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The Warp Drive

gncxx said:
Mythopoeika said:
All we need now is for a man named Zefram Cochrane to offer to fly the thing...
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We'll have to finish off the Third World War first.
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Lets get started! It was an eugenic war wasn't it? Well I say farmers are a degenerate sub-species!
 
Vid and images at link.

NASA scientist designs faster-than-light spacecraft (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

A NASA scientist and a renowned graphic artist have teamed up to produce designs for a vessel that may someday allow human beings to travel the universe and beyond in a first-of-its-kind warp drive spacecraft faster than light.

Impressive illustrations of the work-in-progress — NASA’s New Design for a Warp Drive Ship” — made their way to the web this week while NASA researcher Harold White and Dutch artist Mark Rademaker continue to fine-tune the concept behind a type of craft that may actually be able to travel faster than the speed of light.

Image by Mark Rademaker / flickr.comImage by Mark Rademaker / flickr.com

White, a physicist for the aeronautics administration that has been studying a faster-than-light propulsion concept for years, has previously gone public with his research concerning a craft capable of that sort of travel. As far back as 2011, in fact, he attracted the attention of other scientists by publishing a report that set out to prove the feasibility of the F-T-L propulsion concept. Now for the first time, his cohort has come up with designs that begin to show the sort of spacecraft they’re striving to create. ...
http://rt.com/usa/165564-nasa-ixs-enterprise-white/
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Looks surprisingly like an FTL spaceship design I painted over 30 years ago.
I'm guessing that the rings on that baby are for throwing out a huge deflective magnetic field...
 
Mythopoeika said:
Looks surprisingly like an FTL spaceship design I painted over 30 years ago.
I'm guessing that the rings on that baby are for throwing out a huge deflective magnetic field...
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According to current theory, the only way you could travel faster than light, would be to warp space in front and behind your craft, using the sort of energies that would make a black hole blush.

I suspect that the rings are intended to represent an as yet undiscovered form of space warping field drive.
 
That spacecraft pic is just a plausible rendering of what an FTL spacecraft might look like, if warp drive technology actually existed (and worked as advertised).
It's a 'most likely design' concept pic.
 
The artist has worked together with Harold White of NASA to produce a hi-concept image of what a starship would look like if it used White's hypothetical warp drive, and if White's warp drive concept worked.
White has developed a very sensitive testing apparatus that is supposed to be able to detect any signs of space-time warping.
http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/team/harold-white/

He periodically posts optimistic results, but they all still seem to fall into the grey area that could just as easily be explained by measurement error. It is nice that someone at NASA is looking into this, but it is fairly likely that nothing, or maybe very little, will come of it. Maybe the spacewarp effect will not be able to drive vessels to Alpha Centauri, but it could be useful in ways we don't anticipate; just like the barcode scanner was an unanticipated application of coherent laser technology.
 
http://jalopnik.com/the-painful-truth-a ... 1590330763
The Painful Truth About NASA's Warp Drive Spaceship From A Physicist
32,268

Jason Torchinsky


I'll be honest — this is not the post I wanted to write. When NASA released their new renders of a hypothetical future faster-than-light spaceship, I wanted to believe that such a craft was mere decades away from reality. Then I made the mistake of asking someone much smarter than me about it.

In 2012, NASA physicist Harold White revealed that he and a team were working on a design for a… Read on io9.?com

That much smarter someone is noted physicist Sean Carroll, a theoretical cosmologist specializing in dark energy and general relativity. He's the sort of guy who knows about this kind of faster-than-light travel and warp bubbles and all this sort of exciting stuff. He's a scientist immersed in this world, and as such he's not going to sugarcoat the reality of the universe as it's currently understood just because I want to join Starfleet.

So, when I asked him for his take on just how feasible this warp-drive ship is, here's how he responded:

The Alcubierre warp drive is a very interesting arena for thought experiments to try to better understand general relativity and quantum field theory, but it should give you zero hope for actually building a spaceship some day. Some of the many problems are discussed on Wikipedia:



In short, it requires negative energy densities, which can't be strictly disproven but are probably unrealistic; the total amount of energy is likely to be equivalent to the mass-energy of an astrophysical body; and the gravitational fields produced would likely rip any ship to shreds. My personal estimate of the likelihood we will ever be able to build a "warp drive" is much less than 1%. And the chances it will happen in the next hundred years I would put at less than 0.01%.

But they are very pretty pictures! Would look great in a movie.23

Undaunted, I asked him if these assessments were taking into account the work that Harold White had done that dramatically reduced the energy requirements of the Alcubierre Drive. It looks like they weren't, which gave me some hope, until I read the rest of his response:

... note that "the mass-energy equivalent" of 700 kg (which I don't believe for a second, I suspect you need much more) essentially means you need 350 kg of antimatter to combine with 350 kg of matter. From here:

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=22962

they note that the current cost of producing 1 gram of antimatter is about $100 trillion. But, with completely unsupported optimistic estimates, you might get that down to $10 billion per gram. So, with the most wild-eyed pie-in-the-sky estimates, fuel alone will cost you $3.5 quadrillion — roughly the entire economic output of the world for forty years. Good luck with the Kickstarter!45

Okay. So maybe we all are getting a little more worked up than is merited over these spaceship renders. Forty years of global economic output is pretty expensive, even if I can talk them down, say, 10% or so.

This blast of cruel, scientific reality did depress me for a bit, until I realized something. Something that Sean had not actually said. For being as pessimistic and coldly rational as he was — and as his role as a scientist all but demands him to be — it's worth noting that he never actually said that this sort of faster-than-light travel is impossible.

As far as I know, this may be the first point in history where that statement is true: a coldly scientific assessment of a faster-than-light spaceship did not meet with immediate dismissal as an impossibility. Sure, he pegged the odds of it happening at under 1%, but that's 100% more possibility than we've ever had before.6

And while I suspect that this is the exact opposite take-away that Sean was going for, I'm actually strangely encouraged about the future (admittedly very very long-term) of a project like this. I respect the hell out of Sean Carroll, and I have no reason to believe his assessments are anything but sound. That's why the fact that buried in all those reasons why this ship is currently impractical, that little nugget that suggests it's theoretically possible is so tantalizing.


Sure, we can't do it now, but if humanity has proven anything it's that given enough time, we tend to make impossible-seeming things real. Hand a Victorian engineer a shiny disc and tell him that on that disc, stored in tiny pits and peaks read with a beam of coherent light, are hundreds of songs and pictures and books, and he'll look at you like you're insane. Then tell him how we've already gone beyond that technology and people will throw away those discs like they were spoiled mutton.7

So, despite Sean's very reasonable and rational criticisms, I hope NASA continues their research into Alcubierre/White drives. I hope they take these issues into account, think about them, work, imagine, develop, design, and eventually, whenever that is, figure out a solution.

Sean's probably correct, at least right now. But I'm still hopeful for the day he may be wrong. At least about this.
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Newly emergent theoretical research suggests a FTL drive / propulsion scheme might be possible by exploiting solitons - an approach that would avoid the problems of dealing with "negative energy."
Faster-Than-Light Travel Is Possible Within Einstein's Physics, Astrophysicist Shows
PETER DOCKRILL
11 MARCH 2021

For decades, we've dreamed of visiting other star systems. There's just one problem – they're so far away, with conventional spaceflight it would take tens of thousands of years to reach even the closest one.

Physicists are not the kind of people who give up easily, though. Give them an impossible dream, and they'll give you an incredible, hypothetical way of making it a reality. Maybe.

In a new study by physicist Erik Lentz from Göttingen University in Germany, we may have a viable solution to the dilemma, and it's one that could turn out to be more feasible than other would-be warp drives. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/faster...ithin-einstein-s-physics-astrophysicist-shows
 
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Seems an awful lot of bother re-inventing the last 100 years of Physics just to get a FTL Drive. The US Midwest get hundreds if not thousands of extraterrestrial visitations a year - surely we could come to an arrangement to cadge a lift to the next Star system or maybe a few hints to nudge research in the right direction.
 
This is most exciting!
I have to say, regardless of the maths reworking of the Alcubierre theory, it was the detection of gravity waves that really brought home to me that a warp drive is possible. A gravity wave, irrespective of being made by a blackhole collision, or whatever, the basic phenomenon on which a warp drive would work: a compression of spacetime on which a ship could potentially surf across a distance.

This development is just more fuel to the fire of imagination that might just see us one day head out on a short jaunt to Proxima Centaury!
 
Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the USSR on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program. It orbited for three weeks before its batteries ran out.
Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin formed the American crew that landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969

Ignoring the V2 flights of the 1940s and other developments, it only took us pathetic humans a mere 12 years from getting something orbiting the planet to landing humans on the moon.
Once a technology is discovered the further developments advance at a rapid pace.
 
Woah. It may actually be possible! Anton's pronunciation of 'Alcubierre' is a bit off.
 
Harold White was wrong about the EM drive, so this doesn't fill me with confidence. But even a tiny warp bubble could be potentially useful.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Anton's pronunciation of 'Alcubierre' is a bit off.
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I like Anton.
But his pronunciation of lots of things are way off.
Probably due to English not being his first language.
We can't criticise really - how many of us speak fluent Russian? (I'm assuming he's Russian)
 
Trevp666 said:
I like Anton.
But his pronunciation of lots of things are way off.
Probably due to English not being his first language.
We can't criticise really - how many of us speak fluent Russian? (I'm assuming he's Russian)
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I'm not at all criticising his Russian accent. He's normally very good, it's just that he mangled that name a bit - probably because he is translating from a cyrillic alphabet to a western alphabet and then trying to work out the phonetics.
 
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