Hey All,

Way back when there used to be a site called "Warp Drive When?" and it was a brilliant discussion of reality, physics, and the problems inherent in creating a craft that could accelerate to near-light or FTL speeds.

Does anyone know where it went, where it is, or any info?

I seem to remember it was by a NASA-type or an Academic at a Skool, or someone like that, maybe a Gravity Probe B dude? I just don't remember.

Either way it was excellent and well-written and I used to send people there when they starting waxing poetic about Star Trek or worm-holes and the like.

Anyone have any recollection?

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/warp.html

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http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/warp.html

Ah, CRAP! Geebus I looked long and hard for that thing, though it has been substantially changed.

Thanks, Cap'n! I appreciate it!

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/warp.html

Ah, CRAP! Geebus I looked long and hard for that thing, though it has been substantially changed.

Thanks, Cap'n! I appreciate it!

Google is your Friend!

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Google is your Friend!

I have to say, I'm flabbergasted.

I used both Google AND A9 to find that, and I kept coming up with thousands of pages, that had the words "warp," "drive," and "when." Now it's number one at both sites.

Admittedly this was several months ago, and it just dawned on me to ask here. I don't know what the hell I was doing wrong. But I sure did it wrong.

D'oh!

Google is your Friend!

I have to say, I'm flabbergasted.

I used both Google AND A9 to find that, and I kept coming up with thousands of pages, that had the words "warp," "drive," and "when." Now it's number one at both sites.

Admittedly this was several months ago, and it just dawned on me to ask here. I don't know what the hell I was doing wrong. But I sure did it wrong.

D'oh!

The force was not with you... The Dark side to use Google you should not be!!!

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I'd rather speak my mind because it hurts too much to bite my tongue.

American Spirit BBQ Proudly Serving those that courageously defend freedom.

Google is your Friend!

Shouldn't that be "Google is the preciousssssss"?

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Save a tree, eat a Beaver.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/warp.html

Interesting reading. It's tempting to throw in a couple of my cents... (resulting in an empty wallet) ;)

The three goals NASA draws up for us are of course essential. Goals. In the end. Before reaching there, I think we must realize there are numerous lesser goals and milestones to be achieved. We can't have the orange before planting the orange tree... If we take two steps back and try to see ourselves in a bird perspective, it's obvious (to me, anyway) that we have a looong way to go yet.

Seems to me it's foolish to think we can just throw ourselves into space at staggering speed, without thinking of such basic needs as protection of spacecraft, for instance. Hello? There are unknown objects out there! In our path. Bet on it. Do we want to travel zillions of miles, just to ram into a rock? Even a tiny fragment of stone can blow a lethal hole in a fragile metal box. ...if metal is a suitable material for such speeds. I doubt it. And shall we send the tin man or do we want to go ourselves? It's no fun sending a robot. The whole idea is for us to see it with our own blue. But humans need food. So we need to develop a sustainable environment for growing food in space. Yes, we have ideas in that area. The garden of eden pops into mind... True, there have been some testing, but there's a long way to go before it becomes reality.

Scrap that idea. Back to the drawing board. We need to develop some serious technology first. But we're not ready for that either. We need to seriously PREPARE for developing some serious technology. And to do that, someone has to offer the realm for preparation.

For one thing, we live in a competitive world where money profit is what drives the culture forward. Of course, competitiveness CAN be a good thing. For a lot of things. A lot of things just outside our own nose. However, we may want to look further than that. I doubt competitiveness will deliver us into a future where such HUGE tasks are solved. It can only be done by collaboration, I think.

Before we even can begin to agree to collaborate on such a scale, we must solve other things. As already hinted above, one obvious item is importance of money. How do we downgrade money to be unimortant? The idea is to level out differences by three "small" breakthroughs, thereby abolish the need for money - even make it useless:

- the natural resources we depend on must be enough for ALL and obtainable by ANYONE who wants to get them, with (almost) ZERO effort.

- energy must be enough for everybody (and then some) and obtainable by anyone who wants to use it - everywhere.

- transport must be possible with almost ZERO use of resources and energy.

Brave new world? Yes, it looks like it. Although that's just a coincidence. I'm far from a communist or lefty back-to-nature guy. I'm not even an idealist (I do my share and ignore what others might do or not do). But I beleive in our ability to make progress, if we want to. And I beleive progress and tecnology are closely linked. If we're talking about the possibility of warp travelling, it's time to change our present course. Step by step - in agreement. That's why it will be a slow process. We usually don't agree much about anything... Just think how difficult it is to do it on a planetary scale... I'm a pessimist about this issue. I don't think we're ready - in a longshot.

This is just to scratch on the surface of enormeous problems ahead. The theme contains a lot more to be said. I rest my case. :) This is only my pessimistic way of saying I won't live to see the realization of the warp drive speculations.

My 2 cents delivered. PLING! PLONG! :)

As already hinted above, one obvious item is importance of money. How do we downgrade money to be unimortant? The idea is to level out differences by three "small" breakthroughs, thereby abolish the need for money - even make it useless:

This ain't the silly world of Star Trek where stupid things like "Money doesn't exist in the Twenty-Fourth Century," are said.

You ever actually abolish money world-wide, and you'll have made Stalin and Pol Pot look like good-natured Girl Scouts.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/warp.html

Interesting reading. It's tempting to throw in a couple of my cents... (resulting in an empty wallet) ;)
....

Hello? There are unknown objects out there! In our path. Bet on it. Do we want to travel zillions of miles, just to ram into a rock? Even a tiny fragment of stone can blow a lethal hole in a fragile metal box.

....

That's why, in the world of Star Trek, the ships were equiped with the dish in front that emitted an energy field called the "deflector screen". It "deflected" any object, in the path of the ship[s], when at warp speed. >:-) (-:<

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CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

That's why, in the world of Star Trek, the ships were equiped with the dish in front that emitted an energy field called the "deflector screen".

Yep, that'd be one item on my wishlist. Shield technology. :)
(Girl) scout probes to send ahead are useless when you're travelling at lightspeed. And radar won't work, because you'll outrun the rays... LOL

The only comfort I see if you should happen to ram into a rock out there (and it'll happen), is that you won't feel a thing. You won't even know anything happened. Bending space like that, it'll probably happen even before it should... ;)

That's why, in the world of Star Trek, the ships were equiped with the dish in front that emitted an energy field called the "deflector screen".

Yep, that'd be one item on my wishlist. Shield technology. :)
(Girl) scout probes to send ahead are useless when you're travelling at lightspeed. And radar won't work, because you'll outrun the rays... LOL

The only comfort I see if you should happen to ram into a rock out there (and it'll happen), is that you won't feel a thing. You won't even know anything happened. Bending space like that, it'll probably happen even before it should... ;)

Science fiction presents a few different ideas on how a space-bending drive would work. Star Trek's warp drive is described as creating a bubble of "normal" space around the craft and sliding that bubble thru outer space at high speeds.



Such a system would never collide with any normal object, but a very massive object might curve spacetime too much for the "spacefoil" to deal with. This seems to be a concern in plotting a course in the Star Wars universe as well.

The propulsion systems described on the NASA site appear to be more along the lines of compressing the space in front of the craft and expanding the space behind it.



This system would have exactly the collision problems that you mentioned.

BTW, I've seen two different explanations for "deflector shields" in the Star Trek universe. (I have friends with no lives who seem to mistake my interest in science and science fiction as a desire to know how every Trek gadget, comicbook superpower, and X-File phenomenon works.) The original series seemed to use E=mc^2 to suggest that enough energy could be used to similate armor plating... as armor was destroyed, more energy would be used to replace the missing bits. The next-generation series seemed to use a huge change in spacetime curvature at the border of the "normal space bubble" to make incoming objects meet an impassible region of space. To my thinking, the latter should have rendered the ship invisible as well... but that wouldn't make for dramatic space battle scenes.

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

This system would have exactly the collision problems that you mentioned.

Thanks for the clarification, Octagon.

Another problem is acceleration and deceleration. You'd need to start and stop slowly, if you don't want lose objects inside the craft to be smashed against the walls. That includes humans. One scientist (I forgot who) said that acceleration to lightspeed, as outlined in sci-fi movies, would make humans sushi on the back wall... (If you ask me, I think the whole spacecraft would be flatter than a razor blade in an instant.) Anything more than a couple of G's would be unbarable for longer periods of time. Then we'll need weeks and months for acceleration. So, add this extra time to the flight time of going in lightspeed.

Unless, of course, we can solve this problem before we go. Which we should.

This system would have exactly the collision problems that you mentioned.

Thanks for the clarification, Octagon.

Another problem is acceleration and deceleration. You'd need to start and stop slowly, if you don't want lose objects inside the craft to be smashed against the walls. That includes humans. One scientist (I forgot who) said that acceleration to lightspeed, as outlined in sci-fi movies, would make humans sushi on the back wall... (If you ask me, I think the whole spacecraft would be flatter than a razor blade in an instant.) Anything more than a couple of G's would be unbarable for longer periods of time. Then we'll need weeks and months for acceleration. So, add this extra time to the flight time of going in lightspeed.

Unless, of course, we can solve this problem before we go. Which we should.

Prognatus,

The much explored, but equally improbable (for now) concept of inertial damping would solve all the acceleration/decelaration issues, probably any objects within such a field would be protected somehow from excessive inertial forces.
Another idea would be to have FTL travellers housed in a fluid environment, the specific gravity of which would be appropriate, to easy move around in, and not cause the traveller to be bouyant, and to possibly contain dissolved O2, enabling fluid breathing, such a traveller should then be able to sustain a much higher G force, but would they be comfortable? Don't think so!
UFO's must employ something to get over these problems, otherwise, there would some very mushy ET's around by now, considering some of the reported manouvers carried out by some UFO's.

TTFN, Ken P.

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Ken Phillips

BOINC question? Look here



"The beginning is the most important part of the work." - Plato

This system would have exactly the collision problems that you mentioned.

Thanks for the clarification, Octagon.

Another problem is acceleration and deceleration. You'd need to start and stop slowly, if you don't want lose objects inside the craft to be smashed against the walls. That includes humans. One scientist (I forgot who) said that acceleration to lightspeed, as outlined in sci-fi movies, would make humans sushi on the back wall... (If you ask me, I think the whole spacecraft would be flatter than a razor blade in an instant.) Anything more than a couple of G's would be unbarable for longer periods of time. Then we'll need weeks and months for acceleration. So, add this extra time to the flight time of going in lightspeed.

Unless, of course, we can solve this problem before we go. Which we should.

Wait a second, I thought the whole point of a "warp" drive system was to bend space. That is to make 2 distant points exist at roughly a single point at the same time, so acceleration and deceleration shouldn't matter. If we could do this, we could walk the distance between here and a couple million miles away (and even the most out of shape of us could do so) without breaking a sweat. The effect would be traveling distances at a rate greater than light, but the velocity of the craft would be far less.

Unless I am wrong, the condensed space and even the other side of it could be probed by a laser, rendering the type of shielding mentioned unnecessary.

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Still looking for something profound or inspirational to place here.

That sounds more like creating an artificial wormhole? Warp drive is something completely different.

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Save a tree, eat a Beaver.

That sounds more like creating an artificial wormhole? Warp drive is something completely different.

Octagon's last post describes the Star Trek warp drive. And he did it with pretty pictures too.

Bending space-time so that 2 points on the other side of the universe exists in roughly the same place is more like what they do in Dune.

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Reality Internet Personality

Octagon's last post describes the Star Trek warp drive. And he did it with pretty pictures too.

Bending space-time so that 2 points on the other side of the universe exists in roughly the same place is more like what they do in Dune.

Yes I saw octagons post and I've got to say that must have took some time to do, but I was responding to ghstwolf's post in regard to the bending space theory, hence the reason I posted what I posted.

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Save a tree, eat a Beaver.

Octagon's last post describes the Star Trek warp drive. And he did it with pretty pictures too.

Bending space-time so that 2 points on the other side of the universe exists in roughly the same place is more like what they do in Dune.

Yes I saw octagons post and I've got to say that must have took some time to do, but I was responding to ghstwolf's post in regard to the bending space theory, hence the reason I posted what I posted.

I know. I was agreeing with you.

(why are people so touchy on this forum?) ;-)

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Reality Internet Personality

Sorry about that I didn't mean to come over touchy, I was merely wondering why you had used my post to explain about the one before, I apologise if I seemed a little brusque.

I suppose the unfortunate thing is that sometimes these posts can be misinterpreted.

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Save a tree, eat a Beaver.