Scientists may have figured out how to make a warp drive work

Ha, my Star Trek lore is lagging . I didn’t realized they had established a star for Vulcan. I made a poor choice using it as an example anyway as it is also the name of that proposed “Earth image” star people used to theorize about. And a town near where I live ( that makes tourist dollars from the Star Trek association) :slight_smile:

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…If we could just build a big enough Moog synthesizer…

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What names do these go by? I have never heard of these (but didn’t do my PhD in such stuff).

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This sounds a bit like a Tipler Cylinder - a consistent with all accepted rules back-in-time machine. Which has some difficult pre-requisites in the construction dept, (i.e the possesion of either negative energy or an infintely long cylinder with the mass of ten suns).

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I like to think “just a little less impossible.” I also think 1/2 filled glasses are the wrong size.

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I hope this is many many many years off engineering wise.

At our species’ current level of maturity, if we figure out how to drive even the tiniest masses at superluminal speeds, the first thing we’re going to do is weaponize it to make superluminal mass driver guns and kill the shit out of each other (even more so than we do normally).

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When theology can predict outcomes of experiments with the same precision and reliability that physicists can, or maybe build a computer or global navigation system or something like that, they can come back to the adult table.

Theoretical physics is mostly words, that is true, but when it has to put its money where its mouth is it usually can.

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They can’t even make a warped hard drive work.

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Theoretical physics is also ok at admitting “we don’t know, we’re just guessing this part.” [glares at theology].

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Full disclosure, I’m not a physicist either.

My understanding from what you are presenting is that all we have to do to achieve a solution is to shrink humans down to a size that they can fit into a tiny bubble / space ship… how hard can this be???

The trailer for the documentary below suggests that this has actually been in the works for many years:

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Zeppelins!
(I know, I know, practicality and engineering constraints, Yadda Yadda. I still love them)

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This page explains pretty well (even to an arts-major dufus like me):

https://www.askamathematician.com/2011/09/q-hyperspace-warp-drives-and-faster-than-light-travel-why-not/

tl;dr –

  • Spacelike-separated events (those which are far enough apart in space but close enough in time to make it impossible to travel from one to the other, even at the speed of light) have no absolute order: for different observers, one might come before the other, after it, or at the same time as it.

  • A spaceship engaging FTL warp drive and switching it off again are by definition spacelike-separated events (unless it’s doing donuts in Spacedock or something).

  • Therefore, there is a frame of reference in which the spaceship leaves warp drive before it enters it, providing the possibility for someone in that frame of reference to do something nefarious, like destroying the spaceship before it enters warp drive in the first place, which opens a whole can of causality worms.

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I saw Superluminal Mass Driver Guns open for Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci in 1996.

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image

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TBH, that’s a pretty good argument for the non-existence of a godhead. Of course that hasn’t been the intent of thousands of years of theological debate, but it certainly seems to have been the outcome!

I’ve actually experienced this working with fiber optics communications networks; you see AB in Vancouver, get BA in Edmonton

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Not necessarily.

The most robust chronology protection conjecture is that there would exist virtual particle path integrals along any CTC that would produce a singularity at the Cauchy horizon instead of the CTC. Roman rings don’t solve this problem.

You’re correct, at least for a globally superluminal Alcubierre metric tensor. Transiting between the flat space-time inside the bubble and the external universe would entail locally superluminal travel, which is still forbidden by special relativity. This is true for both the original Alcubierre solution in standard general relativity and these newer solutions based on conformal gravity which avoid violating the energy conditions that also plauge wormholes (Einstein–Rosen bridges).

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The block universe theory, where time travel is possible but time passing is an illusion - ABC News

Try this one on for size. Brain-bending past-present-and-future are all simultaneous, and only depend on your position and state of motion.

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While that’s true, Sabine Hossenfelder isn’t the mainstream press. She’s a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum gravity. When I saw the headline, I was entirely expecting to roll my eyes until I noticed whose YouTube channel @thomdunn was sharing.

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I haven’t watched the video yet, so I don’t have all the info. But based on the description it reminds me of the Mass Effect relays in the eponymous series: giant structures in space that launch ships faster than light.