Out of Pod Experience

Moving at light speed is impossible right?

But you don't have to in order to travel faster then light, light follow gravity, stars, planets, dark matter and other things unknown they all bend it right?

So traveling in a straight line without the detours light runs along would be faster then light travel, no?

Nearest star might be right in our backyard when it seems to be way out in the suburbs.



Thought I'd just mention it, don't mock me to hard if I'm way off \ stating the obvious \ repeating others, my education comes from hofmanns lab, I didn't even start high school and I've never read a physics book :p

Actually I was trying to make sense of just that, wormholes!

I dismissed it as this as I don't get where does the actual "hole" part get into the picture? I'd think you'd just need a propolsion system for this? Thought wormholes where really far out sci fi stuff but isn't this really mundane?

I'm new at this xD

General relativity doesn't allow for anything to travel faster than the speed of light. This is referring to light traveling along the same path as the object in question. Obviously a light pulse traveling through a fiber optic cable that loops around the world will take longer to get across your desk than a beam of high energy electrons that are taking a direct path, but this doesn't mean that the electrons are going faster than light. To compare the two, they would need to be taking the same path.

Wormholes, however, get around this rule in an indirect way. Theoretical physicists have predicted that wormholes could exist without breaking the rules of general relativity. Einstein was one of the first to suggest the concept of a wormhole. It's hard to picture what a wormhole is in three dimensions, so instead imagine that the entire universe exists in a two dimensional plane, like a sheet of paper. When you travel between two dots on the paper, you would have to travel all the way across the paper. Now take the paper and roll it up so that the two dots are touching, and sew the two dots together. You can now get from one dot to the other by taking a different path along the paper, via the sewn together portion.

Note that the wormhole thing doesn't violate any of the rules of general relativity because you end up taking a different path. Light taking one path will always go faster than a space ship traveling the same path in question.

faster than light travel is a theoretical reality Alcubierre drive we just have to overcome the technical hurdles to achieve it. We cant travel faster than light does however we can move the end point closer to us thereby getting to the end quicker than light can

Put in laymans terms, You can't have a dragrace with light and win, but there may be ways to cheat.

The Alcubierre drive, star-trekky though it might sound, has some serious problems with it. The priamry one being that there is no known or predicted way to induce or stop a wave, which means that we don't have the faintest idea how to get it rolling, and once it is rolling we haven't got the faintest idea how to turn the brakes on.

If you ask my predictions, I think its far more likely that we will never develop faster then light travel, and will depend on high acceleration barges and hibernation techniques for commodity and personal transport (ala lighthuggers).

However, I think its extremely likely that we will find a way to make FTL communications.

In a way, we are partway to it now. There is a well founded theory that a bank of lasers could be used to send an elemental particle backwards in time. If you can do that, you can send a message back in time and broadcast it at the appropriate time for it to arrive at its intended destination when you want it to.

Bit of a cheat, but it would probably work.

That's a pretty extraordinary claim. Got a link?

That's why you don't log in anymore?

He MAY be thinking about quantum tunneling, which has been observed in modern day electronics, and is of particular interest to flash memory.

Wormholes have not been observed ever, and their existence depends upon things which are not known to be permitted by the laws of physics.

Wormhole is easy, Distance to point a to b is zero. even though point a and b are very far apart otherwise.

FTL drives are however various ways to a to b.

Conventionally going from a to b with current technology would be a very slow line taking ages to get to speed and just as much to slow down and currently according to current energy estimates we cannot do this yet anyways. If they where on a sheet of paper for this and all other examples ill talk about would be a drawn line between the two, there are few problems with drawing this faster, 1 friction, we are finding out more and more that space ISNT that empty and when you are traveling couple thosands of Km/s you're bound to run into something thats going to ruin your day or make your day that much worse and alot of small atoms in large numbers means trouble. 2 sir issac newton is the deadliest son of a b in space still hold true, go way too fast and dont dump off your sudden surge in movement and you are all pankcakes I say, pancakes.

Our next examples are fictional thankfully.

Star Trek shrinks the distance from a to b, recently this methood was thrown out by real phsycisist out the quantum window becuase of actual matter, dark matter, and dark energy between points a and b would prove just as troublesome as regular space travel essently making a brick wall to slam into when you got there. However I suspect they correct into the next model.

Which places a straw between point a and b. and everything in the straw is empty and the marbel has to squeeze though this staw to get from one end to the other. This creates a pocket the vessel (marble) travels down the straw shoving matter away from it. This is the one of the real ftl researchers are trying thier hands at the moment to get working.

Then our most exotic or fantastic form of ftl travel.

Battlestar and various other sci-fis including eve supposivly uses a methood that has a and b on one side of the page but the line connecting them are on the other side of that page. This helps ignore rules in regular space, however this means that anything entering in the new space must follow that spaces rules or die quite horribly then having ot make sure that the exit point is where you want it or you'd wind inside of a mountain.

And wormholes?

You essentially fold the paper so that a and b meet. and the rest of the sheet is actual space.

It's only impossible if Einstein was right.