhaust to the hardpoints of the ships "keel" by quantum coupling effects. it can even be used to reverse thrust.

originally the impulse engines were supposed to be fusion rockets. the louvers where thrust reversers and thrust vectoring mechanisms. but as the various series developed they were ret conned into indirect drive systems.

crazyewok

pikestaff
I have watched evacuate Earth, and I don't remember ion drive being mentioned at all, which at the moment is the only practical interstellar drive we have at the moment.
As for food, the craft will be big enough for food to be grown inside, the cylinder of the craft rotating to give one g, might be a bit of a problem with the Coriolis effect, but, perhaps at one g constant, the cylinder would not rotate but have 'stories' same as a skyscraper?

Iondrives produce very little thrust.

Nuclear pulse is far better.

Bigger drives, bigger thrust, more drives, more thrust..........

pikestaff



Bigger drives, bigger thrust, more drives, more thrust..........

Bigger drives, bigger thrust, more drives, more thrust = More energy

The energy requirements would rquire a fission, fusion or Anti matter reactor.......... So you may as well ditch the Ion engine then as you will get more power out the fuel source. Why use a fusion reactor to power a Ion drive when you can just use a fusion engine? ect

crazyewok

pikestaff



Bigger drives, bigger thrust, more drives, more thrust..........

Bigger drives, bigger thrust, more drives, more thrust = More energy

The energy requirements would rquire a fission, fusion or Anti matter reactor.......... So you may as well ditch the Ion engine then as you will get more power out the fuel source. Why use a fusion reactor to power a Ion drive when you can just use a fusion engine? ect

the answer is fuel economy. an ion engine uses fuel very efficiently. it can thus continue to burn for years at a time adding speed the whole time. Some ion engines like VASIMR can really get the speed on and still produce lots of thrust when it is desired. BTW it too is best powered by a fusion or nuclear reactor.

the idea would be to compensate for it's normally slow acceleration time by using a fusion reaction or something else to give it a better initial speed and then let the ion propulsion take over to continue accelerating.

a VASIMR like engine design would be "mutifuel" too. ion/plasma mode. or you could inject fusion, fission AM annihilation or even chemical exhaust products through the same thrust nozzle.

the NEXT ion probe has been thrusting for over 5 and 1/2 years now.

www.space.com...

that's 5 and 1/2 years of non stop acceleration. if it could burn until it reached it's maximum acceleration i think that would be about 90,000 miles per hour or maybe about three times Voyagers present speed. and that is a limitation due to the exhaust velocity. technology will certainly improve that velocity.

Voyager 1 is moving at 0.005705% the speed of light. Helios was even faster than that. but triple voyager speed is 0.017115 percent light speed. that's about how fast the New Horizons Pluto probe is travelling.

i cannot find a cite for a top speed of VASIMR other than this on ADASTRA's own website's FAQ: 3.

VASIMR® does not have a maximum speed. Any rocket engine will continue to accelerate its spacecraft until it runs out of fuel. On Earth, an airplane has a top speed because at some velocity the drag from air friction matches the maximum force that the airplane engines can apply. Space is a vacuum and hence there is no air friction to slow spacecraft down. VASIMR® thruster is very efficient with its fuel, so it can attain very high velocities before it runs out of fuel. For example, a 200 kW VASIMR® spacecraft designed to sling-shot a payload to Jupiter will attain a velocity relative to the Sun of ~50 km/s before releasing its payload and returning to Earth orbit.

essentially VASIMR has no top end other than that dictated by the practical constraints of fuel, power, and relativity.

VASIMR will be flown to and tested on the ISS later this year.

crazyewok

yorkshirelad


If you are using the anti-matter to react with matter as a controlled explosion you are still governed by newtonian mechanics ie exceptionally slow method of wandering around the galaxy. Your grandchildren would be dead before they reached one habitable planet.

NO you wouldnt.


It possible to get 50% light speed easy with antimatter and 90% has been declared possible.

That puts alot of nearby starts within a decade travel. At 90% you would get to alpha Centuri and Barnards star in 5 years! And to top it off due to time dillation it would feel alot quicker to those on board the ship.


So no you are wrong.

In regards to the 90% anti-matter. This is relating to the speed of the pions, the problem is that the nozzle would be less than 40% efficient, obviously meaning your ship wouldn't be flying much faster than 1/3rd the speed of light.

Thanks to Cern, newer simulations & calculations have been done. This has dropped the pions down to 80%, but has more than doubled the efficiency of the nozzle to over 80%. This would equate to a maximum exhaust velocity of 70% the speed of light.

Still good enough to explore nearby stars though but not very efficient given all the extra resources your ship would need possess to cater for human needs for x amount of years.

At 70%, for every day on board time dilation would still be under 1.5 days for those back on earth. Even at 90%, your still only talking 2.29 days on earth vs your 1 day on board the ship.

It is possible for humans to explore the Centauri system + one or 2 other nearby stars using non FTL propulsion but it's highly unlikely. Far more likely is that it will be robotic probes & we will all be looking on from Earth, the moon & mars with extrme envy. The simple truth is that humans won't be exploring the galaxy in generational ships for multiple reasons...at the end of the day it's simply too inefficient!

For me, the best non FTL method would be altering the Higgs Field. Further research into the Higgs Boson & ultimately the Higgs Field hopefully will allow this to happen.

We know that FTL (not even FTL, but extreme FTL speeds are needed to do any kind of meaningful exploration of our galaxy within the confines of a human lifespan), so should really be spending more time & money on this. It might prove to never be achievable to us but should be amongst the highest priorities compared to where priorities currently lie.

nope! at .9 c a trip to alpha proxima would take about 4.5 years ignoring acceleration/deacceleration times and the benefits of time dilation. such a trip is emmanently doable.

consider that the great explorers sometimes spend three years on their journeys. and they had to poop, puke and urinate in buckets or over the side of the ship, get scurvy and other diseases like that, contend with dissentery, cholera, plague, and other diseases in a cramped and dark wooden ship.

a star ship would have more room, better quarters, better restrooms, better food, better medical care and more entertainment.

the primary considerations after propulsion would be collision mitigation, developing a closed cycle life support system and having enough food and or aero-ponics and aquaculture tanks to stretch rations out. radiation protection would solve itself with a higher massed ship rather than the aluminium cans that astronauts currently use to get to space in.

a trip a .5 c would take 8.5 years.

and look at the distances between proxima,alpha kentarus and alpha centauri B. once you get to proxima you are just a few months away from the next star and after than a few more months to the third star.

you could do a manned visit to all three for the price and time for of one.

EDIT: by the way if your ship is 1.6 KM long you actually can use some of the pions for thrust as that is where they will decay into charged particles.

also it's 92 percent not 90 and that will change the time dialation thing a lot.