/sci/ - Science & Math

That's what Warp Drives are for. It's not FTL travel, strictly speaking.

>>5878449
if we can just reach 1/2c, the whole solar system becomes our oyster. thats good enough for me.

why do you think it'll be impossible to circumvent?

even if you "can't" move faster than light, it's conceivable that there's a way to reposition an object from point A to point B without moving it.

>>5878459
all you need to do is get to charon, unfreeze the mass relay and then have do nothing but fap to asari women all day until the reapers come to do whatever they do before the story goes to shit.

>>5878464
people are all spun up about leaving our solar system. why? we have plenty of stuff here to fuck up for a long time.

>>5878463
Talking about Teleportation? Maybe of objects. But I would think it would require de-atomization and reconstruction on the other side... which means death of the original person.. as far as traveling FTL...

Theoretically speaking, what if we managed to get close (0.99C) and within that traveling object, the pilot spoke..) now from an outsiders perspective, would that sound wave travel faster than light?

>>5878459
OP here: having our solar system, with no habitable planets other than earth and still being doomed to our sun blinking out, is not good enough for me personally.
>>5878463
If you're talking about bending the fabric of space event horizon style, i hope that may someday become a feasible thing. im not holding my breath though
>>5878470
It's about ensuring the absolute continuation of the human race. Right now we are completely dependent on the sun (and our own planet for that matter). once that gives out, and it could happen in a shit ton of different ways, its all over folks. I'd like to die knowing that we're at least working on the tech to eventually look like what we have in the trek verse

>>5878542
>OP here: having our solar system, with no habitable planets other than earth and still being doomed to our sun blinking out, is not good enough for me personally.

Why do you care, we'll all be dead before any of this happens, including humans colonizing other planets.

>>5878559
You are the reason we are in the sorry state we are. Fuck you. Seriously fuck you. You are egotistical and myopic. Your attitude sickens me. I am far from a long haired hippie fag espousing a zero carbon footprint and veganism, but seriously, recycle every once and a while

>>5878570
>You are egotistical and myopic.
How am I being egotistical or shortsighted? I'm merely stating the obvious. It doesn't matter to any of us if the human race ever goes into deep space; none of us will be around if it ever happens anyway.

Your effort would be better spent on stuff that actually matters today, instead of daydreaming about sci-fi shit that's probably never going to happen.

>>5878590
the fact that you think that because you won't see it in your lifetime it therefore is of no significance to you makes you egotistical. The fact that you see it as a fruitless endeavor because of that fact makes you myopic.
And focusing on the permanent continuation of the human race is one of the most important things one can focus on. I wonder why you come to /sci/ at all

>>5878602
When I said "of no significance to you", you can take out the "to you" part. That was a typo

>>5878602
Telling me that I should focus on the things you find important is... egotistical.

Thinking that survival of the human race is important in the great framework of things is... myopic

The fact that I value things that will have an effect in my lifetime over things that will not is not egotistical. It is a pragmatic attitude, which will probably benefit many more people than yours.

Why can't we just build a stargate?

>>5878453
>It's not FTL travel, strictly speaking

But it is. Once you drop out of warp you could turn around and see yourself before you'd even left. Cause and effect would be broked.

>>5878542
What?! We are not stuck here. Far from it. FTL is an impossibility, but .97c travel is absolutely possible. It is an attainable goal, and assuming we are not made extinct before then, I think it's an excellent bet we will achieve it in the next 1,000-10,000 years. I know that seems like an eternity now, but it's *so short* in the grand scheme of things. We will have near-light-speed travel, lifespans will be extended to the point that if you jet to alpha centauri and back (which will be a short trip subjectively due to time dilation), the eight years you were gone from Earth will not seem like such a life-halting issue. Life spans will be looooooong. Maybe we'll be immortal. Maybe we'll exist as sentient machines, and when we take a trip through the stars we'll leave a copy of ourselves here and then reintegrate the two later. It's going to be fine, it's going to be sweet, and no one will say, "Man, TNG was cooler than this." People will say, "TNG was so short-sighted."

can space travel faster than the speed of light? If so ...

>>5878879
does it have mass?

>>5878894

1m^3 of space is 1kg of mass and -1kg of antimass.

>>5878906
your concept of space is false.

>>5878923

Pretty sure he was joking.

>>5878449
Humans are a remarkably resourceful species.

Even in the event that something like an Alcubierre Drive, traversable wormholes, or Infinite Improbability Drive doesn't turn out to be physically viable - if humans have the ambition and the motivation to travel beyond our solar system I am confident we will figure out a way to do it.

Maybe it'll be cryogenics, maybe generational ships, maybe something no one's ever thought of before - who knows. We'll certainly have to change our image of what it means to be an 'interstellar civilization', but I think we'll figure out a way to make it work.

>>5878449
An electrostatic hydrogen ramjet would feel like FTL to the people on board and doesn't need any new physics to work. Just don't plan on making too many round trips.

>>5878932
>We'll certainly have to change our image of what it means to be an 'interstellar civilization'
In particular, we won't be one.
We'll be a loosely associated collection of civilizations with a shared origin.

>>5879523
It's interesting to imagine though - a collection of say a dozen star systems with human colonies, each aware of the others and able to communicate but separated by lightyears.

>>5878633
You can pretend that being a pragmatist is altruistic, but we all know what you meant when you originally said "who cares, I'll be dead by then."
The continuation of human existence, since we have no evidence (yet) that there are other sentient lifeforms out there, is probably, at this moment, the single most important thing in the "great framework of things." Calling it shortsighted just means you have no idea how to frame something appropriately. You talk about pragmatism in one sentence and give me the whole "we're one blade of grass in a field" crap in the next.
All you've done so far is played devil's advocate because you're probably someone who likes to argue for no other reason than the sake of it.

>>5878932
I've heard this argument used in political science before regarding whether or not resource scarcity would lead to an increase in conflict. They called it the "Cornucopia argument." Essentially the fact that the population is skyrocketing past the Earth's carrying capacity doesn't matter because humans are "inherently innovative" and will find a way to maximize the energy found in current resources, or find new energy sources entirely.

My problem with it then, and I think it applies here too, is the whole thing seems directly contingent upon basically saying "don't worry guys, we'll think of something!" I mean sure, that's worked in the movies, and so far holds true, but is that a reliable philosophy?
Take poker for instance. You can go all in every hand, and as long as you win, you can say it works every time. The second it doesn't work, however, the consequences are catastrophic: game over.
I guess it just scared me more than other people.

>2013
>not trying to make wormholes

>>5878879
I thought there was a theory out there that there were parts of space going FTL as a result of the big bang. Something about them moving farther away at speeds just faster than light and yet there was a way to know they were there. Then again, my grasp on this stuff is tenuous at best and I was watching a lot of sci fi at the same time I was taking the class I think I learned about it in, so I could be mixing up info.

>>5878879
space time can move faster than light

this is where the concept of a warp drive comes from. if you find a way to warp space time, you can use it to your advantage and go faster than light

you dont need to move fast in space you just need move space

>>5878449
We'll never have FTL, no use crying about it. We just need to start thinking longer term.

The metaphor to use is a plant spreading seeds across barren ground to find rare footholds. Once we get self-reproducing manufacturing worked out, we'd spin off some factories to make seed capsules, designed to last 20,000 years on interstellar journeys. We'd send thousands of these seeds out on slow trips to neighboring stars. These seeds would hibernate until reaching a warm star with asteroid material to work with, then make more copies of themselves and spread to further systems. If they find a really habitable system (water planet), they'd break out the biosamples from deep freeze storage and jumpstart a biosphere, sending a message probe back to Earth to let us know we'd found the jackpot!

>>5879842
i honestly think the most trying period for humanity is going to be well within our own solar system.

if human colonies spread to the other planets, earth becomes disposable and/or a threat.

nobody is glassing the planet because of MAD, well whats going to happen when MAD isn't a factor anymore?

>>5879853
>if human colonies spread to the other planets, earth becomes disposable and/or a threat.

Did you leave your brain in your other pair of pants this morning? That's like saying "well I've got a tent in my car, I guess it doesn't matter if I burn down my house!"

>>5879878
What he's saying makes sense. Once people get properly established in space, there will probably be communities who can lay waste to the Earth while being virtually immune to nuclear retaliation from Earth. They'll even have ready access to weapons capable of wiping out cities without creating long term radioactivity issues.

Nuclear war will become a reasonable option for humanity to continue its typical warlike ways instead of a last-ditch deterrent which keeps the world largely peaceful due to the assurance of mutual destruction.

It's a problem for world peace to establish viable independent populations on the unassailable high ground.

>>5879878
>"well I've got a tent in my car, I guess it doesn't matter if I burn down my house!"

its like you don't even remember the cold war. this was literally the thinking of the people in charge, and they didnt even have a tent.

Even though wormholes and alcubierre drives are most likely impossible, so what? We have our entire solar system to dick around in, not to mention our oceans and crust, etc.

Even then there could still be massive sleeper ships that can go from one system to the other over the course of centuries or longer.We just won't have the boring, bland standard "galactic empire/federation/alliance", instead each system will be secluded from the rest, becoming almost a universe in of itself.

>>5878559
> we'll all be dead before any of this happens,
yeah m8, letz all get drunk and fuq all day, weer all gonna die in like 60 yrs n e way

>>5878795
thats just the image you would be seeing

>>5878542
The sun will last billions of years, it's completely irrational to use that as a reason we need to colonize other stars.

We shouldn't send anything more than interstellar probes until we can defend this solar system from a stray gamma ray burst or huge clouds of interstellar dust.

>>5880626
Imagine if a star teleported instantaneously 30 light minutes away. It would then orbit around its past self for thirty minutes.

>>5880156
i wouldn't go that far. nanotechnology and materials science could have a lot to say about useful casimir engines in 20 -30 years.

>>5880643
ya so?

>>5880649
Now Imagine if a scientist were to observe that phenomenon. How would he explain it?

>>5880643
>mind blown
Then I actually thought about that. No, that doesn't make any fucking sense.

>>5880652
It does, gravity travels at c.

>>5880657
Shit, I forgot about that..

Okay so it orbits it's 'shadow' of it's previous self , so to speak. While it's really neat & weird, I don't follow how that breaks anything.

I mean, when we see our reflection in a mirror it's an almost immeasurable amount in the past and that doesn't cause any problems.

So just add some mass and increase the distance and boom, same shit.

It seems that there is some support for the possibility of an Alcubierre drive, but what about a hyperspace/subspace drive?

>>5880676
There is no evidence for the existence of hyperspace or subspace.

>>5880680
So that fact that multidimensional shapes exist isn't proof of hyper/sub space?

>>5880680
What about the creation of artificial subspace regions?

>>5880669
It breaks conservation of energy. I hope you understand that the "old" star cannot be affected by the "new" star's gravitation.

Think of Kepler's laws in term of kinetic/potential energy.

>>5880645
Do you also believe there will be a singularity in 20 years?

>>5880693
Oh. Interesting. Welp, now my mind is in a pretzel.

Good game.

>>5880693
Actually it's far simpler than I thought. Just think of it in potential energy and you'll see why it doesn't make sense.(Too me at least.)

>>5880693
>It breaks conservation of energy.
Not necessarily. The gravitation could be explained by a sort of graviton radiation as an effect of the "warp".

here you go guys
http://banoosh.com/blog/2013/06/29/nasa-admits-alcubierre-drive-initiative-faster-than-the-speed-of-light/

>>5880729
>article links a video from thrivemovement
>expect /sci/ to take you seriously

Look my man I dont want to rain on your parade, but the entirety of the rest of this board does and will.

>>5878459
Just because we can't go the speed of light does not mean that we cannot achieve interstellar travel.
By the time we get to that level technology we will all be computers anyway.

>>5880693
OK, I'm no physicist so I'm probably about to make an ass of myself: But why would it break the conservation of energy?

That effect of gravity would have existed regardless of whether the star moved or not. Only in the latter scenario, the 'new' gravity is being 'radiated' from a different location?

Explain why I'm retarded.

>>5880997
>Explain why I'm retarded

You believe in magic sky wizards

>>5878795

Warp drives work in hyperspace, avoiding such paradoxes.

>>5880643

iNTERADASTING

>>5881025
wat.

Don't worry OP.

Observed speed dx/dt is limited to the SOL but EXPERIENCED speed dx/dt' has no upper bound.

>>5879684
hyperinflation?

>>5881037
i.e we can travel to anywhere in the universe within a reasonable time (< one human life), problem is everything outside of the ship will have progressed millions or billions of years.

>>5881064

If you travel fast enough you can witness the end of time.

>>5879842
>implying modern manufacturing can produce something that will last that long

The speed of light is limit of the measurement of speed, not the speed limit.

>>5880161
Fucking futurists. Just because the guy doesn't care about what happens 10K years from now doesn't mean he doesn't care about what happens 10 years from now, or tomorrow.

>>5878477
Your last sentence assumes that velocities simply add like vectors. They don't work like this at high speeds, and this is special relativity. In any inertial reference frame, nothing massive moves FTL

>>5880686
Existing in one's imagination is not the same as existing in real life.

>>5881068
yeah, it is a hard problem. But at least it doesn't break the laws of physics like FTL.

The hardest part about building things to last is testing. To make something last a thousand years, you need to test it (and redesign it when it breaks) for several thousand years. That is one reason you would make thousands of seeds. Each would have a slightly different design, hoping that statistically one of them was more long lasting than the others.

It is sobering to think that we have never created technology that has lasted more than a few hundred years! There is a lightbulb that has been shining continuously for over a hundred years, and the Voyager probes have been going for 40 years. But other than static architecture, we have not created things that last a millennium.

>>5880693
Are you counting in the energy required to teleport a 10^30 kg object? Because something tells me it'll be bigger than potentional+kinetic energy of star riding on (soon to disappear) gravity waves. Imagine making waves in a pond (2d) with a ball, then raising it in the air (3d) and moving it meter away; it'll move until the waves stop and it won't violate any law because you had to put in energy to move it. Now up that 1 dimension and think about it.

>>5881025

that's not a fucking paradox you stupid cunt

>>5878449
i dont think we will ever be able to travle FTL. Photons exist at the speed of light, they dont accelerate to

>>5880693
Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory offers a potential solution to this. If under 'normal' circumstances, lightspeed gravitational waves are actually interference patterns between advanced and delayed wave, it's not inconcievable that the conditions needed to produce a warp drive would produce an unbalanced advanced wave that would interfere destructively with the lightspeed waves. It does require information to propogate backwards through the lightcone, but if warp drives are a thing we're past that point anyway.

>>5878876
>.97c travel is absolutely possible
Do you have ANY IDEA how much energy that requires?
I sure hope you have some fantastic solution hidden up your ass because spending that much energy on a glorified vacation is beyond insane.

>>5879942
he probably wasn't alive during the cold war anon. As evidence, I offer you everything he's said so far

>>5880156
the point is limitations. Staying in our solar systems means we are at the mercy of the sun. If the slightest thing upsets the delicate balance that allows for human life, then there won't be any human life anymore. Getting out of our solar system eliminates this problem.

>>5881115
Why? there's essentially no difference. Every reason you can give for not giving a fuck about centuries from now can be applied to not caring about decades from now, except the most obvious, selfish reason. So, as this guy so eloquently put it, >>5880161, I ask you his question again

>>5880632
I was just using it as one example of the many things that could go wrong. The point is we are vulnerable since we are confined to just one planet or system

>>5881065
I saw that on an episode of futurama so i know it must be true

>>5878876
>this should never matter because you won't live for millenia

Founding a new planetary civilization in another system would be the most expensive and difficult task we have ever undertaken as a species. Just the planning and construction stages alone would probably last multiple lifetimes. Some fundamental and novel problems would have to be solved; for example, what kind of society and government will this new planet have?

And all this for what? There will be no material benefit for the Earth, and I fear humanity simply doesn't have the will for such a selfless, costly act. We're barely even willing to take care of people on this planet, and we have more than enough to go around.

>>5882126
We don't even need to start planning for a new civilization yet. We just need to start setting up some basic infrastructure.
>refueling stations in orbit
>asteroid mining
>orbital manufacturing and ship building
>reliable shuttle spacecraft to get people and supplies that can't be manufactured, into orbit.

>>5882136
Well we should be setting those up anyways if we have any plans on developing our own system, let alone others.

Moving FTL isn't that bad. Think about it. If you move at the FTL, than from your perspective you reach any point in the universe in zero time. That's relativity! The problem is that acceleration and deceleration at safe speeds to FTL and back to zero m/s would take around 6 years total.

>>5882150
And if Superman flies around the Earth fast enough, he can go back in time to save Lois

>>5882150
WAT, even at 10xFTL it woulds take 100 of years to travel to certain places in the universe

>>5882136
infrastructure has to be beneficial...ask yourself this, how could we do any of the above and have a real benefit from it?
Just doing it for proof of concept is a waste of money.
Source:NASA

>>5882166
It's not a "proof of concept".
There are several corporations that want to expand their industry into space, but they are all waiting for someone to set up the infrastructure for them, which the government doesn't want to do.

>>5882165
Perspective buddy, perspective.

>>5882175
Why don't they?
How is the government stopping anyone from entering space?
How will it benefit us now...by throwing trillions of dollars of resources in a failing global economy by throwing it into space with no direction or objective...
How will this benefit the economy?

>>5882381
>How is the government stopping anyone from entering space?
They're not, per se. But the only way companies could make profit from space development right now is by selling things to the government.

Guys, I'm afraid we'll never see the stars. Fully immersive VR and hard AI will be here by 2040 (and that's a conservative estimate, things are moving much faster today that was predicted 10 years ago). Who will care about space exploration when they can live out their free time in a virtual universe of their own choosing?

I think we'll end up plugged into a matrix of our own design, like plants, but not because someone will force us. No, we'll want to go in, and spend all our time there because it will be insanely pleasurable. Imaging being the god of your own reality. Living out your virtual 'life' as an all-powerful being in a world whose only purpose is to bend itself to your entertainment and will.

I'm afraid we'll never spread to the stars, because we won't even try to reach for them. Maybe this is why we haven't detected any intelligent life. Maybe an intelligent species retreats into VR when they advance far enough to produce such technology. After all, why struggle and suffer hardship in this reality when you can substitute it for your own, which is so lifelike and realistic your brain will never know the difference.

Not trying to be edgy, but I think this is a valid concern. We already have so many bright, young people addicted to games like WoW, just try to imagine what will happen in 2-3 decades when VR becomes indistinguishable from reality.

It wouldn't necessarily suck. We would just need to invest in life extension technologies so we can travel to these distant star systems.

>>5878449
> cock-sucking logic and faggot lies

No it doesn't. More FTL solutions to the field equations have been discovered in the past two decades than in the preceding century. The FTL barrier was set 108 years ago, and weakened 11 years after its creation by General Relativity.

And we don't even have a GUT yet. Future technologies and Future physics have immeasurably more weight. In short, you're a fucktard.

>>5882709
Man, you're post really changed my mind anon. You must be so proud of yourself, being able to have civil, intelligent discourse with others. Kudos

>>5882671
I feel like if you haven't read The Atopia Chronicles, you definitely should

>>5878449
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/01/reviewing-woodward-book-making.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.6178

>>5882920
Never heard of it, but I'll give it a look. Thanks for the suggestion, Anon.

>>5879842
does the treeship yggdrasil or muirwood mean anything to you?

>>5878449
>oh no, we'll have to take several months/years to go from point A to B
As long as spaceships become cheaper and cheaper, we'll colonise everything.

Just need an interstellar spaceship to be affordable by a hundred people of something.
If we don't collapse to stone age population-level, it would mean virtually daily colony ship launches, if not quicker.

>>5882150
>safe speeds to FTL and back to zero m/s would take around 6 years total.
but it takes only about a year if you accelerate with 9.81m/s^2 to "reach" c

c/g ~= 30*10^6s

>>5879878
watch Vandread, Earth becomes a pretty big threat, harvesting body parts from colonized planets to ensure their immortality.
inb4: "lelelel, weaboo faggot watches animu"

>>5881065
why not build a restaurant in a bubble that drifts forwards and backwards along the timeline at the destruction of the universe.
We can call it...
I dunno...
"The Restaurant at the End of the Universe".
What do you guys think?

>>5883119
>watch Vandread, Earth becomes a pretty big threat, harvesting body parts from colonized planets to ensure their immortality.
Yeah, that makes the plot of the Matrix sound realistic

>>5883127
well, the idea of the people of Earth wanting immortality is a common one today.
Think of the money corporations would make off of regular operations to increase your lifespan.
And then they realise they can just give you fresh body parts from planets millions of miles away.
the next step is creating ships to get those parts.

>He thinks you have to expend energy in order to displace matter

>>5883139
Or, you know, they could spend the time and energy growing new organs in pigs or whatever.

>>5883146
I dunno, it's anime. The whole crux of it is fighting of humans to unite men and women.
Point is, the **idea** of Earth being a threat is perfectly tangible.
If not for organs, then maybe because they dislike the way a colony looked at them. Who knows? Humans are fickle creatures.

>>5883151
Earth governments have had enough of corporations basing their headquarters offworld to aviod paying tax.

>>5883154
there we go. See, you kind of get it. Some kind of punishment would inspire humans to get off their asses and invent shit.

>>5879648
I'm not pretending that being pragmatic is altruistic; I am claiming that I am both.

Again, the belief that we are special because we are 'sentient', whatever that means, is the epitomy of navel-gazing.

Being pragmatic and referring to how little influence the human race has in the great scheme of things is not contradictory.

All you've done so far is play devil's advocate because you're probably someone who likes to argue for no other reason than the sake of it.

>>5881064
I can see it now. The first crew boards the first near-lightspeed space craft to travel to an uninhabited planet. On the journey, thousands of years pass around them, and when they reach their destination after what feels like a year or two for them, they find the planet already densely populated by humans who, over the course of those thousands of years that passed, invented traversable wormholes or warp drives and got there first.

This concept could potentially hold humans back from making the first step into interstellar travel.

>>5881816
The problem of energy isn't going away anytime soon, but it is going away. The time frame given in the post you replied to was "1,000-10,000 years." In that time, assuming no extinction event has occurred, it's reasonable to expect that usable energy will become too cheap to meter.

As for the fuel used to accelerate a craft to .97c, anti-hydrogen is the only way to go. It's the most energy-dense substance currently known to science, and when you're trying to accelerate to relativistic speeds (and back down to zero relative to Earth), energy density is king.

Of course, it takes even more energy to create anti-hydrogen than you get by reacting it, so you need an almost limitless source of energy. Energy needs to be so abundant that mankind simply can't use it all. The sun seems a good candidate, and solar panels (not tremendously more efficient than those of today, but a shitload more of them) would be a viable means of tapping it. The plan would be for self-replicating robots building themselves and solar panels out of materials that are already found in abundance in lunar regolith. You build 20 or 30 robots, give them a few decades to increase in numbers and build your solar array, and then you power Earth for free. Let the robots continue building until the entire far side of the moon is a blanket of solar panels, add some self-replicating linear accelerator factories, and you have your source for anti-hydrogen.

I have to disagree with that. The best fuels are the ones you don't have to carry with you.

>>5883264
And I don't know why that didn't quote.
>>5883246

>>5882126
>I fear humanity simply doesn't have the will for such a selfless, costly act.

Here's thirty years and ten billion dollars humanity spent to find the Higgs boson. Don't forget that among the countless selfish, shortsighted masses are those precious few with vision. They are outnumbered, but they are unstoppable.

>>5883268
Don't forget twenty billion dollars for nuclear fusion.

>>5883264

Great except they don't work.
To quote from the atomic rocketry bible:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight.php#id--Bussard_Ramjet

Things started to unravel in 1978. T. A. Heppenheimer wrote an article in Journal of the British Interplanetary Society entitled "On the Infeasibility of Interstellar Ramjets." Heppenheimer applies radiative gas dynamics to ramjet design and proves that radiative losses (via bremsstrahlung and other similar synchrotron radiation-type mechanisms) from attempting to compress the ram flow for a fusion burn would exceed the fusion energy generated by nine orders of magnitude, that is, one billion times. The energy losses will probably show up as drag. This was confirmed by Dana Andrews and Robert Zubrin in 1989.

The effect of drag? What it boiled down to was that the ramjet had a maximum speed, where the relative velocity of the incoming hydrogen equaled the drive's exhaust velocity. It has a "terminal velocity", in other words.

A proton-proton fusion drive has an exhaust velocity of 12% c, so a proton-proton fusion Bussard Ramjet would have a maximum speed of 12% c. You may remember that a spacecraft with a mass ratio that equals e (that is, 2.71828...) will have a total deltaV is exactly equal to the exhaust velocity. So if a conventional fusion rocket with a mass ratio of 3 or more has a better deltaV than a Bussard Ramjet, what's the point of using a ramjet?

>>5883277
Well of course it won't work if you put a giant magnetic mirror on the front. That's why you use an electrostatic collector.

>>5883283
Read the article, friend. The limitation has nothing to do with collection, and everything to do with drag and exhaust velocity.

>>5883287
The criticism centers around synchrotron radiation, which happens because the ions follow a spiral path through the ramjet. If you remove the magnets they follow nice, efficient straight lines.

>>5883293
It doesn't matter. Once the incoming velocity of your hydrogen fuel equals the exhaust velocity of your helium exhaust, you can't accelerate your craft any further. This is still .12c, which is tremendous, but it's not good enough for interstellar trips, especially when anti-hydrogen presents an alternative that can get you up to .97c.

>>5883123
This.

Do want.


I also want to find a desert planet and make Dune.

>>5878449
We will never travel faster than a man can run
We will never travel faster than a horse can run
We will never travel faster than the speed of sound
We will never travel to the moon
the next breakthrough is just around the corner, remember nobody expected the Write Bros. to achieve powered heavier than air flight when they did, it was considered impossible, sure birds could but they where small and a man is too big.
Same with Yeager and the sound barrier, people of the time thought it was a fundamental barrier, sure a bullet can but bullets are small and a man is big
so now when people say "We will never travel faster than the speed of light" and that it is a fundamental barrier and sure there are particles that can travel faster but those are small and a man is big I can't help but think of those historical examples.

>>5883324
1/10

>>5883319
That's because you're still thinking of a mirror design that decelerates the hydrogen on the way in. Think of the difference between a ramjet and a scramjet.

>>5880657

then how can it escape a black hole? (of ourse anything else would violate casuality)

>>5880700

mfw I go to /r/futurology to laugh at those faggots

>>5883334
This is a whole other level of theoretical. A bussard ramjet is science fiction, a bussard scramject is science fiction fiction. They belong in science fiction books read by characters within science fiction books.

>>5878795

please explain how casuality would be broken, preferably as a thought experiment

>>5883342

It doesn't. Seen any gravitons lately?

>>5883355

yea I have one in my pocket, want to see it?

>>5883360

Actually, I don't want to see anything you've had 'in your pocket.'

>>5883363

It's sticky...

>>5883351
Antimatter factories, meanwhile, are totally realistic.

>>5883367
We make antimatter *now.* You're equating a theoretical improvement on a theoretical starship design to existing technology?

>>5883277
very interesting, thanks anon! I hadn't heard this refutation before. Another promising idea falls to the laws of thermotynamics...

>>5883353
A man gets into his FTL ship and accelerates the space around his ship to a speed faster than light. He takes a trip to Alpha Centauri. To him, the trip takes four minutes. Because he never accelerates, but merely accelerates space around him, he experiences no time dilation. His frame of reference is never different than that of Earth. He returns to Earth immediately. Both his watch and the clocks on Earth show the round trip taking eight minutes.

He gets back into his ship and returns to Alpha Centauri. This time, before activing his space-warping drive, he accelerates using conventional rockets to a significant percentage of light speed away from Earth. He no longer has the same reference frame as Earth. What is "now" to him, is no longer "now" to those on Earth, but rather the past. He then turns on his space warping drive and accelerates space around his ship to a speed faster than light and returns home. Because his frame of reference was not the same as Earth's during this trip, he arrives home before he left. This is time travel, which allows for effects to precede causes, and throws causality out the window.

>>5883387
Existing technology can produce 10 milligrams of antimatter every billion years, and can store it for less than a second. A chemical rocket would get to the other side of the galaxy before your antimatter rocket had even finished fuelling.

>>5883402
I'm sorry you don't like what experts in their fields have to say about bussard scramjets. Everyone knows that if scientists say something is impossible, you get to ignore them, because flight, supersonic airplanes, etc.
Here, why don't you chat with this fellow for awhile?
>>5883324

>>5883409
Hey, if you want to ignore the proposed solutions and try to get to alpha centauri on a hundred antiprotons and a Penning trap, I won't stop you.

>>5883415
I'm saying that we'll perfect magnetic bottles for storing frozen anti-hydrogen long, looooooooong before we could ever conceivably build a bussard scramjet. We will have handheld fusion power before we have bussard scramjets.

>>5883418
So what you're saying is that you're confident in your assumptions about things you have not knowledge of.

Anyway, you're ignoring the *staged* Bussard ramjet, in which case successively larger trailing ramjets throw energy and momentum forward to smaller ones.

>>5883422
Look, I already provided a link to
http://www.projectrho.com
which is the best collection of sourced facts and credible opinions on the subject I am aware of. You are right, *they do not have the final say on what is possible,* reality does. But neither should their opinions be disregarded simply because they do not mesh with yours. I hope you are right, I hope mankind builds rockets that can get infinitely close to the speed of light and have infinite delta-v. And if I say the it doesn't look possible and provide a link to sourced evidence suggesting it doesn't look possible, it's because I thought you'd want all available information on the subject, not only that which agrees with what you already believe.

>>5883429
>Look, I already provided a link to
>http://www.projectrho.com
>which is the best collection of sourced facts and credible opinions on the subject I am aware of.

>collection of... opinions

I'm familiar with that site. It's interesting in places, but only reliable where it's talking about history.

>>5883418
And we'll just ignore that the antimatter reaction will lose energy as neutrinos and photons that are too high frequency to be reflected by a mirror built from atoms. Antimatter is magic, don't you know.

>>5883438
Oh, and by the way, this is me:
>>5883422
>>5883438

I didn't post in the thread before these.

I sympathise with OP but don't share his view. When playing Civilisation (or other explore the map games), my interest level is 1 (normalised) right up until the the last dark pixel is removed, at which point my interest is 0.

>>5879676

I think our first experiments should be trying to pull a whale through a straw. If we can do that, going through wormholes shouldn't be much more complicated.

It'll only take something really shit to happed or an imminent apocalypse then we'll probably figure ou a way

>>5883246

Isn't there some physical entanglement involved with creating antimatter? I remember hearing from somewhere that creating any decent amount of antimatter takes an extremely long amount of time, and that no amount of technology advance is really going to speed it up.

Another thing is, where the hell would you keep that much antimatter? It hardly seems like a good idea to leave vast quantities of an element that could turn the earth into a bunch of crumbly bits if it were to be exposed to the air lying around.

I think humans should worry about expanding life indefinitely and colonizing the moon before we worry about colonizing the universe.

>>5883398
>in space
>accelerates the space around him
>accelerating nothing
>wut

>>5879676
>implying we aren't
>>5883037

Why don't people get that the reason we will never achieve FTL isn't "cause it's hard"

"We've done hard stuff before guys, so we'll figure it out!"

It's not that we can't think of a way because it's hard. We can't think of a way because it's forbidden by physical law. When was the last time we broke the laws of physics?

>>5884088
Ur mum broke the laws of physics, she should be a black hole with all that mass yet isn't.

>>5883324
>Not understanding the fundamental laws of physics
Everything that you listed happened before we had a firm grasp of classical physics. They were deemed impossible for their time on account of ambitions and expectations. Now that our general understanding is much more advanced than say 300-400 years ago, we can theoretically plot out new ways of accomplishing previously thought impossible things, while still firmly grasping and acknowledging what we cannot accomplish per laws of physics, mathematics, etc

>>5883929
I'm not sure what you mean by physical entanglement. If you mean that you can't make anti-matter without making an equal amount of matter, you are correct. As for, "No amount of technology is going to speed it up." I'd have to disagree. Even if 10,000 years of research produce only minor improvements in anti-matter production (a pessimistic view) you can still make more with more facilities running in parallel. Take the output of one future linear accelerator, and multiply that by the number of such accelerators you can power using a field of solar panels that cover half the moon's surface, and you end up with a large figure. This still would not likely mean, "Free anti-matter for everybody!" But it should mean we can use significant amounts of it for moving spacecraft about the solar system. Repeat the process on Mercury, and you've got enough to start sending more than just a handful of ships to other stars.

>>5883181
Your logic is circular and stupid, and after this I'm done replying to you.
>navel-gazing
>not understanding how something technically not that important overall can still be the most important AND not realizing that his/her attitude is the most defeatist thing possible

just leave

>>5883200
No matter what the risks are, you're still going to find a few dozen people out of 7 billion with the drive and qualifications (whatever those may be) to take those risks

>>5883322
soon, far away planets will be colonized only by film crews in order to reproduce our favorite sci fi movies without CGI or special FX, but with real aliens and on real non-earth planetary surfaces.

I see it now.

>>5884088
There have been circumstances where fundamental tenets of hard sciences have been revised due to new information. That isn't to say that the current laws of physics are breakable in any sense, only that there are things in our universe still not explained, and currently inexplicable given our current understanding. Precluding the possibility that new information might change the entire foundation of the science makes you of a similar attitude as the people that killed other people for trying to tell them the concept of a geocentric universe was wrong.

>>5885646
So far, the Mach effect is shaping up to be the 21st century's photoelectric effect.

>>5881008
>You believe in magic sky wizards.
What the hell is the point of posts like this?
The guy asked humbly and politely for something to be explained.
If you didn't feel like explaining why did you respond at all?

>>5878449

>>5883904
we could pull whale through a straw, but it wouldn't live through it obviously

they'll eventually figure out a way. i know all the hardcore physicsfags think that Einsteins equations are the word of god but that's simply not the case. There are so many missing pieces of our understanding of the universe, how is it impossible that there just might be some way to go faster than light?

>>5885703

There are these creatures called trolls.

They believe pleasure can only come in the form of frustrating others by pretending to be horrible cunts.

They make themselves horrible cunts in the process.

And they draw genuinely stupid people like flies, who then team up with them, albeit seriously.

"The troll racist comes first, then the actual racist."

If we can't move faster than light could we make light move faster?

>>5887302
We could put an enraged bear behind it, it work in cartoons.

>>5886669
Thats a very good way of putting it mate.

>>5887302
b..but we want to slow it down, so we can get faster than it

>>5886666
OP here, wasn't calling it an impossibility, I was just saying I'd be sad if humans never figured out a way to do it.

>>5882671
We wouldn't have the resources to live in a virtual reality like that.

>>5884109
How do you know we have a firm grasp of the fundamental laws of physics now?

How do you know what we "know" now won't turn out to be wrong?

>>5878449
I think the fact that we have never noticed any alien visitors (definitively) sort of proves that FTL travel isn't possible. You'd expect there to be interstellar civilizations if it was possible by now...maybe

If time travel will be invented within my lifetime, I will travel back in time and post in this thread.

>>5885654
not really. Photoelectric effect was an easily observed phenomenon that needed new theories (quanta) to explain. Mach effect is a theory that we can't get clear evidence to prove. Most physics is like that now. The low hanging fruit has already been picked.

>>5888811
thanks anon. You truly are a real human bean and real hero

>>5888804
I feel like your assumption is biased. I mean, maybe we are the most technologically advanced civilization in the universe. Maybe we're the least and every other civilization has upheld something like the prime directive to prevent us from finding out about them. Maybe there's some stupid MIB-style shit going on right now. "By now" is just an arbitrary place in time. We have no frame of reference for how long it should approximately take for technology like that to develop, because we don't know how to do it and don't know of anyone that does.

>>5888938
That disproved pseudo-philosophy is not a "theory".

>>5888938
>The low hanging fruit has already been picked.

They said the same thing before quantum mechanics was discovered.

>>5889151
>We have no frame of reference for how long it should approximately take for technology like that to develop
Any inertial frame would work.

>>5891339
lol

>>5888938
It doesn't help that this particular well was thoroughly poisoned after the Dean drive fell through.

>>5892431
It is not funny.

In the high mountains of Tibet, in the South, the highest part, no horses can live at that altitude. It is the only area where tribes never raid each other's livestock or goods.

It seems that fast getaways are important when raiding. It makes for a larger search area. So, no FTL travel may be a benefit to humanity.

>>5893893
i beg to differ. Confusing a scientific frame of reference with a social frame of reference makes me chuckle every time

>>5893999
interesting, where can I read more about this?