Sensible Erection | Actually Faster Than Light

Tuesday, 18 September 2012

quote [ A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel -- a concept popularized in television's Star Trek -- may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say. ]

I leave it to the devoted members to point all the ways this is bullshit - but hey, it's fun bullshit.

Search terms: Miguel Alcubierre, Faster than Light, Warp Drive

[sci&tech] [by bathoz@8:58amGMT] [+9 Interesting]

Comments

Chop-Logik said @ 9:17am GMT on 18th Sep [Score:5 Interesting]
Obligatory: Warp Drives May Come With a Killer Downside

robotroadkill said @ 11:18am GMT on 18th Sep
What about the ship itself: wouldn't that be like the space debris and be wrecked after it stops?

karakth said @ 1:13pm GMT on 18th Sep
Screw light travel, we've got ourselves a killer defense system here.

The further away they are, the harder we'll blow them.

karakth said @ 1:14pm GMT on 18th Sep [Score:5 Funny]
Up. Blow them up.

damnit said @ 4:14pm GMT on 18th Sep
awwww

*puts pants back on*

cb361 said @ 4:21pm GMT on 18th Sep
Don't worry. We're keeping your FTL gamma-ray-ejeculate facials in reserve as weapon-of-last-resort.

graham said @ 11:05pm GMT on 18th Sep
This is why I'm glad you can't edit comments on this dinosaur.

-_- said @ 9:30am GMT on 18th Sep
"But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light."

That seems awfully presumptuous to me.

schatten00777 said @ 10:33am GMT on 18th Sep
I thought the whole notion of the "fabric of space" thing was a shortening of distance, not a bypassing of the speed of light.

Vic said @ 11:59am GMT on 18th Sep
Well presumably, they're just misusing the language in this case. If you temporarily shorten the distance between two locations for the purpose of travel between them, once you've travelled there and space/time returns to its normal distance, you've effectively travelled faster than the speed of light, even if you never actually did break that barrier.

cb361 said @ 4:23pm GMT on 18th Sep
Yeah, but it still seems to break that information-not-propagating-faster-than-light thing that Stephen Hawking was going on about.

cb361 said @ 11:31am GMT on 18th Sep
Presumptuous? The unspeakably omnipotent members of the Complector Council are bound by nothing else save the laws of physics, and are generally held to be putting considerable effort into getting round those.

Seneki69 said @ 11:33am GMT on 18th Sep [Score:5 Insightful]
I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong...

Supreme_Coconut said @ 3:37pm GMT on 18th Sep
Oh God, the nightmares are going to come back again!

wynterbourne said @ 5:25pm GMT on 18th Sep [Score:1 WTF]
Several years ago some guy was pestering a friend of mine, a druggy named Caspar, to let him try some LSD. After a few weeks Caspar got fed up and told the idiot to come by and he'd let him trip. A few minutes after he took the acid Caspar plugged in Event Horizon.

That boy still isn't right.

eggboy said @ 10:03pm GMT on 18th Sep
Caspar is an arsehole.

wynterbourne said @ 10:18pm GMT on 18th Sep
Yes, yes he is.

backSLIDER said @ 1:15am GMT on 20th Sep
I was staying over at a friends house when we were 16 and he had Aliens and this movie. I had heard that Aliens was scary and I wasn't in the mood for a scary movie... I didn't sleep for three days.

DuncmanG said @ 2:39am GMT on 19th Sep
That is a great fucking movie.

Garr123 said @ 7:50am GMT on 28th Sep
I feel it starts out with a lot of promise, then slowly disapoints.

spazm said @ 12:00pm GMT on 18th Sep
Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed. ~Howard Nemerov

kichijoii said @ 8:05pm GMT on 18th Sep
Clever, except that the shadow is not a "thing;" it's a no-thing, an absence rather than a presence.

spazm said @ 8:08pm GMT on 18th Sep
Yeah. I think you missed it.

arrowhen said @ 8:37pm GMT on 18th Sep
I did too, I guess.

schatten00777 said @ 9:58pm GMT on 18th Sep
Speed of shadow = Speed of light?

mechanical contrivance said @ 11:26pm GMT on 18th Sep
The Neverending Story 2 says the speed of darkness is faster than the speed of light.

-_- said @ 2:13am GMT on 19th Sep
It is.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 2:30am GMT on 19th Sep
How?

-_- said @ 3:17am GMT on 19th Sep [Score:1 Insightful]
Sorry, saying darkness is faster than light is like saying the track is faster than the horse. My mind was elsewhere.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 5:50am GMT on 19th Sep
I like that analogy.

-_- said @ 11:06pm GMT on 19th Sep
Just a thought though...

Think of a photon as a pixel moving across your screen.
The top speed at which the pixel can move seamlessly across the screen is determined by the refresh rate of the monitor.
The refresh rate must be greater than the speed of the pixel's movement by enough to maintain seamless translations of location.
Thereby the track has to be faster than the horse.

-_- said @ 11:27pm GMT on 19th Sep
Even then I'm not saying that darkness is faster than light, only space-time. For information to be capable of propagating at the speed of light the "refresh rate" of space-time needs to be slightly faster.

happiest_sadist said @ 5:56am GMT on 20th Sep
Not necessarily, since the location of a photon in motion is not determinate in the way that the location of a "moving" pixel is.

-_- said @ 7:28am GMT on 20th Sep
Please .. elaborate.

donnie said @ 8:52pm GMT on 20th Sep [Score:1 Informative]
Your analogy is crude and fraught with complication, but that's not to say that science doesn't have something in the ballpark like this - Phase Velocity comes to mind...

-_- said @ 10:00pm GMT on 20th Sep
Thank you donnie :)
" The superluminal phase velocity does not violate special relativity, as it carries no information. "
That's a much better way of putting it.

chold_numa said @ 3:17am GMT on 19th Sep
A little disingenuously, light needs to travel, but the shadow is already there.

GordonGuano said @ 3:53am GMT on 19th Sep
High magic field.

edga alunpo said @ 1:04pm GMT on 18th Sep
Scientists define the physical laws.... Technicians break 'em.

I've always been amazed that what mankind thinks up, eventually (may) becomes reality.

danshyu said @ 1:10pm GMT on 18th Sep
I want to believe!

DarkShadowRavenDragonGrrl69 said @ 1:41pm GMT on 18th Sep
No references to FTL? Huh.

In any case, yes, please.

ckfahrenheit said @ 3:51pm GMT on 18th Sep
... may not be as unrealistic as once thought ...

1. work out exactly how unrealistic warp drive is
2. brew really hot tea
3. ???
4. P̡R̛͟O͏F̀IT͏ ҉!̡̨!̧!҉̶

darkener said @ 6:59am GMT on 19th Sep
1. Work out exactly how unrealistic warp drive is.
2. Stand on a toilet to hang a clock.
3. ???
4. LIBYANS!

donnie said @ 10:11am GMT on 19th Sep
Maybe in the future plutonium will be available in every corner drugstore...

ckfahrenheit said @ 7:05am GMT on 20th Sep
I forgot, we need an unrealism drive
but for that, we could use SE's search engine for power

ethanos said @ 4:28pm GMT on 18th Sep [Score:1 Good]
needs more fins. and a lightning bolt decal.

blacksun said @ 4:31pm GMT on 18th Sep
*Checks out the window for Vulcans*

lilmookieesquire said @ 5:09pm GMT on 18th Sep
This shit better work.
I've watched star trek.
I understand the deal.
I expect space poontang.

hellboy said @ 6:03pm GMT on 18th Sep
It's a bit green...

endopol said @ 6:38pm GMT on 18th Sep [Score:1 Funny]
Space Tang is orange, my friends.

wynterbourne said @ 10:59pm GMT on 18th Sep
Snooki is space 'tang?

Seneki69 said @ 8:05pm GMT on 18th Sep [Score:1 Informative]
FYI fellow SE'ers,
Today (wednesday september 19th) is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

kichijoii said @ 8:07pm GMT on 18th Sep
How does one warp space-time? HOW IS BABBY FORMED?!

chold_numa said @ 10:46pm GMT on 18th Sep
Injection moulding.

cb361 said @ 10:58pm GMT on 18th Sep
Bend over...

moriati said @ 12:12am GMT on 19th Sep
Compression moulding,

happiest_sadist said @ 4:44am GMT on 19th Sep
Vacuum-welding if you aren't careful.

RuneLancer said @ 3:29am GMT on 19th Sep
Obviously we still need to get that tiny detail out of the way, but aside from that...

arrowhen said @ 4:55am GMT on 19th Sep

klingon_fodder said @ 5:53am GMT on 19th Sep
there was a young lady named bright
who traveled much faster than light
she departed one day
in the usual way
and returned the previous night

there was a young lady from natchez
whose apparel was always in patchez
when comment arose
on the state of here clothes
she drawled, "when ah itchez, ah scratchez!"

Which leads to the obvious question: If you travel FTL, do your clothes go too?

Barnabas_Truman said @ 9:17am GMT on 19th Sep
You go naked. Something about the field generated by a living organism. Nothing dead will go.

GordonGuano said @ 12:44pm GMT on 19th Sep
It's a good thing metal is alive then, or we wouldn't have a movie.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 6:04pm GMT on 19th Sep
Yeah, that always seemed fishy. If wrapping the robot in flesh works, couldn't you just wrap a plasma rifle in flesh and send it back too?

devilsad said @ 10:32pm GMT on 19th Sep [Score:1 Insightful]
Not only that, but then in the second film they send back a 100% metal robot, and in the third film, the robot has weapons built into its body. That doesn't even begin to scratch the problem of 'if skynet succeeds, then how does it know it needs to eliminate Connor' and 'if skynet hadn't sent back the terminator, Connor would never have been born'
I think the only movie with time travel in it that doesn't have gigantic plot holes and contradictions in it is Primer.

-_- said @ 11:08pm GMT on 19th Sep
The present would not be the present if we did not go back in time and make the mistakes we made when trying to change the present.
In short.. without time machines being invented in the future the present wouldn't be the same "now".

arrowhen said @ 4:10am GMT on 20th Sep
+1 Primer.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 9:06am GMT on 20th Sep
The most sensible time travel movie I've ever seen is Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. The first Terminator movie was fairly reasonable (stable time loop) but the second one kind of screws that up.

mechanical contrivance said @ 12:08am GMT on 21st Sep
The clock in San Dimas is always ticking. Why? They have a time machine.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 6:54am GMT on 21st Sep
Okay, okay, that's the one dumb thing about the movie. Everything else is fine.

Possible fanwank explanation: the whole "clock in San Dimas" thing is a lie. Rufus was bullshitting them because he knew that without a (made-up) time limit, Bill & Ted would just slack off and never get anything done. It's not like they're going to realize it doesn't make sense.

Omegaphobic said @ 8:32am GMT on 19th Sep
White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory.

They set up what they call the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer at the Johnson Space Center, essentially creating a laser interferometer that instigates micro versions of space-time warps.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

donnie said @ 10:17am GMT on 19th Sep
Admittedly, it's not nearly as foolish as tickling the dragon's tail...one screwdriver slip away from sitting atop, at best, a 'criticality' event, and, at worst, an atomic meltdown or explosion.

Scientists....

Barnabas_Truman said @ 10:28am GMT on 19th Sep [Score:1 Informative]
Ohhhhhhhh, the demon core... I cringe just to see the picture of it.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 10:29am GMT on 19th Sep
Make that "...picture of a re-enactment of it."

KingPellinore said @ 1:29pm GMT on 19th Sep [Score:1 WTF]
This seemed appropriate:

blacksun said @ 11:36pm GMT on 19th Sep
cool!