FTL travel

[bdewoody]

In scifi stories there tends to be about four different types of ftl drives

Star Trek's warp drive where the starship generates a warp bubble around the ship and it moves along at speeds up to warp 9.9 or so. They spend a lot of their time at warp something.

Babylon 5 where they have stargates and hyperspace unless you have a big honkin ship that can generate it's own stargate. Here it's uncertain how much time was spent in hyperspace when getting from one planet to another.

Battlestar Galactica where they have a ftl generator that after spooling up the ship makes a jump to a specific set of coordinates where they must wait until it spools up again. Almost no time elapses during the jump

Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis where they have a stargate at each end and virtually no time is spent in the connecting wormhole. I'm not sure how stargate universe fits into this.

There are probably more variations but at four in the morning I can't think of any except the means of travel in Dune where stoned worms think you to your destination.

So which do you favor as the most plausible or what other method do you favor?

 

[yevaud]

Call it a gut feeling, but my own suspicion is that if ever something such as an FTL Drive System is developed, it'd be of the Battlestar Galactice variant. Something to do with making two regions of space linked in some sort of vast quantum effect, akin to a Josephson Jump (Josephson Effect). A simple transferrence of mass from one point to another, and voila.

The other possibilities are far too dicey, I think. The ability to quite literally warp spacetime itself? Doubtful. And creating stable wormholes? Everything we (so far) can tell about "stable" wormholes is that they aren't stable, and are too microscopic to be useful; any idea to make them large enough to be useful requires exotic, barely believeable substances, such as Negative Energy.

 

[bdewoody]

Yevaud,
I tend to agree with you. I have never liked any of the other descriptions. Of course it is most likely that none of the above is the real answer and we will remain forever stuck in our little solar system.

 

[strandedonearth]

There's also the Star Wars version of hyperspace, which seems to be traveling through another dimension at finite speeds. I also remember reading a book waaay back in Gr 7 (the name escapes me) which used a tesseract, described as the 5th dimension, to jump between points, as in BSG.

I figure hyperspace is vaguely plausible if we can ever figure out how to "jump to hyperspace," despite the fact that Star Wars never attempted to explain anything in a scientifically plausible way

 

[yevaud]

True, which is one reason Star Wars is considered "Space Opera," rather than Science Fiction: no science.

The issue I have always had with "Hyperspace" is, it's another dimension, where vastly different rules would apply. It is doubtful a human could even survive passage into such a realm. Suppose the Fine Constant were different, or there was no Weak Force, or what have you. It's not as if you're walking through a tunnel, it is another very different place indeed.

 

[ZenGalacticore]

Great point Yev. With no nuclear forces, we'd all fly apart like exploding pizzas! :lol:

 

[yevaud]

Yep. If I am going to travel, I'd at least like to think the journey wouldn't freeze all molecular activity, or morph me into Lemon Tapioca, or whatever.

Well, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

 

[ZenGalacticore]

What if there's no electromagnetism in the 5th d, as well as no stong and weak nuke forces.

So in a sense, we humans are "electric", in a bioelectric sense. If we could build a "nuke suit", and artificially create the forces needed to hold us together, what would the electricity we bring along with us do to the 5th dimension? How 'bout we bring a few big magnets with us, just to see what happens!

 

[kelvinzero]

I suspect if we ever do discover a way of sending information faster than the speed of light, that is all it will do. Maybe we will discover wormholes, but probably we will never be able to squeeze anything larger than an electron through without it being ripped apart for example. So we probably still have to digitize ourselves first. For example, the ship and crew are consumed by nanobots. Through arcane manipulations a single nanobot is created on the other end of a wormhole. matter is fed though to it particle by particle, bootstrapping up an entire nanobot colony which rebuilds the starship and then rebuilds the crew.

The crew's memory is adjusted slightly to only remember some pleasing screensaver effect


One nice compromise between FTL and realism would be travel at exactly light speed. We cannot send mass at lightspeed but information is fine, obviously, eg radiowaves do this.

Travel as information at lightspeed is not only plausible within known science, also no time passes for the traveller, and the time periods are acceptable for human civilisations, eg under a decade for a round trip.

So.. suppose the reason we have never found life is that it generally ignores planets because it has learnt to colonize stars instead. The stars of the solar system have god-like civilisations but they merely regard us as curiosities, like we regard life limited to volcanic vents on the sea floor.

So what you do is you fly into a star after first having negotiated a deal with it. The star observes you as you evaporate, in great detail. It pretty much txts a message to one of its pal stars (eg alpha centauri) with you as an attachment. This arrives at alpha centauri about 4 years later, which prints you out with something like a solar flare of living plasma, sending you on a reverse course from the new location. No mass is lost from the system in general, because to leave the system you would need to throw yourself into the sun again.

This idea is probably partially inspired by the sort of FTL in The Mote In God's Eye, where travel involved nodes that were only accessible very near to and sometimes inside stars.

 

[kelvinzero]

I also found that throwing yourself into a sun nice and nihilistic: You know you are going to burn up and die. But you also know you have done this several times before and you will not actually remember burning up and dying, because that happened to someone else, your previous copy, lightyears away and years ago around another star.

Could you accept this? The universe will belong to the people that can. Everyone else can stay at home.

 

[yevaud]

This idea is probably partially inspired by the sort of FTL in The Mote In God's Eye, where travel involved nodes that were only accessible very near to and sometimes inside stars.

As to the Pournelle/Niven book, that's a sort of misquote. Alderson Points were created via thermonuclear equipotential flux between stars, and those that terminated in the wispy outer fringes of very large stars were few and far between.

Yes, I am a Pournelle "Empire of Man" fanboy. I'll see you a Mediator, and raise you a Sauron Cyborg.

(Also, consider Crazy Eddie's username for a moment)

 

[jim48]

Star Trek made up "warp drive" as it went along over the decades. Thankfully mostly unexplained in the original series, but ridiculously over-explained in Next Generation. Legend has it that when the designer of the starship Enterprise, artist Matt Jefferies, asked Gene Roddenberry his thoughts on how the ship should look, Roddenberry replied "Make her look fast!"

 

[ZenGalacticore]

Right on Jim!

Roddenberry and the original writers, directors, cast and crew who made 'Star Trek' understood what worked. It's basic creative writing 101: Less is More!

 

[doublehelix]

I also remember reading a book waaay back in Gr 7 (the name escapes me) which used a tesseract, described as the 5th dimension, to jump between points, as in BSG.

A Wrinkle in Time? I loved that book - read it many times as a kid, along with its sequels (A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters, but later in life).

I believe a tesseract is a 4 dimensional structure.

-dh

 

[clandistine1]

Great point Yev. With no nuclear forces, we'd all fly apart like exploding pizzas! :lol:

Zen
Scientists have proved that in a universe without weak nuclear force matter could exist to a point, so our bodies would quite possibly survive but our space craft of what ever probably wouldn't.
Because (correct me if i am wrong) i think iron would become the last stable element.
Oh and just to point this out there would be no stable form of hydrogen (excluding deuterium)

 

[yevaud]

A Wrinkle in Time? I loved that book - read it many times as a kid, along with its sequels (A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters, but later in life).

It also might be the Heinlein story, And he built a crooked house.

 

[ZenGalacticore]

Great point Yev. With no nuclear forces, we'd all fly apart like exploding pizzas! :lol:

Zen
Scientists have proved that in a universe without weak nuclear force matter could exist to a point, so our bodies would quite possibly survive but our space craft of what ever probably wouldn't.
Because (correct me if i am wrong) i think iron would become the last stable element.
Oh and just to point this out there would be no stable form of hydrogen (excluding deuterium)

Without the nuke forces, we wouldn't be here.

 

[doublehelix]

It also might be the Heinlein story, And he built a crooked house.

I'm going to have to check this out - it sounds good!

-dh

 

[StarRider1701]

Yes, Heinlein was a great storyteller, you will like the story dh.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but didn't Star Trek's 'Warp Bubble' do 2 things? While not only moving the ship out of our Universe (or Dimension) into another thereby allowing us to exceed the speed of light, didn't the Warp Bubble also contain the small peice of our Universe within itself, thereby allowing ship and contents (us) to continue functioning normally? So no exploding apart like a pizza because the properties of the other dimension isn't the same as ours.

I too like the ftl as in BattleStar Galactica. I remember reading other SF stories with this type of ftl and it does seem most realistic within the limits of our current knowledge and abilities.

I also like the Jump Points such as Niven/Pournelle's Alderson points or created jump points as in B5. Yes, time did pass as one was moving through Jump space, but you are right bdewoody, they didn't really dwell upon how much time it took to go specific distances.

Speaking of Heinlein, his story Tunnel in the Sky was always one of my favorites. In this story we have figured out how to make transporters. His first prediction is that once we know how, we will erect such transporters all over Earth, using the Earth itself as the anchor point of these devices. Once in place and active, the permenant transfer points allow a person to go from a "grand central station' to the Grand Canyon (where the main character's family lived) with one quick step and use very little energy. He also used the device like a Stargate to travel to other worlds around other stars. This was a little iffy to me because they were able to open such gates without needing a receiving device at their destination... Still a good story. Wagons Ho!!!

 

[yevaud]

Just as with an Alcubierre Drive, no, the Enterprise didn't head off into another dimension of different sort of space. It merely made a small piece of our "normal" spacetime move independently of the rest of the metric. So the "laws" within the bubble remained the same. In point of fact, as the bubble was moving but not the contents, you could be travelling at many times the speed of light...and in total freefall as well (there is no net acceleration applied to you).

Tunnel in the Sky was, of course, the source and inspiration for Stargate, although I don't believe Heinlein ever got a single nod of credit.

The reason I chose the BSG form of FTL travel is that among all of the options, it is the only one that appears to have some potential. We already known electrons can make a quantum jump between points without crossing the intervening distance (that's a "Josephson Jump"). Anyone who understands Transistors knows this well, and we are all chatting online thanks to this effect (your PC wouldn't work without it). Perhaps someday, we can create the proper parameters for larger than a single point-particle to "jump" in the same way?

Dunno, but it's interesting as hell to contemplate.

 

[bdewoody]

So nobody thinks the "Dune" solution has any merit? Well I don't either, except that for now the only way I can travel to Alpha Centari is in my dreams.

 

[a_lost_packet_]

...So which do you favor as the most plausible or what other method do you favor?

and

..Dunno, but it's interesting as hell to contemplate.

Well, here's a shot:

If you can control mass, you don't have to worry about any speedlimits. Well, that's not exactly true. The point is that if you can control how something is expressed in space-time, then you can break the Rules.

Traveling faster than the speed of light in a spaceship may rely not on ditching the Intergalactic Highway Patrol by ducking down a side-dimension. It may just be a matter of making yourself invisible to them. After all, a pink car looks black in the moonlight... IOW - You manipulate the information that space-time gets and uses to "enforce" its rules and you don't avoid it completely by "leaving it." You're still the same pink car but the Universe sees you as a black one.. or not at all.

Let's say we discover the "Higgs" whatever it happens to be. The first step towards manipulating something is discovering how it works. So, the LHC finally pays off after frying a few birds, toasting some bagels and popping a few seams... What do we do? Well, first off, there's a rush by Weight Watchers to quell the information as a risk to their proprietary business practices. (Hey, I'm on a roll, ignore mass-vs-"weight" for a minute..) But, after that, we're all in store for some fun as soon as the eggheads figure out how to fool around with the Higgs and invent new routines for David Copperfield.

But, what about the next information bearing particle/field that communicates vital, rule-enforcing information to our space-time fabric? What happens when we can manipulate those messengers in such a way that the Intergalactic Highway Patrol simply will never see us zooming by?

IMO, that's the way we'll be able to get past all those pesky rules. It's not about taking a physical object off the playing field and then skirting the sidelines to the end-zone. It's about simply refusing to obey the Defending line in the middle of your zone.

PS - I'm awaiting the first test-run of the very first <ahem> "anti-gravity" device. It should be pretty interesting when the experimenters forget that our Solar System is shooting around galactic center at about 250 km/sec. It will be a very short demonstration...

 

[yevaud]

PS - I'm awaiting the first test-run of the very first <ahem> "anti-gravity" device. It should be pretty interesting when the experimenters forget that our Solar System is shooting around galactic center at about 250 km/sec. It will be a very short demonstration...

:lol:

I'm laughing, as what with the multiple Alcubierre Drive / Can we go FTL threads of late, I've mulled a few issues over. Such as, suppose the first time an actual experiment with a Drive is conducted, will it all be exactly correct? Virgin territory, Baby. Suppose a figure is off, a sign reversed, whatever. Can you imagine the effects of a test mass - say a gram - being accelerated into the lab's wall at 0.999 C?

Something along the lines of large-scale urban renewal, I'd guess. Or perhaps a new great lake.

 

[yevaud]

This being the SF forum, we can indulge speculation for fun, of course. I really did think through some esoteric aspects of FTL travel the other night. One of those bored late evenings, with a mixed drink and Jazz.

Now assume an Alcubierre Drive is discovered and made workable. So there you are, content in your little detached bubble of spacetime, experiencing total weightlessness and traveling at some multiple of C.

So, umm, what do you see of your journey? Hell, man, you're going 2.96 C. Everything impinging on the boundary of your bubble of spacetime is in tachyons. Or photons at some ridiculous velocity. Will you see anything? Or will you be fried to a cinder instantly by photons suddenly de-accelerated from multiple C to your rest velocity inside of the bubble?

Complicated, ain't it?

OK, suppose it all works. We figure how to de-accelerate photons to "C" within your bubble of spacetime so you see some analogue of what the bridge crew on the Enterprise sees. Good, because now you won't run into anything. Or will you? You're still traveling at more than C. You could run into something before you knew what hit you. What possible effect does this have on you? Well, it ain't good.

If even these problems are solved, then we have a nice workable equivalent of a Federation we can go zipping around in.

But then there's the concept of war. How does this work at FTL?

Well, consider THIS little thingy I tripped into. Suppose you had two armed ships in space. Can they fight, interact, what?

Beam weapons would be useless. The moment the beam left the boundary of your spacetime bubble, it'd drop back to C for the continuum it's in, e.g "normal" space. So that's out. Same for particle beams, except I think their abrupt de-acceleration to a lower C would liberate some energy, but right when they departed your spacetime bubble. Not good, in fact pointless. So there's another weapon out.

The only thing I could think as an offensive weapon were missiles with their own Alcubierre Drives. So they can travel with/faster than the ship's bubbles. And then it occurred to me: what happens when a spacetime bubble at FTL moves inside of another ship's spacetime bubble at FTL? It seems one or the other will treat within the bubble as normal space, and continue to move at FTL. Making a truly destructive weapon (a 2 ton missile at FTL multiples running smack into you? Ouch!).

Pretty hairy stuff.

 

[bushwhacker]

Actually in Dune the drive itself was never described. The"stoned worms" were just navigators who could see the future and therefor keep the ship away from running into stars and such. I loved the dune books.