Warp drives and space travel, the age of space exploration might not be too far away

http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive

Here's an interesting article. And it appears to be legit.

 

I'm still waiting for Ludicrous speed.

 

I looked up what the Alcubierre Drive is. So I guess this spacecraft is going to expand and contract spacetime... Ah well, very interesting I guess. But how would that work?

 

The main trouble is going to be all those little funky microbes and other limitations on the human body.

Even if someone works out warp drive and we go to other habitabke planets, we will still get wiped out by whichever little funky virus our immune system cant handle

Even.a.slight variation in gravity, length of.day will takes its toll in months

Even something like trying to colonolise a planet just like earth, but has no moon will throw out ovulation cycles making settlement far more unlikely.

Its our own complexity that may end up ending us

 

technically there shouldn't be any speed at all, since the spacecraft doesn't actually move.

 

human body is not that rigid. it can adjust to a range of variables. we probably could function completely normally if the length of day was suddenly changed to 48 or 72 hours, maybe even more (not to mention you can create your own day-night frequency with artificial light). and human body has already been shown to withstand huge variations in gravity and we've devised methods to counteract it (astronauts, supersonic flight).

 

I'm with William Shatner on this.

Green chicks are hot.

 

Actually the space craft does move. It expands and contracts spacetime around the spacecraft creating acceleration.

 

well i'm no expert on this but i can read english.

from this article:

from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive#Placement_of_matter

it's not your conventional form of movement. it appears the spacecraft doesn't move (at least not in any significant way). the space moves.

 

space moves around the spacecraft pushing it across the universe. There might not be any acceleration from the spacecraft but it's definitely moving and accelerating.

 

i think you're clinging too much on the word 'push', which was probably used in a more figurative sense here. the ship is not pushed anywhere. actual space gets repositioned. space is moved around the ship/bubble. it's not possible for the ship to attain faster than light speeds, so it follows quite logically from there that it can't move.

''definitely moving and accelerating''? are you an aerospace engineer? you have experience with Alcubierre drive? you know exactly what happens? cause i sure don't. i have no idea what exactly happens under such physics. we're talking purely theory here.

 

this one here offers a better explanation:

http://gizmodo.com/5942634/nasa-starts-development-of-real-life-star-trek-warp-drive

i was able to find what appears to be an actual quote from Dr. White, the guy who's actually working on this thing, and he says (according to this) the ship's acceleration is zero.

 

Exactly the ships acceleration is zero, but the immediate space around the ship is moving the spacecraft thru spacetime. It's like a surfer riding a wave, the surfboard has no acceerlation but the water below it is rising and falling creating forward movement and speed for the rider.

Watch this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwZt1Yh4-1U"]NASA Scientist Says Warp Drive is Doable - YouTube

and for the record I graduated top my class at starfleet academy.

 

Broken link.

Seems legit

 

fixed. thanks for pointing it out.

 

I'm a warp drive.

Anything and everything with mass warps space.

Matter is energy, energy warps space.

The amount of matter/energy in an object directly corresponds to the amount of spatial displacement around that object. There are no known exceptions to this law.

The vacuum energy of space is ~3 times that of matter/energy.

To move a "warp drive" ship through the width of our solar system would take 3 times as much energy than our entire solar system contains. In other words, 3 stars worth of power to move the distance of one stars gravitational field.

 

now you agree the ship's acceleration is zero. earlier you said it was definitely accelerating. my point all along was that the ship itself is not accelerating or moving. it's inside the bubble, and in its local space it doesn't move.

in your video, the only guy that phrases it in a way that can be interpreted as spaceship moving is this Imichio Kaku (no idea of spelling) ''of the science channel''. who is that guy? is he a scientist, a reporter? he appears to be directly quoting the text in that first article (or its source) i posted. it's an exact wording.

the video also says ''making deep space come to you'' and ''without moving at all''. if there is acceleration and movement then why are they all saying there is no acceleration and movement? since this is science at the forefront it's easy for things to get a little mixed up, especially since the people who are doing the reporting on the subject are actually not scientists themselves.

i am not familiar with such physics. what i understand from these texts is that this is a completely different form of ''movement'', that it is a manipulation of space not actual movement the way we're used to it, and that the ship can't move through space since this travel happens faster than c and the ship is not able to reach speeds like that. it has been explicitly stated throughout these texts that the spacecraft gets displaced, rather than moving on its own. that, already intuitively, would agree with no movement of the ship taking place.

i'll try to get my hands on actual scientific texts on this subject to understand it better.

 

White devised an improvement to the drive's design that would require much less energy to operate. he's actually seriously proposing that interstellar travel could become possible in our lifetime.

 

I have to ask.
How many of you actually believe you're going to be abord some sort of space craft and travel to all these unknown planets?

Because if the answer is zero then don't you think this is kind of pointless? I mean you might as well be watching a Star Trek film for all it really matters.

 

yeah, knowledge is pointless. stay away from it.