New efforts!

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

From the viewpoint of people outside the collider the person in the collider would strike the collider walls at 0.99c and vaporize themselves, the collider walls, the collider, the collider complex, the people outside the collider, and probably a substantial amount of the country the collider was located in, in much less time than it takes for human eyes to register seeing anything.

Particle colliders use magnets to steer particle streams.  They are unlikely to work on people nearly as well.

i was presuming the person was in some sort of capsule or other container which the collider would act on because otherwise they'd have to be in a vacuum and die very quickly. i mean that's the least of the logistical problems with the collider scenario considering the power requirements to keep a passenger looping at that speed for centuries is moderately absurd. Presumably the collider is orbiting a star in space somewhere with a Dyson swarm to power it and some sort of self-repairing maintenance system. Also, isn't there a bit about mass increasing as an object's velocity approaches c?

[LadyVamp]

There's also the question of what that much force would do to a human body if it could be exerted.  I think it would probably turn you into a liquified fruit roll up, but I don't want to solve the relativistic momentum equation to be certain.  "Some form of goo" would probably be in the general ballpark.

If I'm remembering correctly, the kinetic energy possessed by our hypothetical human being travelling at 0.99c (the velocity at which they would experience about 7 times time dilation) is about 6.1 mc^2.  In other words, it is about six times the energy you'd get if you were to convert their entire mass into energy.  Let's say they weigh about 70 kg (154 lb).  That would be ... about 4 * 10 ^ 19 joules.  A megaton of TNT releases about 4 * 10^15 joules.  So this would be ten thousand megatons of energy.  This is I think approximately the total yield of all the nuclear weapons ever created by all the nuclear powers combined.  The Chicxulub asteroid impact, for reference, delivered about ten thousand times more energy than that.

So one megaton bomb times ten thousand equals Speedy.  Speedy times ten thousand equals mass extinction.

Quite interesting.  I was, of course, kidding about bulking up on iron.  It's likely we will eventually figure out how to go that fast without the problems we'd have today.  I'd say we have a lot of challenges to solve before we get there.  Besides, who would want to be put into a super collider?

[LadyVamp]

Hey Guys!  We're about to break 1300 pages.

[Vee]

Hey Guys!  We're about to break 1300 pages.

If you count stuff that's been deleted or moved we've had a lot more than 1300 broken pages :P

[Tubbius]

Oooooo, 1299!

[Abraxus]

The interesting thing is, even if one was to just skim those (almost) 1,300 pages; the actual subjects discussed under a topic created to discuss the efforts to bring back our game, are as varied as they are entertaining.

[Graydar]

I've always wanted to learn C++, apparently SEGS is written using that. Think it'd be a good idea to study the C++ in SEGS or would it drive me insane?

[Arcana]

I've always wanted to learn C++, apparently SEGS is written using that. Think it'd be a good idea to study the C++ in SEGS or would it drive me insane?

Are those mutually exclusive?

[eabrace]

Are those mutually exclusive?

Yeah, are we talking '|' or '^'?

[Arcana]

Quite interesting.  I was, of course, kidding about bulking up on iron.  It's likely we will eventually figure out how to go that fast without the problems we'd have today.  I'd say we have a lot of challenges to solve before we get there.  Besides, who would want to be put into a super collider?

The problem isn't going fast per se.  Board a rocket ship capable of accelerating at a leisurely 1g of acceleration (equivalent to Earth's gravity at sea level) and you'd get to 0.99c in a relatively short amount of time (about a year I think).  The problem is trying to do so in the small space an Earth-bound collider would occupy.  You have to eventually turn to stay inside the collider, and that means accelerating, and that acceleration would be astronomically high.  And if it is insufficient, actually colliding with something at that relative speed would be spectacular. 

There's a project underway to engineer nano probes capable of being accelerated to about 0.2 c and being sent to nearby stars like Alpha Centauri on timescales of just twenty years.  That's actually amazingly just slightly outside the reach of current technology, but at the moment there is no intractable technological problem anyone's identified that won't be solvable within the next couple of decades.  Someone alive day is likely to be alive when the first human space probe actually reaches another planet in another solar system.  Outside of inventing warp drive, I didn't think that would happen in my lifetime.  There's now a 50/50 chance it might.

[Arcana]

i was presuming the person was in some sort of capsule or other container which the collider would act on because otherwise they'd have to be in a vacuum and die very quickly. i mean that's the least of the logistical problems with the collider scenario considering the power requirements to keep a passenger looping at that speed for centuries is moderately absurd. Presumably the collider is orbiting a star in space somewhere with a Dyson swarm to power it and some sort of self-repairing maintenance system. Also, isn't there a bit about mass increasing as an object's velocity approaches c?

Mass is also lorentzian, so someone experiencing 7x time dilation is also experiencing 7x mass increase.

The Lorentz factor is 1 / (sqrt (1 - (v/c)^2)).  It looks a little ugly, but let's call it L.  Interestingly if you want to calculate the relativistic kinetic energy of a high speed particle you might think you need to start with the kinetic energy equation - E = 1/2 mv^2 - and then try to figure out what the mass is for that relativistic speed.  Actually, you don't.  According to Einstein, relativistic kinetic energy is actually E = mc^2 * (L - 1) where L is the lorentz factor above.  For mathy reasons (anyone who knows taylor expansion can derive the first order approximation of the lorentz factor) when v is very small, this formula is approximately mc^2 (1 + 1/2 v^2/c^2) - mc^2 = 1/2 mv^2.  In other words, the classical kinetic energy equation.

But if you know the lorentz factor, the quickie shortcut is this: in a situation where you are moving fast enough that time is running 7x slower, your kinetic energy is going to be E = mc^2(L-1) = mc^2(7-1) = mc^2 * 6.  You don't need to do all the extra homework to calculate relativistic mass change etc.  The relativistic kinetic energy equation takes that all into account.

One of the strangest things about relativistic physics, at least to me, is how almost beautifully the complex relativistic equations almost "coincidentally" match the classical ones for low velocities.  When you do the math on paper, it almost seems like mathematics itself is conspiring to make the one look like the other magically, even though they look so different at a glance.

[Tubbius]

Someone alive day is likely to be alive when the first human space probe actually reaches another planet in another solar system.  Outside of inventing warp drive, I didn't think that would happen in my lifetime.  There's now a 50/50 chance it might.

Arcana is going to invent warp drive?  :O

[Kelltick]

Arcana is going to invent warp drive?  :O

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB2yqeD0Nus

[pinballdave]

I believe that cheap plentiful energy from cold fusion should be higher priority than warp drive.

[Fireheart]

Well, obviously.  You're gonna need that energy to power the drive... Or a mighty big space-hamster.

Be Well!
Fireheart

[Twisted Toon]

Well, obviously.  You're gonna need that energy to power the drive... Or a mighty big space-hamster.

Be Well!
Fireheart

You mean to tell me that a miniature giant space hamster won't do?

Minsk will be do unhappy. And so will Boo.

[Arcana]

Arcana is going to invent warp drive?  :O

I believe that cheap plentiful energy from cold fusion should be higher priority than warp drive.

I meant to say that outside of someone inventing a technological miracle, I didn't think I would live to see humans actually visit another solar system even with space probes.

But it brings up an interesting point.  Why did I think it was even likely that a giant leap in propulsion technology like warp drive might just magically materialize?  Well, we see huge leaps in technology all the time.  Consider the technological progress of the last twenty years.  We have smartphones today that would have been laughably science fiction just a few decades ago.  And smartphones contain multiple giant leaps in technology.  Battery technology is massively better.  Computing technology is massively better.  Communications technology is massively better.  A lot of it is built upon the internet which developed from nothing in my adult lifetime to become practically all-pervasive.

Flat screen TVs have completely replaced CRT televisions and are better and cheaper in every way.  We have robotic cars that are coming close to replacing human drivers.  The average consumer can take themselves off the energy grid with solar panels, battery storage, and emergency generators.  Sequencing DNA has gone from something that took specialized research labs literally billions of dollars to do to something mail order services can do for a hundred bucks.  We're measuring gravitational waves. 

Why smartphones that make everything in Star Trek look absolutely quaint, but no warp drive?  Besides the obvious technological challenges, I've come to realize that technology isn't developed in a vacuum.  The smartphone wasn't invented.  It was crafted from an enormous surrounding technological ecosystem that itself is composed of large numbers of other technological innovations applying positive and negative feedback to each other.  In my opinion, the iPhone - and I mean literally the iPhone, not the smartphone in general - is the singularly most influential technological innovation of the last fifty years.  And that's because it wasn't just a product, it created its own weather system, its own technological ecosystem, and it was a huge one.  Its the iPhone that validated the smartphone concept: it showed other companies how make money off the idea, and it generated a lot of interest in improving the technology that went into smartphones.  With a huge smartphone market there was greater incentive to develop better, low power computing.  There was huge incentive to develop better battery technology.  Better battery technology doesn't just help smartphones, it helps electric cars, it helps home power backup systems, it helps computer UPSs.  Remember when UPSs weighed a ton?  Now they way a couple pounds.

Smartphones don't just happen because there's money to be made.  That's obvious.  Its also because there's money to be made in making the processors that go into smartphones, the batteries, the cameras, the screens, the cases, the wifi hotspots they use, the applications they run.  There are enormous incentives everywhere to propel smartphone technology forward.  And much of that technology is multipurpose.  Smartphones consume internet usage.  That furthers development into new ways to create internet content for smartphones to consume.  Some of that ends up in other hands besides smartphones.

There's this constellation of computing technology, communications technology, power technology, materials science that all keeps self-reinforcing.  And because there's so much incentives, so much money to be made, so much interest in the fields, it draws lots and lots of smart people to work in all of them.  That's why we have gigantic flat screen TVs that cost less than CRT tvs that used to be a quarter the size and ten times the weight.  That's why our kids are watching high definition Netflix in the back of our electric cars.  But no warp drive.

That might be because warp drive is impossible.  But its also clear to me that there's no way to get there from here even if it was possible.  Where's the infrastructure that's going to create the things you need before you get to warp drive.  You can't just magic warp drive into existence any more than you could have magicked an iPhone into existence thirty years ago.  There's no amount of smart and hard work that can do that.  Even if you sent a real iPhone back thirty years ago in a time machine the world of 1986 couldn't do anything with it, and couldn't replicate it at any price.

In Star Trek First Contact Zephram Cochrane admits to the Enterprise crew that he only invented warp drive to make money, to get rich.  That's an acknowledgement that in fact that's often why technological innovation happens.  But what I think is unrealistic is that it doesn't really explain how Cochrane thought he was going to get rich with warp drive.  Who was going to pay him anything for it?  What was warp drive worth to post-WW3 Earth?  Pinballdave is right: energy production is the higher priority.  Not just for altruistic reasons.  Cheap, clean, inexhaustible energy generation is worth an almost unlimited amount.  It is one of the cornerstones of our current technological society.  What's more, hundreds of thousands of people are working in a hundred different fields all surrounding the field of energy generation.  It is so much more likely that a smart person might be able to make a key quantum leap forward while building on the work of millions of man-hours of scientific and technological research to make something useful.  A way to generate clean, unlimited, inexhaustible energy wouldn't just be attractive to us today, it would have been potentially even more attractive to the rebuilding post-WW3 Earth of Star Trek.  Warp drive is an aspirational luxury, and if it wasn't for the lucky happenstance of the Vulcans passing by that might have been all it ended up being.

It is not Trek canon per se (as far as I know) but if the warp drive was just a demonstrational platform, if it was actually intended to prove to people that the warp engine, which required huge amounts of energy to power, demonstrated that Zephram Cochran had simultaneously discovered a theoretical way to put that same power to more conventional uses, then *that* might have been worth a lot of money.  Maybe, ironically, the warp drive was the easy part that Cochran figured out.  The hard part, but the part that he thought would make himself rich, was that he believed there was a way to tap that warp energy and turn the warp engine into a warp generator.  With free unlimited warp generator energy powering post-war reconstruction, then space flight, then solar system resource mining, Earth could have pulled itself out of nuclear devastation in less than a century, with Cochran becoming astronomically rich in the process.

[Heroette]

Can I be the first post on page 1300?

[Heroette]

Rats, missed.

[Heroette]

hmm, going to try again.  LOL.