Topic: NASA May Have Invented Warp Drive (A.K.A. : Perfect engine for a 1000yo human?) - page 2. (Read 3466 times)

You first need to demonstrate the existence of "negative matter", which is impossible.

An interstellar body might consider that criterion in the defence of a less capable civilization against a more capable one.

The cosmos is pretty, pretty big. We have room to create our own interstellar community. "Clear and present danger" concept may not even be part of the first billionth of second of a thought inside an alien mind. That would be their doom if their green skinned women look tasty to us...

 

It must merely be demonstrated, to the interstellar community, that our isolation of negative matter does not occur "in such circumstances and [is] of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that [it] will bring about the substantive evils that [an interstellar governmental body] has a right to prevent" (U.S. Supreme Court).

... Then it does not matter and we should simply do what we do, until we get hit by an artificial gamma ray burst shot from a death star far, far away....

Evolution (at least, that by natural selection) hones certain traits (e.g., the sincere pursuit of survival).

It is already problematic among humans to try to read each other's mind. Now we want to read the mind of hypothetical advanced civilizations light years away from us, but having the 'same' mindset as us, reacting the same as us? Some would see this as a lack of imagination.

1000 of roaches are plotting right now to take over your kitchen. You only deal with them when they bother you. They would react and run the opposite direction. They will never comprehend what an ipad is for. In one scenario we are the advanced civilization. The other is the exact reversal.

We should not worry too much about advanced civilizations (billions of them?) trying to stop us from doing anything. There is nothing we can do about it, nor can they.

Taking the first article, it says this -

Because of the equivalence principle of general relativity, the attraction towards the center of a gravitational potential well, produced by a positive mass, is for negative masses the same as for positive masses, and large amounts of negative masses might have over billions of years been trapped in these gravitational potential wells.

Is not this the reverse of your claim, that the positive and negative matter would accelerate forever?

In any case, since no two masses can be exactly identical in weight, I would assert that instead of a 100g -M and 100g +M accelerating forever, they would always join in short order.

This article continues -

Now it just happens that the center of the moon is a potential well, not too deep that it cannot be reached by making a tunnel through the moon, not possible for the deeper potential well of the earth, where the temperature and pressure are too high. Making a tunnel through the moon, provided there is a good supply of negative mass, could revolutionize interstellar space flight. A sequence of thermonuclear shape charges would make such tunnel technically feasible.


This is wronger than wrong - lunar gravity is substantial, therefore pressures deep in the core would be enormous.  And it isn't certain that the Moon is frozen all the way through, IIRC.  However one might conjecture running a tunnel through Ceres, some 590 miles in diameter and with surface gravity only about 1% of the moon.   Of course this presumes that the "negative mass" actually is trapped in the core.  Hard to see how to disprove this assertion, since even if you drilled through Ceres and found none, it might be lurking in the next planetoid.  Oh, and no, thermonuclear shaped charges don't generate a 600 or 2000 mile long cylindrical hole.   

The second article, I am not familiar with the equations and thus can't follow it.  But I am not seeing the relation between any article and the subject at all.

It does not matter if scientists here believe negative matter to exist: what matters is whether or not it does and whether or not the local interstellar community would tolerate our isolation of it. (Note: extraterrestrial views on our isolation of negative matter could be akin to American views on Iran's enrichment of uranium.)

You present negative matter as if it were a fact, but I do not think that any modern physicists believe that.  This puts it in a different category than say "virtual particles", which do not exist but are handy to use to describe various phenomena.  Similarly, "anti matter" we know does exist at least individual particles are easily produced by particle accelerators. 

Because of this, your paragraph about negative matter should perhaps be disregarded? 

Quoting from the Wikipedia article...

Such matter would violate one or more energy conditions and show some strange properties, stemming from the ambiguity as to whether attraction should refer to force or the oppositely oriented acceleration for negative mass. It is used in certain speculative theories, such as on the construction of wormholes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass

Negative matter, having negative mass, responds to forces related thereto in the exact opposite direction that matter with positive mass does. For example, if one were to take 100 kg of negative matter and affix it to 100 kg of matter, Newton's third law of motion implies that the negative matter will accelerate in a direction opposite that which matter would (i.e., towards the matter) while the matter responds in the typical way (here, away from the negative matter). This has the result that, with equal masses, both the matter and negative matter would accelerate, in the same direction, forever if left undisturbed. The results of this could be catastrophic over great (e.g., interstellar) distances. If someone, say 50 ly away, sends one such bundle (or, yet more perilous, a guided one) of matter and negative mater towards one's planet (i.e., where it will be in the amount of time that it would take the bundle to reach the planet), depending on the absolute value of the mass of the matter and negative matter, how forcefully they are initially collided, and whether the negative (or, if the target consists of negative matter, matter) can be jettisoned, one's planet could be impacted by a macroscopic body traveling at superluminal speeds!

Why would an advanced (by local interstellar standards) civilization permit a primitive (by local interstellar standards) one to develop such capabilities if it could put an end to that?

This emDrive idea was mocked by everyone. NASA was not into it until very recently. To prove or disprove it. As long as 0bama does not take this the same way as al gore inventing the Internet if something more concrete happens...

I agree.

Does the warp drive act directly on every particle of the ship it drives? Or does it simply "push" the ship along. If it doesn't react on all the particles of everything in the ship it drives, then everything inside the ship will be forced by inertia through the rear bulkhead, provided the bulkhead is strong enough to keep from disintegrating, itself.

We are so far away from having a practical warp drive that, maybe the first thousand year old person will live that long before we have it.

It's call job security for NASA. Do some faulty advertising so that the people let government spend more of our tax dollars on their useless salaries.

If this is proven to be true, that would be amazing.
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[–]daneagles 391 points 9 hours ago

I'm not a physicist but maybe I can give you a more ELI5 answer to why everyone is freaking out about EmDrive right now.
The thing with the EMDrive system is that it's really a fundamental departure from previous engines in two major ways. For one thing, it doesn't require a propellant. Everything that we've ever sent into space since the first satellites and Apollo has been strapped onto a gigantic tank of fuel, which we then lit on fire and sent it into the upper atmosphere.

EMDrive achieves this by essentially "pushing off" the quantum vacuum, which causes the spacecraft to recoil in the opposite direction of motion and produces a small amount of thrust. As an analogy, consider a submarine: a submarine's propulsion system doesn't have to make use of strapping some giant fuel tank onto it - it can take advantage of the fact that it's submerged in its propellant (water) and instead we simply attach a rotor on the end which propels the submarine along. The EMDrive concept is doing the exact same thing, except this time the medium that we're "submerged" in is space itself. This explanation is a little light on a deeper scientific level but hopefully gets the general idea across.

The second reason why this is so revolutionary is because not only is the EMDrive much more efficient because it doesn't require a fuel tank to use, it also holds the possibility of travel faster than anything we could ever possibly build in the next century or more. I want to stress that this hasn't been confirmed for sure, and that for now this is just speculation, but what a more technologically mature version of the EMDrive would do is essentially contract the space directly in front of the spaceship, and expand the space behind the spaceship, meaning that when the spaceship is travelling, it's not moving straight through space; space itself is being contracted to make the journey much shorter. Think of sending a spacecraft from Earth to the moon; the distance is about 200,000 miles away. However, imagine now that instead of having to travel 200,000 miles, you only had to travel 100,000 miles because the space between Earth and the moon was contracted to make the distance shorter. You'd still be going the same speed, but the distance you'd have to travel would be substantially less because spacetime is being curved in your direction of motion, resulting in much faster travel times both around the solar system and beyond.

Also, if you don't have a science background it might be a bit overwhelming to understand why this is such a big deal in and of itself. You've probably heard that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and you may have also heard that as you approach the speed of light, anything travelling that fast has to have its mass approach 0 - this is why photons, the particles of light that move at light-speed, have no mass. Because of this, it is quite literally impossible to build a ship that could travel at anything even CLOSE to lightspeed, because in order to accelerate an object with a non-trivial mass (in fact, a HUGE mass, given that this is a spaceship), it would take more energy than we could ever possibly load onto a spaceship. This means that without the (eventual) invention of some kind of Alcubierre drive, it would be realistically not possible for us to even consider a mission shorter than the century+ timescale to any star system outside of ours. With EmDrive, that possibility could potentially be realized since you're not actually accelerating the spaceship to a high fraction of the speed of light; you're simply changing the space that it moves through.

This second application of the EMDrive is what's still very much contentious and still has yet to be proven, and you could probably see why - rigorous proof of this engine doing what its inventors claim it can would be a revolution of mind-boggling proportions and would completely change how we view space. This is the piece of the theory that Sonny White and his team are testing now; essentially what they're doing is setting up a small table with two beams of light going in opposite directions, where a beam of light is being forced through a test article designed to contract the space around it and thus make the beam of light appear at the detector SLIGHTLY faster than the control beam. If they compare the two beams of light and find that one arrived sooner than the other, it means the device has succeeded in shrinking the space in front of it which would be really huge news for the theory and device, and would definitely prompt the scientific community to turn a lot of their attention towards trying to disprove it since it's such a revolutionary idea.

Sorry this was so long but hopefully it helped answer your question.


http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/34lkqw/eli5_the_emdrive_warp_field_possible_discovery/cqvumbs

Real science is pushing science fiction out faster and faster. Everything is moving forward in parallel, faster and faster.

Today's fairy dust will be tomorrow's common concept, even throw away products in some cases.

imho if such exists they would ignore us as we ignore some tribes in new guinea.........not worth the effort ...but for maybe an extra terrestrial anthropologist passively watching
us once in awhile would be my guess (shaking its head/thenacles/robot body/wings //// whatever in pure dismay

as to interstellar......with so much real estate out there doubt that would be an issue either

the distances involved......if they have come this way they likely would not bother to come back .....not sure I would just looking at the state  of affairs the last 1000 years

 

How did the United States respond when it found out that the U.S.S.R. could deliver nuclear warheads to targets within its borders? How do you believe extraterrestrial governments would respond if civilizations such as those presently located in Earth developed the interstellar equivalent of that capability? (E.g., respond with preemptive strikes, the singular [i.e., black hole] option, etcetera.)

well if such technology worked..it would probably get us funny hairless monkey primates to get our heads out of the dirt and look at the stars maybe even slow down some of
the squabbling and mucking around in circles we seem to do as normal policy....

we probably need a truly stupid/silly/senseless gesture of some kind to get humanity to get its 'ducks in a row' and think more in the long term as a species a frigging hot
space ship would probably qualify from just a human knocking about the solar system point of view...

something like this would certainly qualify imho to get folks to sit up and take notice thats for sure.....would be nice I think humanity needs a kick in the ass to think bigger anyway

 

http://emdrive.com/

Probably a good idea to read the scientific articles.

There are unanswered questions - but the very point is that it is plausible that something works, but we don't know exactly how.