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
Didn’t he or some other Greek philosopher also describe atoms?
Rudimentary atomic theory was independently “discovered” multiple times and places throughout history.
Hippocrates also described the four humors.
Their theory of atoms was also that they were indivisible, being the most basic building block of all matter. Obviously now we know that that’s not true.
They described a lot of things, and were wrong more often than not. Their biggest contribution was really just progress in the scientific method itself.
It was not really what we would know as science, as it does not revolve around strictly constructed experimentation, hypothesis, or reproduceablility or predictivity, so much as it was the concepts of logic itself, of arguing about things with rationality and rhetoric.
A whole lot of Greek philosophy uses what seem like decent arguments to lead to decent sounding explanations that do not actually work if explored further or tested, though there are genuine examples of actual experimentation that still hold up fairly well, like Eratosthenes approximating the size of the Earth based on geometry and shadows.
Theyre basically just known for formally getting the ball rolling of inquisitive discourse on the nature of the world.
Basically, Empedocles came up with the 4 ‘roots’ of air (smoke), water, earth and fire, Plato expanded on how they ‘worked’ and interacted, as well as naming them ‘elements’, and Aristotle expanded further on this and added the concept of aether, which is what stuff in the heavens must be made of.
Probably the most popularly read material on this both in ancient times and today is Aristotle and Plato. Plato also associated the first four elements with Platonic solids.
Atomic theory of today is really only named such because Atom is roughly the Greek word for ‘indivisible’. Their indivisible atoms were of the four or five elements as they had no understanding of Chemistry.
Chemistry also linguistically does come from Alchemy, which comes from Al Khemia, which roughly in context means the study of the wisdom of Egypt.
This is because basically after Rome broke apart, many of the remaining scholarly texts of all kinds of philosophers largely only remained intact in Egypt.
So you had the Greek or Coptic texts translated into Arabic, studied and preserved in Arab speaking areas, which were then reacquired by various Europeans and translated into Latin or other local language. Roughly, the texts of this period which attempted to further philosophize more detailed understanding of elements, mixed with a huge amount of religious and superstitious content, became Alchemy.
When modern science began roughly with the Renaissance, well a lot of those guys were studied in Alchemy and attempting to apply more rigorous and testable logic to it, and we end up with the word Chemistry.
Thats a really long way to say that basically Atom as a word in modern parlance basically is just Greek for something that cannot be further divided, and is named such to basically honor the tradition of it all getting kicked off by the ancient Greeks.
Actual ancient Greek Elemental theory has basically nothing in common with modern Chemistry, and of course we now know that Atoms are actually divisible into Protons Neutrons and Electrons, and Protons and Neutrons are further divisible into various Quarks.
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?
