Always loved this sort of stuff.....

 

I've already got a warped drive. The tarmac melted at the front of my house. 🚀

Still what seem like insurmountable problems though. Will it simply form a black hole, can you accelerate from sub light speed to light speed, requirement for huge amounts of negative energy which may not exist, and may have the same speed limit as matter.

Edited April 24, 20215 yr by martin-w

1 hour ago, martin-w said:

Still what seem like insurmountable problems though. Will it simply form a black hole, can you accelerate from sub light speed to light speed, requirement for huge amounts of negative energy which may not exist, and may have the same speed limit as matter.

Of course, at one time exceeding the sound barrier seemed nearly as impossible to some.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Edited April 24, 20215 yr by HiFlyer

37 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

Of course, at one time exceeding the sound barrier seemed nearly as possible to some.

 

Yep, very true. In fact when Stephenson built his rocket they said that if you travelled over 30 MPH your ear drums would burst. 

Always a bad idea to claim anything like this is impossible. 

At present our best hope for decent velocities is the VASIMR plasma rocket. 34 miles per second and a payload to mars in 39 days. Nice thing about the VASIMR is that the specific impulse is variable. You can set it to high specific impulse and low efficacy or low specific impulse and high efficiency. 

 

Very similar principle of operation to the fictional impulse engines on Star Trek!

Warp drive or hyperdrive, either one would be fine by me so long as I also get a phaser or blaster (with adjustable power settings) and, of course, a lightsabre.

Set phasers on tickle, and accelerate to the speed of dark! Which is the same as the speed of light, but they don't see you coming.

56 minutes ago, Chock said:

Set phasers on tickle, and accelerate to the speed of dark! Which is the same as the speed of light, but they don't see you coming.

Ah, a "croaking device"!  You go so fast you croak! ☠️

It would mean a change in physics as we know it.  Currently any physical body travelling at the speed of light would have zero length and infinite mass.  You would have to convert the physical body into an energy wave and reconstruct that energy wave back into a physical body as you slowed down.

It's just possible that some things we dream of are impossible.

Noel

So what's next?  "Beam me up Scotty!"

I always thought that superconductivity might be part of creating a disturbance on the surface of an object that changed the rules as it were.

59 minutes ago, birdguy said:

It would mean a change in physics as we know it.

sounds like another way of saying "we learned something"

1 hour ago, birdguy said:

It would mean a change in physics as we know it.  Currently any physical body travelling at the speed of light would have zero length and infinite mass.  You would have to convert the physical body into an energy wave and reconstruct that energy wave back into a physical body as you slowed down.

It's just possible that some things we dream of are impossible.

Noel

The light speed limit for matter applies to matter *traveling through space*.  However, if you bend the space, or warp it as some like to say, then you can get around that limitation.  I know that this is possible because every mass distorts space, albeit the amount of distortion is so small that it takes a moon sized mass to make it noticeable.

If we can figure out how to bend space using electromagnetic waves or some other practical means, then faster than light travel will be possible. 

Dave

2 hours ago, birdguy said:

Currently any physical body travelling at the speed of light would have zero length and infinite mass.  You would have to convert the physical body into an energy wave and reconstruct that energy wave back into a physical body as you slowed down.

It's just possible that some things we dream of are impossible.

Noel

That's why a warp drive is necessary, you don't actually travel at any speed at all, the space you are in travels. It's the same concept as a helicopter going backwards in an air mass which is moving over the ground. The helicopter isn't moving in the air mass it is occupying but it still travels.

So conceptually, if you can create a craft which is able to warp space, then it is perfectly possible to achieve it. We can't currently do that, but 300 years ago we couldn't even make a train which went at 20 mph and most people would have thought that wasn't possible at the time either and if you'd have shown them your mobile phone they'd probably have thought you were a witch or an alien or something, so who knows what we will be able to create in 300 years time?

Edited April 24, 20215 yr by Chock