Faster than light travel

[Terminator X]

Yipper said:

Almost all scientific theories get disproved and replaced at some point. History is littered with fancy theories that were not right. It will defo be possible to go faster than light. Perhaps via a graviton tunnel or similar. An AI robot will probably crack it in the 22nd century.

if it were possible though in the future wouldn't someone have come back in time by now?

TX.

[caelite]

I think physically reaching the speed of light will always be an impossibility, relativeaty and all of the conventional physics issues are just insane.

However very goofy things happen around black holes, in high gravity environment goofy st happens with time, light, matter etc etc. I think developments in FTL travel will involve something involving either wormholes using gravity to take 'shortcuts' through space, some kind of gravity drive which distorts space around the vessel causing it to move space as well as itself, or some form of mass drive which is able to negate its own mass, which would do all sorts of goofy things. As I said, gravity is a strange force and I think, based on half an engineering degree and a couple of decades of watching sci-fi, it will be the key to many things, space travel being one of them.

Personally it is not something I look to as I don't believe it will happen anywhere near our lifetimes, however I think our solar system will be well within reach using conventional chemical and even ion electric drives within my lifetime (~2076 provided I make 80).

[Halmyre]

Terminator X said:

Yipper said:

Almost all scientific theories get disproved and replaced at some point. History is littered with fancy theories that were not right. It will defo be possible to go faster than light. Perhaps via a graviton tunnel or similar. An AI robot will probably crack it in the 22nd century.

if it were possible though in the future wouldn't someone have come back in time by now?

TX.

There's a school of thought that says, if we invent a time machine at some point, we wouldn't be able to return to a time earlier than that point. Don't know what the reasoning is though.

[Dr Jekyll]

Halmyre said:

There's a school of thought that says, if we invent a time machine at some point, we wouldn't be able to return to a time earlier than that point. Don't know what the reasoning is though.

That was based on a particular idea for a time machine, which would be a sort of landing pad that you could jump back to from the future rather than a vehicle.

[peterperkins]

Who was it who said to travel to other solar systems you either go fast in a tiny ship or slow in a big ship? A C Clarke?
Anyway, Fast means perhaps approaching C and journeys to our nearest neighbours measured in one human lifetime.

Slow means perhaps 1/100 C and a journey of 400 years to our nearest star..

I don't doubt in due course some sort of hypersleep will be possible with body metabolism slowed down to 1/100th current rates heart rate <1 beat per minute etc..

Ark ships with multiple generations living out their lives onboard? Not sure humans would accept that.
They probably would accept a long sleep though...

Faster than light travel?
Hmm not sure, If you accelerate at 2/3g (sustainable by the human body) how long would it take you to get to C?

[Dr Jekyll]

peterperkins said:

If you accelerate at 2/3g (sustainable by the human body) how long would it take you to get to C?

2g six months, 3g four months.

[p1stonhead]

peterperkins said:

Ark ships with multiple generations living out their lives onboard? Not sure humans would accept that.
They probably would accept a long sleep though...

Imagine if just one of the people changed their mind though and blew something up/sabotaged something - let alone kids being brought up and told that their only purpose is to survive on the ship until they have kids and their kids have to do the same for 'the good of mankind' - a hard sell IMO.

I think were far too selfish and prone to violence to ever colonise or travel anywhere that far.

[warp9]

p1stonhead said:

Imagine if just one of the people changed their mind though and blew something up/sabotaged something - let alone kids being brought up and told that their only purpose is to survive on the ship until they have kids and their kids have to do the same for 'the good of mankind' - a hard sell IMO.

what if they never knew.....

[Einion Yrth]

Dr Jekyll said:

peterperkins said:

If you accelerate at 2/3g (sustainable by the human body) how long would it take you to get to C?

2g six months, 3g four months.

[pedant]arbitrarily close to C[/pedant]

[RobDickinson]

Dr Jekyll said:

peterperkins said:

If you accelerate at 2/3g (sustainable by the human body) how long would it take you to get to C?

2g six months, 3g four months.

I suspect you could do 2-3g for 8-12 hours a day and then cut it back

[AW111]

warp9 said:

what if they never knew.....

Brian Aldiss : "non-stop". 1958

[RobDickinson]

I doubt we'll ever build an arkship.

We might one day have the technology and ability but we'd have to be 100% sure there was a world at the end and it would have to be very close in galactic terms

[RizzoTheRat]

It'd be a good way to cut down on the number of marketing consultants and telephone box sanitation engineers though.

Doesn't quantum coupling mean information can potentially be transmitted faster than light?

[Einion Yrth]

I'd view generation ships as pretty much a non starter. Exactly how close the the necessary 100% closed cycle do we think we can get? My answer would be "likely not close enough".

[xjay1337]

Ayahuasca said:

How would you slow down when you got there?

Brembo 6 piston calipers.

[annodomini2]

ash73 said:

Light speed could be possible if we could negate interaction with the higgs field, acceleration would be instantaneous though so I can't see how we'd survive the transition.

Ark ships could work as DNA banks with computers to incubate life at the destination. But it would then evolve according to local conditions, so wouldn't look like us anyhow.

Worm holes etc are baloney, imo. Most likely humans will never go anywhere, our role is to design AI machines that can.

Could be interesting to research that, if you could manipulate it with shape, you may be able achieve warp drive without negative energy.

I.e. Increase in front, decrease behind, same effect as warp without the negative mass issues.

As you are effectively accelerated by Gravity, the acceleration occurs across everything relatively evenly depending on the field shape.

[c6r]

once we have AI machines that we can send at say 99% c to somewhere else, I think the most likely way for us to travel there too is going to be some sort of atom-level 3d printer so we just have to send the information only and the AI reconstructs a version of us in the other location. probably gets a bit philosophical at that point whether the clone is really you or not, and still limited to as fast as c though, not faster. but would seem to be technically fairly straightforward given a decent amount of progress in AI and 3d printing.

[Wiccan of Darkness]

Halmyre said:

There's a school of thought that says, if we invent a time machine at some point, we wouldn't be able to return to a time earlier than that point. Don't know what the reasoning is though.

Probably similar to the invention of the telephone. It was pretty useless until a second one had been built...

[Wiccan of Darkness]

As objects accelerate towards the speed of light, they gain mass. Energy required to accelerate an object is proportional to its mass, ergo as mass increases, proportionally more energy is required to get that next push. In my minds eye it's an exponential graph.

This however is conventional thinking. The thing about science is it evolves, and is basically a general consensus based on repeated observations. I mean, we all thought thunder and lightning were created by the gods. But we can only look back at what we have discovered, we can't exactly see in to the future and see what we have left to discover or invent. For all we know, we could still be in a prehistoric mindset, its just we don't know it as there's nothing to compare it to.

[Ayahuasca]

Doesn't gravity travel faster than light?

Or, was the gravity that we experience now created in the past and has traveled to us at light speed?