New efforts!

[Vee]

I think this convo achieved FTL a while ago  :P

[FloatingFatMan]

well.. you are the floating fat man after all hah.

Exactly!

[Mistress Urd]

Trying to go fast in interstellar terms is actually kind of an interesting topic, because there are a number of different barriers to going fast.

The first problem isn't "speed" per se, but rather acceleration.  It takes a lot of energy to accelerate - go faster - but to a first order approximation it doesn't take any energy to keep going faster.  So the problem isn't going 1% the speed of light, its figuring out how to accelerate to that speed in the first place.  And the problem is fuel.

Conventional rockets use fuel that they bring along with them.  That means the more fuel you have, the more fuel you have to expend energy to accelerate.  Eventually, you have a spaceship that is one big giant fuel tank and all of your rocket fuel is going towards trying to accelerate more rocket fuel.  There's actually an equation that operates here called the impulse function, but that's neither here nor there.  The problem is that its like trying to build a car that can drive a thousand laps around North America.  You can't bring enough gas to make the trip in your car, and if you make your car bigger you'll just need more gas.

The solution is to not have to bring the fuel with you.  If you could drive a bit, gas up the car, and continue on, you can drive an unlimited distance (at least until your car falls apart).  There are theoretical propulsion systems that work that way: the classic Bussard Ramjet and its brethren for example.  The idea is that interstellar space is not empty: there is a very tiny amount of gas floating in space.  You collect that gas as you travel, compress it, energize it with some energy source, and expel it as propulsion exhaust like a rocket, or rather like a ramjet.  Provided you can bring a suitable long-lasting energy source with you (or you can fuse the hydrogen atoms in space that make up a lot of that gas), you could use this to accelerate to very high speeds.  Much higher than 1% the speed of light.

The problem then becomes the fact that you are now traveling fast enough that "empty space" isn't so empty anymore.  Now, you're travelling fast enough for you're getting constantly pelted by dust grains and that same gas that you're using for fuel.  Eventually, you could sustain a high degree of friction in the form of cosmic radiation that is bombarding your ship.  You'd need to both protect yourself from it and also expend more energy to overcome the drag of interstellar space components.  Different designs yield different results but my guess is that interstellar friction becomes a serious problem before you get to 10% the speed of light.

At some point, assuming you're traveling in normal space and not using exotic technology, the cosmic microwave background becomes a problem.  The universe contains a radiation field that has an intrinsic temperature of about 3 degrees Kelvin - i.e. three degrees above absolute zero.  In other words, not really very noticeable.  But as you move faster, you will doppler shift that radiation to higher and higher energies.  At high enough speeds, that 3K radiation will become increasingly hot until eventually you are experiencing incredibly intense radiation coming from the direction you are heading towards.  Eventually that radiation will vaporize your spacecraft.

So, initially the problem is acceleration.  Then the problem becomes speed, and the friction associated with that speed.  And if you get past that, the problem will be the universe will eventually try to incinerate you.

Of course, you could always invent Alcubierre warp drives.  Those tend to protect you from all of that.  On the other hand, analysis seems to indicate they will likely sweep up and accelerate the interstellar medium in the direction of travel.  Meaning you won't be incinerated, but your destination could become extra-crispy two seconds after you arrive.

Well "comfortable acceleration" 1G (if you have live crew) and sooner or later you have to decelerate, I'm sure turning the ship around will be fun.

[Arcana]

sooner or later you have to decelerate

I'm sorry but no one specified a requirement to stop the ship at its destination.  You'll have to submit that request as a change order.

Once I turn on the Alcubierre drive, good luck delivering that change order.

[Tubbius]

All this talk of positrons just makes me miss City more.  :(

[umber]

I'm sorry but no one specified a requirement to stop the ship at its destination.  You'll have to submit that request as a change order.

Once I turn on the Alcubierre drive, good luck delivering that change order.

https://janvanderhaegen.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/what-the-customer-wanted.jpg

[Codewalker]

So you're primarily asking where a space-faring species is going to find carbon and hydrogen.  The answer is:  "If they throw a rock, they'll hit some."  If they want those specific chemicals, they can assemble them to order.

The laws of thermodynamics say that the amount of energy you have to spend to synthesize chemical compounds (including hydrocarbons) is greater than the amount you can extract by burning or otherwise reacting it.

Synthesizing chemicals is still a viable method for storing energy for transport (with some loss, as no process is 100% efficient), but you have to get that energy from somewhere.

[Codewalker]

Of course, you could always invent Alcubierre warp drives.  Those tend to protect you from all of that.  On the other hand, analysis seems to indicate they will likely sweep up and accelerate the interstellar medium in the direction of travel.  Meaning you won't be incinerated, but your destination could become extra-crispy two seconds after you arrive.

They also depend on a laundry list of things that probably don't exist. The most obvious of which is exotic matter having a negative mass. That's something that can theoretically work according to the math alone, but there isn't a shred of observational evidence that it actually can exist, much less how it would be produced.

As you alluded to in a later post, there's also the issue of getting it out in front of your ship at the speed of light before you have a functional FTL drive (chicken and egg problem), and of having to break causality in order to communicate the instructions to stop.

I honestly think we're more likely to see quantum vacuum thrusters than Alcubierre drive. At least those have some possible evidence in support, even if its validity is suspect. They're not as exciting though, because even if they completely solve the propellant problem, they still need a ton of energy to run and wouldn't produce much thrust.

[Ohioknight]

They also depend on a laundry list of things that probably don't exist. The most obvious of which is exotic matter having a negative mass. That's something that can theoretically work according to the math alone, but there isn't a shred of observational evidence that it actually can exist, much less how it would be produced.

As you alluded to in a later post, there's also the issue of getting it out in front of your ship at the speed of light before you have a functional FTL drive (chicken and egg problem), and of having to break causality in order to communicate the instructions to stop.

I honestly think we're more likely to see quantum vacuum thrusters than Alcubierre drive. At least those have some possible evidence in support, even if its validity is suspect. They're not as exciting though, because even if they completely solve the propellant problem, they still need a ton of energy to run and wouldn't produce much thrust.

The starting and stopping and control problems are old issues that have been answered to the same degree that the system has been described originally (you can be causally connected to the front of the system from the "ship" by having a more complex shape to the metric)

The causality issue is "arguably" (maybe?) dealt with by Feynman's "sum over histories" -- though that would create very weird behavior by the universe from our perspective (essentially the most likely thing to resolve the collapse state becomes what's "real" -- quantum probabilities seem to start to get different results on a macro scale and physics seems to be "directed" for result -- this is the "Editing" solution to FTL causality issues)

The most intriguing thing that makes this still an interesting idea is the discovery of Dark Energy -- which seems to function as a negative mass -- the possibility of controlling dark energy to produce negative mass effects will need to wait for our understanding what it is. 

Juggling quantum singularities will be fairly trivial compared to getting an Alcubierre drive to work, so I think we can wait til we have a micro-black hole powered infrastructure before we really need to worry about it.

[Pengy]

I'm sorry but no one specified a requirement to stop the ship at its destination.  You'll have to submit that request as a change order.

Once I turn on the Alcubierre drive, good luck delivering that change order.

Tau 4√-1?

[CrimsonCapacitor]

I honestly think we're more likely to see quantum vacuum thrusters than Alcubierre drive. At least those have some possible evidence in support, even if its validity is suspect. They're not as exciting though, because even if they completely solve the propellant problem, they still need a ton of energy to run and wouldn't produce much thrust.

Two words:

Improbability Drive.

Anyone have a strong cup of tea?

[ivanhedgehog]

Tau 4√-1?

bugs bunny's emergency brake.  always effective


not the one made by Acme

[Joshex]

At this point it's obvious you're either just trying to wind people up by spewing crackpot gibberish at them or you take the same approach to science that Kanye West takes to literature.

Actually, science is about explaining observations or looking for an explanation for observations, they may sound the same but they aren't, they are as different as FPS (first person shooter) to TPS (third person shooter).

Modern science has stopped following this pattern concretely, instead when they can't explain something through logic they turn to math. Math is good for finding values, but as an explanatory language it's nothing more than an opinion where the output of such is only as detailed as the input variables designed by the mathematician; in simple terms this means "An equation used to explain science is only as good as the knowledge of it's writer." and considering that the writer didn't have a clue to start with (which was the reason they chose to make the equation in the first place) We can always assume they are more than likely missing something or completely wrong all together.

But complex equations in small print that take up the wall of a whole room tend to seem more believable than a few sentences of logic that explain everything.

To further answer your question directly I will imply my studies in this comment; I have corrected mistakes in science text books before, well enough in fact that the books were republished that year due to the problem, needless to say I got A's in science and helped others with their work. I admit it helped a lot that my father and grandfather were engineers.

When protons decay into neutral pions and positrons, the positron will curl in the opposite direction from an electron towards the magnetic pole of the magnetic field induced by the electric charge separation which would imply an anti-gravity force interacting with the coupled plasma in the ionosphere demagnetizing the inducted field loops in the magma without penetrating the ferro-crystalline core.  This poses limits on meson generation in chondritic coupled paramagnetic lattices of sufficient gravitational potential embedded within a dipole environment.

Of course, it's a polar interaction, with every negative there is a positive, However to assume this creates anti-gravity would be incorrect, it pushes away from an object traveling towards 'down' but that doesn't mean up because of our 3-Dimensional universe. to be honest it's like climbing a falling ladder. Pions and positrons travel around the core in the opposite direction from an electron, However as we know protons carry no charge (No offense to our armored friend from CoX) with no charge their components also have no charge, and this means they wont effect the magnetic charge of the core.

The only way to actually create a 'G-diffuser' is to negate the source of pull which is the magnetic core; this requires electromagnetism, our magnetic field stops where the electromagnetic field arcs, this observation indicates that electromagnetism is incompatible with magnetism, they push from each-other. thus creating an electromagnetic field of a strength greater than the conductivity of the mass of the object it's connected to underneath the object or around it would cause it to rocket into outer-space and become a orbiting object. and no, electromagnetic fields are not magnetic or electric they are both and yet neither.

to be quite honest man doesn't know how to or have any machines that can generate such a field, yet we are standing on one right now.

there is the biggest failure of man's science, scratch that, second or third failure of man's science right after not being able to explain where life comes from or goes.

[LaughingAlex]

I think i'll just watch someone play a stupid character in the fallout games...or maybe roll one in new vegas.

Hey i've been reading this conversation and all, and I have to hand it to ya guys this one is an interesting one to see but I often see alot of science going on tv all the time, go figure :).

[JanessaVR]

The laws of thermodynamics say that the amount of energy you have to spend to synthesize chemical compounds (including hydrocarbons) is greater than the amount you can extract by burning or otherwise reacting it.

Synthesizing chemicals is still a viable method for storing energy for transport (with some loss, as no process is 100% efficient), but you have to get that energy from somewhere.

True enough, but if you're in a star system and not too far out, solar energy is free.  As to why a space-faring civilization would want coal or petroleum, I have no idea - maybe as decorations on their coffee tables?  Museum exhibits of ye olden days?

As to the how, this little demo vid from a few years back is an interesting conceptual overview:

Productive Nanosystems, from Molecules to Superproducts

[RGladden]

  As to why a space-faring civilization would want coal or petroleum, I have no idea -

Chuggachuggachuggachugga...WHOOOOOWOOOOOOOO....chuggachuggachugga

"Saucer leaving on Track 5 for Anaheim, Azouza, and Kukamonga...."

[Arcana]

They also depend on a laundry list of things that probably don't exist.

Alcubierre drives fall under the category of "so advanced we can't even assess their plausibility."  That's like two chiselers at Karnak discussing the plausibility of the iPhone.  We probably won't get there, but the theoretical framework that would tell us with certainty lies *just* close enough in the general vicinity to be tantalizing.

[Arcana]

However as we know protons carry no charge

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=youneedawhoopin.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F09%2FScreen-shot-2013-09-25-at-9.46.55-PM-300x194.png

Bzzzz.

[Arcana]

Modern science has stopped following this pattern concretely, instead when they can't explain something through logic they turn to math. Math is good for finding values, but as an explanatory language it's nothing more than an opinion where the output of such is only as detailed as the input variables designed by the mathematician; in simple terms this means "An equation used to explain science is only as good as the knowledge of it's writer." and considering that the writer didn't have a clue to start with (which was the reason they chose to make the equation in the first place) We can always assume they are more than likely missing something or completely wrong all together.

1.  Equations have meaning:

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=upload.wikimedia.org%2Fmath%2F0%2F4%2F5%2F0452024f7afd12aca8b1f3aa0597b79e.png

"Inertial observers measure the speed of light as a constant while observing spacetime coordinates differently based on their relative motion."

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=upload.wikimedia.org%2Fmath%2F3%2Ff%2F5%2F3f50fd206f2fe543a6a8a3e687cf74c3.png

"Gravity is an effect of spacetime geometry determined by its metric tensor influenced by the mass density configuration."

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=scienceworld.wolfram.com%2Fphysics%2Fbimg59.gif

"Black holes have a temperature associated with their entropy."


2.  Science consistently pursues logical explanations for why observed phenomena match predictive formulae:

"What physical model can explain the Lichnerowicz-Weitzenböck superconductivity formula"


3.  Much of modern science isn't based on fitting mathematical formulae like theoretical physics:

Nobel prize in physics goes to discoverers of blue leds


https://images.weserv.nl/?url=photos1.blogger.com%2Fblogger%2F6604%2F1037%2F1600%2Fredx.jpg

Bzzzzzzz.

[Arcana]

electromagnetic fields are not magnetic or electric they are both and yet neither

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=pad2.whstatic.com%2Fimages%2Fthumb%2F7%2F73%2FCreate-a-Magnet-With-a-Wire-and-a-Nail-Step-5.jpg%2F670px-Create-a-Magnet-With-a-Wire-and-a-Nail-Step-5.jpg


https://images.weserv.nl/?url=cdn2-b.examiner.com%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fstyles%2Fimage_content_width%2Fhash%2Fc3%2Fdd%2Fsteve-harvey-family-feud.jpg

https://i.warosu.org/data/biz/img/0002/54/1396395679803.jpg

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=2.bp.blogspot.com%2F-oZhL8AJL5Lg%2FUQDD-6pEqlI%2FAAAAAAAAHnE%2FEOgfoZTnaEM%2Fs1600%2Fsteve2.gif