tl;dr: this is still heavily in the realm of edge theoretical physics, if that. It's not possible to see any steps towards this direction unless somehow we discover a way that wholly changes our current understanding of science in general and quantum physics in particular.
you just have to split a quark its easy guys!
However, a theoretical physicist says there's "zero chance that anyone within our lifetimes or the next 1,000 years" will see it happen.
fuck
Oh boy, they got a nay-sayer who is selectively ignoring the physical concepts behind Alcubierre drives.
What's more, the amount of negative energy you'd need to reach a place like Alpha Centauri — the nearest star system to Earth, at 4.367 light-years away — in a couple years with a 100-cubic-meter ship is truly astronomical.
They aren't thinking of this in terms of warp, they are still tied to the idea that the energy is used to accelerate the mass to beyond the speed of light, which in itself would be impossible with our current understanding of physics. The technology to actually create a warp field doesn't even exist in theory yet, but to outright say it is impossible is to strangle the theory in its cradle. This is why I usually dislike skeptics, too, since they love to conveniently ignore key concepts just to shut down discussion of something that they have already decided for themselves in impossible.
Tbh at this point we should just use military funding to go as far as we can with military space travel
at least at that point we'd get something out of it
Don't worry guy Tom Delonge is on the case.
I mean a lot of scientific breakthroughs had the same naysayers before. People probably thought in the 50s that computers will always stay the size of a small room, then 60 years later we have computers the size of grain of rice with nearly the same power. A lot of science fiction of the early 1900s was almost fantasy while just today we have a good number of "impossible" inventions.
Though true, there is also a lot of science fiction technology that we're still no where close to.
If I had to guess, I would bet that there's far more tech that remains fiction than tech that has become reality over the years.
There's also the constant question of whether a tech is actually worth the time to develop when there are alternatives that work just as well or when it would require a lot of development in other sectors to even work. That doesn't mean that we don't have the capacity to make something reality, like flying cars, but rather there is just no incentive to do so. Something like a warp drive has no real incentive other than the curiosity of being able to travel interstellar distances in a matter of days or hours, and there likely won't be a reason to look into its development until humanity is already branching out within the solar system.
Science and research should always be taken and no rock is too small to overturn as they can easily find something that could be helpful. My contention with it is that often times our current research projects are based on untested, terribly explained and/or straight up lies hidden behind a paywall.
Compound that with researchers doing everything they can to avoid explaining their research to the laymen means we have researchers making big discoveries that could possibly mean something else because the research they referenced or used was never tested and then they can't explain it. That's the state of science right now.
ftl is impossible because like they said in the article, while the raw physics allows warp bubbles to exist, there is no way to engineer a thing that produces a warp field and no source of energy that's remotely close to the amount required in the first place let alone negative energy. end of story.
the only alternative is that everything we currently know about physics is just the tip of the iceberg. every day we grow increasingly confident that this isn't the case.
Too late to explore the sea, and too early to explore space, well i really wish i could see an actual faster than light travel even if i'm not experiencing it, just seeing that humanity can achieve such thing would be a great thing to see.
And slowing down may be deadly: Several light-years' worth of cosmic dust and gas between the origin and destination might turn into a dangerous shockwave of high-energy particles and radiation upon arrival
Huh, I've never considered this before
You haven't really made an argument here. The technology doesn't exist and there are excellent reasons to suspect that it cannot exist even in principle. Especially if you enjoy, as I do, effects being preceded by definite causes.
Carroll, at least, absolutely knows what he's talking about. He is a well-known cosmologist who literally wrote a textbook on general relativity (for my money, the best one out there), not just a talking head.
The article doesn't dispute that.
No, the radiation would be very bad for the travelers in the bubble. Here is the paper that computes that (published in Physical Review D) and the top answer here is a more informal description of that calculation from a dude who knows GR quite well.
Eh, I wouldn't say that a faster-than-light drive would be a "curiosity". Asteroid mining is probably the leading economic incentive for space exploration, and I imagine we'll discover materials that can only be manufactured in zero-gee environments, but governments across the world would definitely be interested in colonizing space for the sake of geopolitical dickwaving.
I think the incentive is already here, but the technological ability is definitely not. We went from launching a single satellite to landing on the Moon in twelve years, but that took the combined economic, scientific, and engineering muscle of two superpowers to pull it off. We don't even have a solid foundation for the physics it would take to build a superluminal drive.
I suppose I'm thinking of the idea behind it as if it were a technology as separated from our current knowledge as splitting the atom was to Archimedes. With current understanding of physics, the math says that it is impossible, but we also likely have a whole lot more that remains undiscovered that possibly could allow for warp fields or other, inconceivable phenomena that could propel us through the universe. Really, having the DOD jump the gun on investigating warp drives in our time is probably more harmful in the short-term for anyone that might make a breakthrough of the study since it does, indeed, say that they would be either extremely unlikely with the resources needed to get them to work or otherwise impossible. That being said, the short-term is unlikely to have any significant progress anyway since, again, these are things that likely won't even become within our grasp for centuries, if ever.
So essentially humanity is doomed to die out from overpopulation since we have no way to effectively colonize the galaxy? Great, just what I wanted to hear today.
The US Military probably won't even exist by the time we develop FTL or warp drive travel. Either it gets obliterated by European Federation mechas and/or Chinese CRISPR super soldiers or the US goes the Panama route and replaces its entire defense budget with space stuff.
can't, killing people in the middle east is more profitable in the short term, and that's all that matters.
But we could also kill aliens in the middle of the solar system, so same difference
We could be mating with space aliens as well
Overpopulation don't real
To elaborate on what ThighHighSuccubi said, the incentives to have children decrease as standards of living increase. Virtually all developed nations have declining birth rates, and there is an increasingly high number of nations whose populations are shrinking due to sufficiently lowered birth rates. The population won't increase exponentially, it'll plateau. The average point at which models project the population to plateau at is around 11 billion, which is perfectly sustainable.
Ok, doomed to die out because we use up all of the world's natural resources.
Where do these resources go?
Nah, we could start doing it right now with something like Project Orion if we had the will to. Even barring relativistic-speed ships, slower-than-light generation or stasis ships are less sexy than FTL but also far less physics-defying.
Actually there is achievable methods of doing this. Problem is its going to take a long while to travel between star-systems. Even if we develop engines that are somehow able to approach 10-40% the speed of light.
The Solar System has orders of magnitude more resources than we could ever dream of using up, and our own system is firmly within our potential grasp.
Kind of a bodacious claim, I'd say most things that we've written about at some point have in one way or another materialized.
You could probably find the same function as a lot of mythical or fantastical objects in a smartphone.
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