Warp Drive effects

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starsinmyeyes44

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Just a fun video to watch...


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj178APgdno[/youtube]
 
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jim48

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Be careful with warp drive. Look what happened to me. :?
 
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RWJ

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Perhaps someday it will be possible to create a device similar to warp drive.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ScAHXN_kAY[/youtube]
 
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bdewoody

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RWJ":2qf05tdi said:
Perhaps someday it will be possible to create a device similar to warp drive.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ScAHXN_kAY[/youtube]

And then it will be science fiction no more.
 
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StarRider1701

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RWJ":8griomqz said:
Perhaps someday it will be possible to create a device similar to warp drive.

The Human Race needs to hope so!!! Without Warp (or some kind of FTL) Drive we will be pretty much prisoners of this one little Solar System. As MeteorWayne loves to point out (ad Nausium) if we are forced to stick with below light speeds, tremendous energy will be required for any ship to attain even a significant percentage of C.
Not to mention the supreme level of effort and energy required to send out the few and far between Generation Ships.

Without Warp (FTL) Drive I fear for the future of the Human Race.

BTW, thanks for the video stars, yes it was fun to watch.
 
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MeteorWayne

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StarRider1701":12xbdhwd said:
RWJ":12xbdhwd said:
Perhaps someday it will be possible to create a device similar to warp drive.

The Human Race needs to hope so!!! Without Warp (or some kind of FTL) Drive we will be pretty much prisoners of this one little Solar System. As MeteorWayne loves to point out (ad Nausium) if we are forced to stick with below light speeds, tremendous energy will be required for any ship to attain even a significant percentage of C.
Not to mention the supreme level of effort and energy required to send out the few and far between Generation Ships.

Without Warp (FTL) Drive I fear for the future of the Human Race.

BTW, thanks for the video stars, yes it was fun to watch.

As long as people continue to ignore that fact (Not so much here in sci fi, but in the science fora) I will point it out as often as necssary. Even if it makes people sick

User Meteor Wayne ;)
 
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dryson

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I believe that Warp Drive is possible. I think the key to Warp Drive is not the notion of warping space, I mean how can one warp something that does not exist, which space is the nothing between two atoms that interact with each other.

The real quarrel with Warp Drive is figuring out the wavelength that causes more fuel to be consumed when trying to reach an escape velocity. We know that it takes the shuttle a certain amount of thrust and fuel to reach the escape velocity necessary to reach LEO. I would have to surmise that the reason is because the faster a ship travels the more EM wavelengths are occupying the layer of every atom between the electron and nucleus. The more EM wavelength's that occupy this area of the atom means the more the atom will magnetically weigh. I am using the term magnetically here because I am trying to reference the effect of the shuttle being like a positive charge and the Earth's EM field being a negative charge. Which we all know like magnetic fields attract. So the faster that the shuttle goes the more pull that the Earth's EM field exerts on the shuttle until at some point the shuttles thrust reaches an equilibrium between the repulsive and attractive nature of the EM field thus allowing the shuttle to continue into space.

The same effect can be said to be true of Warp Drive. The instant that your ship engages to light speed inside or near an EM field the attractive force of the planet's EM field would instantly exert it's pull back on the ship at light speed velocities thus creating a large introduction of EM wavelength's into each atom that your ship is built of that the ship would far outweigh, atomically speaking, the ability of the thrust units to break the attractive pull on your ship.

I also feel that once physics has determined why a blackhole pulls a light photon into it's maul, given that a light photon is supposedly the fastest velocity obtainable in the Universe, that an engine would be able to be created that would break the threshold between the attractive pull of an EM field and the ship that is traveling at light speed.

After all if the gravity of a blackhole was not functioning at faster than the speed of light then a light photon would be able to pass right through the blackhole's gravity field. But since light cannot escape the gravity of a black hole then the gravity of the blackhole must be functioning at faster then the speed of light velocities.

The answer to Warp Drive is out there and it's lies somewhere between the interaction's of the gravity of a blackhole and the light photon.
 
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MeteorWayne

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dryson":olbe6cum said:
I believe that Warp Drive is possible.

Of course you do! :roll: :lol: :D

{Followed by 5 paragraphs of imaginary physics so bad it ain't even Sci Fi.}

Don't worry dryson, you make me sick to my stomach as well... ;)
(In response to your witty :roll: sigline "I think that I'am (sic) going to throw up on you now Meteor Wayne.")
 
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SteveCNC

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Wow , you know dryson sometimes you really crack me up . You understanding of gravity is rather unique to say the least . To think that it requires speed to function is in itself pretty funny .
 
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StarRider1701

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SteveCNC":e4gmhiro said:
Wow , you know dryson sometimes you really crack me up . You understanding of gravity is rather unique to say the least . To think that it requires speed to function is in itself pretty funny .

I think you might be misunderstanding what he said. "Gravity" does not require "speed" but gravity causes speed. Outside the event horizon of a black hole, light and other objects have a chance to escape. But within the event horizon, from which even light cannot escape, the black hole must be causing objects to move faster than the speed of light. Thus, between the event horizon and the black hole itself the gravity is so strong as to be able to cause objects and perhaps even light itself to exceed the speed of light! Of course this does violate the Laws of Physics which states that nothing can exceed the speed of light.

Several SF writers have used miniature black holes (sometimes artificial) to power spacecraft beyond the speed of light.
 
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EarthlingX

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www.technologyreview.com : How to Build a Warp Drive Using Metamaterials
Wednesday, September 29, 2010

A "warp drive" built using metamaterials could reach a quarter of light speed.

Warp%20drive.png


Metamaterials are substances in which their ability to support electric and magnetic fields can be changed. Fiddle with these properties in just the right way and you can steer electromagnetic waves in all kinds of strange and exotic ways.

The highest profile use of this idea is to build invisibility cloaks but there's another more fascinating application. It turns out there is a formal mathematical analogy between the way metamaterials bend light and the way gravity does it. Inside metamaterials, electromagnetic space becomes distorted in exactly the same way as spacetime in general relatively.

That means physicists can use metamaterials to simulate the universe itself and all the weird phenomenon of general relativity. We've looked at various attempts to recreate black holes, the Big Bang and even multiverses.

But there's another thing that general relativity appears to allow: faster than light travel. In 1994, the Mexican physicist, Michael Alcubierre, realised that while relativity prevents faster-than-light travel relative to the fabric of spacetime, it places no restriction on the speed at which regions of spacetime can move relative to each other.

That suggests a way of building a warp drive. Alcubierre imagined a small volume of flat spacetime in which a spacecraft sits, surrounded by a bubble of spacetime that shrinks in the direction of travel, bringing your destination nearer, and stretches behind you. He showed that this shrinking and stretching could enable the bubble--and the spaceship it contained--to move at superluminal speeds.

Today, Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland, points out that if these kinds of bubbles are possible in spacetime, then it ought to be possible to simulate them inside a metamaterial.

His analysis makes for interesting reading. It turns out that faster than light travel travel is not possible inside any physically-realisable metamaterial. That agrees with various analyses of Alcubierre's ideas suggesting that his bubble would be highly unstable and that superluminal travel would be impossible. We looked at one here.

However, Smolyaninov says that subluminal travel is still possible using this method and shows how it ought to be possible to reach speeds of up to a quarter of the speed of light by distorting space in front of and behind the traveller.

That's not quite warp speed, nowhere near it actually. But it's a fair rate of knots by anybody's standards.

It only remains for somebody to actually build a metamaterial capable of this trick. And judging by the rate at which this stuff is being developed, we shouldn't have too long to wait.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1009.5663: Metamaterial-Based Model Of The Alcubierre Warp Drive
 
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docm

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And lest anyone think that mag is just another pseuo-science rag, I'd like to point out that it's published by MIT.

Metamaterials are going to change the world, period. Practical invisibility and cloaks, near perfect optics, non-CCD imaging sensors with extreme resolutions & bandwidth etc etc.
 
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bdewoody

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StarRider1701":11i7qxq4 said:
RWJ":11i7qxq4 said:
Perhaps someday it will be possible to create a device similar to warp drive.

The Human Race needs to hope so!!! Without Warp (or some kind of FTL) Drive we will be pretty much prisoners of this one little Solar System. As MeteorWayne loves to point out (ad Nausium) if we are forced to stick with below light speeds, tremendous energy will be required for any ship to attain even a significant percentage of C.
Not to mention the supreme level of effort and energy required to send out the few and far between Generation Ships.

Without Warp (FTL) Drive I fear for the future of the Human Race.

BTW, thanks for the video stars, yes it was fun to watch.
I agree, unless a way around the light speed barrier is found mankind will most likely cease to exist when our star dies. That is if we don't wipe ourselves out much sooner. As our star approaches old age and if we are still here I presume a great effort to build ark ships will be made and they will be sent in the direction of every nearby star system known to have planets. But I would guess the chances of any of them actually surviving the voyage is somewhere between slim and none.
 
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warpfactor999

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Scottie....All engines to Warpfactor999!

But I'm givin it all I got Captain!

Scottie ...I need Warpfactor999 and I need it NOW!!!

If I do that Captain...she's sure to blow!!!!!

That's all right Scottie....thats all right!!!!

ok... thats all i want to spend on this......WP999
 
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EarthlingX

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www.universetoday.com : Astronomy Without A Telescope – Warp Drive On Paper
Oct 30th, 2010

by Steve Nerlich


It's sixteen years since Miguel Alcubierre suggested that faster-than-light travel might be achieved by generating a warp bubble that contracts space-time ahead of the spaceship and expands it behind. Now a metamaterial test laboratory is available to see if this idea really could work. Image sourced from: andersoninstitute.com

The Alcubierre drive is one of the better known warp drive on paper models – where a possible method of warp drive seems to work mathematically as long as you don’t get too hung up on real world physics and some pesky boundary issues.

Recently the Alcubierre drive concept has been tested within mathematically modeled metamaterial – which can provide a rough analogy of space-time. Interestingly, in turns out that under these conditions the Alcubierre drive is unable to break the light barrier – but quite capable of doing 25% of light speed, which is not what you would call slow.

OK, so two conceptual issues to grapple with here. What the heck is an Alcubierre drive – and what the heck is metamaterial?

The Alcubierre drive is a kind of mathematical thought experiment where you imagine your spacecraft has a drive mechanism capable of warping a bubble of space-time such that the component of bubble in front of you contracts bringing points ahead of you closer – while the bubble behind you expands, moving what’s behind you further away.

This warped geometry moves the spacecraft forward, like a surfer on a wave of space-time. Maintaining this warp dynamically and continuously as the ship moves forward could result in faster-than-light velocities from the point of view of an observer outside the bubble – while the ship hardly moves at all relative to the local space-time within the bubble. Indeed throughout the journey the crew experience free fall conditions and are not troubled by G forces.


Standard images used to describe the Alcubierre drive. Left: Want to make the Kessel run in 12 parsecs? No problem - just compress the Kessel run into 12 parsecs. Right: The Alcubierre concept can be thought of as a spaceship surfing on a wave of space-time. Images sourced from daviddarling.info.
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It turns out that the material parameters of even so-called ‘perfect’ metamaterial will not allow the Alcubierre drive to break light speed, but will allow it to achieve 25% light speed – being around 75,000 kilometres a second. This gets you to the Alpha Centauri system in about seventeen years, assuming acceleration and deceleration are only small components of the journey.

Whether the limitations imposed by metamaterial in this test are an indication that it cannot adequately emulate the warping of space-time – which the Alcubierre drive needs to break light speed – or whether the Alcubierre drive just can’t do it, remains an open question. What’s surprising and encouraging is that the drive could actually work… a bit.
 
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Ruri

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EarthlingX":o1i418dm said:
http://www.universetoday.com : Astronomy Without A Telescope – Warp Drive On Paper
It turns out that the material parameters of even so-called ‘perfect’ metamaterial will not allow the Alcubierre drive to break light speed, but will allow it to achieve 25% light speed – being around 75,000 kilometres a second. This gets you to the Alpha Centauri system in about seventeen years, assuming acceleration and deceleration are only small components of the journey.

Whether the limitations imposed by metamaterial in this test are an indication that it cannot adequately emulate the warping of space-time – which the Alcubierre drive needs to break light speed – or whether the Alcubierre drive just can’t do it, remains an open question. What’s surprising and encouraging is that the drive could actually work… a bit.


I really hope Igor is dead wrong on this as .25% c is no where fast enough besides antimatter drives can get you to 80%c and still be able to slow you down.

I think he likely is wrong on the upper limit of max speed of the drive as the test was assuming no relativistic real space component to the ship's momentum which should help things out a bit.
I suspect the two components should square each other vs being additive.
Also the computer used to test it is probably is no where powerful enough to even come close to modeling it such a computer may not even exist yet.
This should be modeled on Jaguar or the Kraken before any assumptions are made.
 
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