As I understand it, even if you could get something to another star system at a speed approaching c, time dilation would make a round trip last thousands of years from Earth's perspective.
[QUOTE=Thunderbolt;46835785]WELL YEAH but I meant something that could get you to another star system in a reasonable amount of time[/QUOTE]
Well, define "reasonable" then :v:
What uses would interstellar travel have, exactly? IMO if we end up pulling it off it will probably only be used to settle exoplanets, not to go shopping at Alpha Centauri. So if we build a ship that can last and find a way for humans to be alive inside at its arrival it would do the job.
[QUOTE=_Axel;46835828]Well, define "reasonable" then :v:
What uses would interstellar travel have, exactly? IMO if we end up pulling it off it will probably only be used to settle exoplanets, not to go shopping at Alpha Centauri. So if we build a ship that can last and find a way for humans to be alive inside at its arrival it would do the job.[/QUOTE]
Couple of months tops so that you could travel between colonies or mining outposts without dying of old age? Imagine how much fuel you could get from gas giants and stuff like that, I don't see the point of space travel if it's gonna take a couple of generations for people to get somewhere.
[I]I[/I] want to visit the other planet, not just get on the colony ship and have sex with everyone so that at some point my kids can colonize that planet, I don't give a shit what will happen after I die
[QUOTE=Thunderbolt;46836001]Couple of months tops so that you could travel between colonies or mining outposts without dying of old age? Imagine how much fuel you could get from gas giants and stuff like that, I don't see the point of space travel if it's gonna take a couple of generations for people to get somewhere.
[I]I[/I] want to visit the other planet, not just get on the colony ship and have sex with everyone so that at some point my kids can colonize that planet, I don't give a shit what will happen after I die[/QUOTE]
As far as resources go, the time the transport takes shouldn't matter much, once a mining outpost is set up it should output a constant stream of materials. Once it arrives at destination, it can be considered as an additional resource flow.
For space tourism, yeah, I'm afraid you'll have to remain in the system you are born in, otherwise your best hope lies in transhumanism.
About not giving a shit after death, I don't think that's a commonly shared mindset. I guess a lot of parents would be glad their children get to live great lives after their death, kings and emperors of the past also most certainly cared for the posthumous prosperity of their empire.
[QUOTE=_Axel;46836102]
About not giving a shit after death, I don't think that's a commonly shared mindset. I guess a lot of parents would be glad their children get to live great lives after their death, kings and emperors of the past also most certainly cared for the posthumous prosperity of their empire.[/QUOTE]
I know
That's why my initial post was about wormholes and jumpdrives, if they existed you could get to another planet in a matter of hours (assuming the jump is instantaneous) - all you would need to do is take off and get into an orbit, activate the jump drive and instantly appear near the target planet, then just circularize your new orbit or start the landing procedure, depending on what you want to do and how similar the planet is to earth.
[QUOTE=Krinkels;46835809]As I understand it, even if you could get something to another star system at a speed approaching c, time dilation would make a round trip last thousands of years from Earth's perspective.[/QUOTE]
From Earth's perspective, it takes just as long as (distance from Earth to star from Earth's perspective)/(~c). Nothing out of the ordinary from classical mechanics except for the speed limit. From the spaceship's perspective though, it will seem like it took just about no time at all.
[QUOTE=Amiga OS;46829458]Can you not remind me of that fucking awful episode.
Thx.[/QUOTE]
it is actually so bad it is considered a "what if" story and not canon to voyager
Does quantum tunneling happen faster than light, technically? As far as I know a particle just pops out of existence and pops back into existence some quantifiable distance away.
[QUOTE=Ardosos;46839018]Does quantum tunneling happen faster than light, technically? As far as I know a particle just pops out of existence and pops back into existence some quantifiable distance away.[/QUOTE]
No, because the "pop out of existence" part is not correct. It's generally not considered meaningful to say the particle was somewhere before you measured it.
[QUOTE=FreakyMe;46822383]Though I agree, it is fun to imagine that it would be that simple. That it is some big 'Duh' moment waiting for the right tinkerer to follow the right process and then we are off to the stars.[/QUOTE]
[quote]Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning in this way: If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!
He did this and was rather startled when he managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator. He was even more startled when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he was lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had realized that one thing they couldn't stand was a smart-ass.[/quote]
I am not very knowledgeable on these sort of things, but even if he managed to build a "warp drive" that did that space expansion-space contraction thing wouldn't the "No FTL communication" thing mean that it couldn't go faster than light no matter what because information can't be propagated faster than light or something along the lines of that?
Here's an idea, though I don't know how sane it is:
If some place has a positive mass-energy, then there is a gravitational field in it, and vice versa. It's defined by space being "pushed together". So an "anti-gravity" or "repulsive gravity" field, if there were one, a field whose effect would be to "stretch space apart", should cause a negative mass-energy.
So if we take something that produces gravity waves (e.g. some big mass in motion), and found a way to de-couple the oscillating part of the gravitational field from the static part (like AC vs DC electric signal) then we'd get a gravity wave that, instead of going from 0 gravity to positive gravity, would alternate between positive and negative gravity. Probably. So we'd get negative mass-energy, at least sometimes.
The problem is that gravity doesn't behave anything like electricity because afaik there are no objects, natural or artificial, that have a "speed of gravity in material" anything other than the speed of light in vacuum, nor any kind of resistance to gravity, no gravity dipoles or anything that can induce gravity... so no gravity circuits for us I guess.
If only we had lifespans on the order of several hundreds of thousands of years. Then the distances involved don't seem so large.
Trying to think up how to make a warp drive with our current knowledge of physics is like a caveman trying to think up an electric motor just from seeing a lightning storm, all this warp drive shit is just something we see in TV and Movies.
[QUOTE=NeverGoWest;46839867]I am not very knowledgeable on these sort of things, but even if he managed to build a "warp drive" that did that space expansion-space contraction thing wouldn't the "No FTL communication" thing mean that it couldn't go faster than light no matter what because information can't be propagated faster than light or something along the lines of that?[/QUOTE]
Yes. The Alcubierre drive cannot work as promised (i.e. initially the drive is off and everything is normal, turn it on, space curves, get to your destination faster than a light beam) because changes in space-time can only propagate at the speed of light. A [I]less[/I] impossible "warp drive" would involve traveling to your destination at less than the speed of light, curving space as you go and basically creating a channel so that future ships can there more quickly. But this still relies on negative mass-energy, so it's still probably impossible.
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