While the concepts outlined in the team’s new paper pave the way toward making travel through space nearing light speed a reality, constructing such an engine is likely something that will only be feasible far in the future, as the present state of technology would not allow for such a device.
… by an astounding margin.
The paper is paywalled and I am too lazy to look for a free/open link, but the shown graphs indicate many squared meters of energy concentrations of 1 - 10 * 10^39 joules.
The entire energy output of the Sun, in a year, is around 10^34 joules. 6.6 * 10^39 joules is apparently the estimated total mass energy of the Moon, if you basically perfectly E = mc^2 transformed it into pure energy.
In 2010 the estimated total energy consumption of humans on Earth was 5 * 10^20 joules.
So we just need something around ten billion * ten billion more joules than that, presumably generated by something i dont know, naval frigate sized?
Yeah. Faaaaaar off indeed.
Like Hippocrates telling people that a new breakthrough in medicine could allow bones to be seen in detail without cutting into flesh
So if we could completely annihilate a mass equivalent to the Moon with an equal mass of antimatter and capture all of the energy with no losses to heat and without ripping the device apart, that would work?
No problem, we’ll have it done next week.
Thanks! =D
Nobody can be excited for anything. Whether or not it’s possible in even the next century or two, I still think it’s awesome that there are dreamers out there trying to make at least a solid theoretical plan on how to accomplish stuff like this. I also think people are discounting the exponential rate of knowledge we accumulate every generation. It might be awhile, but unless society collapses, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have interstellar propulsion like this in the next couple centuries. Hell, I expect to see a thriving commercial space industry in the next 50-some-odd years within our solar system.
This article is crap. Repeats everything 3 times and explains nothing.
At least they linked the study but since
The solution involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric.
doesn’t mention How they do this, i guess this is a purely mathematic experiment?
Well…yeah. No warp drive is possible with current tech, so it’s all theoretical. We have no capabilities at all ever mentioned in these articles, but it’s still interesting.
What i meant: physics has a lot of mathematic nuts. Some take it a bit too far and think, just because you can make a formula that works out, it proves anything, instead of mathe describing the logic. As an example: some thesis at ETH Zurich “proved” the existence of god by having some set parameters and assumtions (which were a classical logical fallacy). I think this might be similiar.
For the alcubiere warp drive, the logical explanation is: it warps space before the ship and back behind it, so it basically makes the distance for the ship shorter. I expected a similiar explanation for this. But it looks more like people played mathematics here.
The physics behind the Alcubierre is all theoretical, and when you’re dealing with Theoretical Physics of any kind, there are assumptions in the mix until you have provable theories.
Think of it like a logic chain: “If Z is possible, then Y is possible, and so is X, but that’s all supposing we can make W happen first…”
So you can have different pieces of the puzzle provable by math alone, but not all the pieces will together without real world experimentation perhaps. Like how know that Fusion power is possible (we can observe it mathematically and in the Sun), but we basically have to take a bunch of blind leaps to actually make it happen.
Do we have any plan for how to avoid colliding with asteroids or other things while traveling so fast?
Most of space is empty, analysis of the path beforehand and a structure that can withstand the smaller objects is really all that’s necessary. But those are just as theoretical as this engine.
Problem is that asteroids are very hard to see, as they are both cold and dark, meaning they don’t stand out against space very much at all. And even a micrometeoroid poses a risk even when traveling at low velocities (e.g. someone orbiting earth, the meteoroid itself has a relatively high velocity). Getting hit by a 1cm meteoroid at warp 1 would be devastating.
Yes, as I said theoretically. If/by the time this heavily theoretical engine comes to fruition there will probably be ways to detect asteroids better than we have now. Also materials/structural design that are better than what we have now for sustaining the smaller hits. Maybe quantum prediction scanning, maybe a forcefield. Who knows by then.
Not an issue if you aren’t actually traversing the whole space but rather bending space to get you where you want to go.
Well, I’ll be long dead before we get a Farnsworth drive running off dark matter.
Just a thought. If you just have a preliminary motion and your travel velocity is due to warping of space, wouldn’t objects caught in your warp field just move with you till they exit?
Simple, the galaxy is pretty much flat so go up, turn 90°, travel until you’re over your destination, go down, same as an helicopter!
This sounds dumb but honestly is it really a bad plan? I say we go forth on project hyperspeed helicopter
We can’t even travel that fast to even start theorizing how that would work 🤣
From previous reading on the subject, I believe the main issue with this style of transport would be slowing down so as not to cause a massive explosion of forward moving energy at the barrier of the warp bubble which would build up during travel.
Deflector dish like in Star Trek?
I’m almost 50 years old and I’ve been hearing about this for almost 50 years.
Curse that Gene Roddenberry!
The fact that you can even be indignant about not having the technology to travel to another solar system developed within a single lifetime is pretty amazing considering it took us billions of years to get here.
I doubt we’ll survive long enough to make a real go at it. And somehow if we do, the rich will just ruin it for everyone anyway.
We’ll just use it to make warp drive missiles and torpedos to kill each other quicker with.
Yeah but haven’t we already mastered constant-velocity subliminal travel?
