Could NASA Really Build an FTL Drive?

For those of you that follow cutting edge physics, Harold White is no stranger.  For those of us a bit further back on the bell curve..... White announced last month that he and a team of NASA scientists  had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive.

White's drive would be based on an Alcubierre type of drive which I last talked about back in September here

Basically the Alcubierre drive accomplishes faster than light and still adhering to the universal speed limit by maintaining a bubble of real time around a ship.  Then warping space before and after the bubble to "push" it through real space time at supra-luminal speeds. 

The thinking is that nothing can exceed light speed in real space, but space can be compressed and expanded at any rate.  So if the expanding space behind pushed you into the compressed space ahead, you speed would not change but your "relative" speed would exceed that of light.  

So far thought it remains a theory only.  Check out the IO9 article here 

Warp Drive...Possible? More-so Than We Previously Thought!

Ian Steadman, writing for Wired UK, has penned an article that if not blowing my socks off, really set me up and take notice!

 Ian writes that NASA scientists think that the concept of FTL may just be available to future generations.

 Back in 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre demonstrated that warp speed was, on paper at least, theoretically possible. However, one of the major drawbacks was the assumption that Alcubierre's drive required the mass/energy conversion equivalent to that of a gas giant of roughly the size of Jupiter!


(Now this renders the drive impossible, but my thinking is that this is stunningly efficient. Now here is my reasoning, discounting warp for the moment, Light has been used as the universal speed limit. Though clearly not infinitely fast, it takes a prodigious amount of energy to reach C. Matter of fact, given any starting point speed and then factoring the energy it took to accelerate to that speed. Now doubling that speed does not take twice the energy but 4x, it soon becomes apparent that even an incremental increase would require more than all the energy available in the Universe. Anytime you could go faster than light on just the energy/mass of a planet like Jupiter is very efficient.)


Now Harold White, a scientist from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, has revealed at a Sept. 14 space symposium that his team has calculated that the amount of energy required to create an Alcubierre drive may be far smaller than first estimated.


Those of you that have been with the blog for some time remember that we have on occasion discussed various drives like an Alcubierre.


The main argument against ftl is that nothing can travel faster than C ( information may be the one exception....but lets stay within the realms of star ships and such) So the trick is, how do you keep a ship in normal space but move it around at super-luminal speeds. Alcubierre's drive "compresses" space ahead of the ship and expands it behind, with the net effect of a "trough" between the two wave fronts. Inside the normal space, the ship would travel in normal space/time, but the normal area between the two warped areas could be moved around at speeds far above C. (It starts to sound very much like the Enterprise's warp drive. Their "Warp Field" could very well have been this normal space maintained inside of of the warp "waves" fore and aft)

As the article points out, if you change the "shape" of the warp field, you greatly reduce the energy expenditures. Alcubierre's engine called for a globe and where White's team has differed is to use a "doughnut" shaped field in their equations.

Still, the energy requirements are phenomenal and far outstrip any form of energy or generation we have at our disposal, at present.

Plus there still is the nagging problem that José Natário published in 2002. According to the Wikipedia article:

• it would be impossible for the ship to send signals to the front of the bubble, meaning that crew members could not control, steer or stop the ship.

Oh my.....

Wired Article

Warp Drive Would Destroy Its Destination

  

            

                                                     Alcubierre drive

Wow, this could lead to someone having a very bad day. I was reading on the Dvice blog that well say we actually built an FTL drive that really could take a craft trans-light - it seems that anything at your destination would gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion. Ouch.

A team at the University of Sydney in Australia looked at a warp drive concept proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre. As you might remember this is the system where the ship would be enclosed in a "bubble" of negative energy that would warp space ahead and behind the ship. Ahead, space/time would be compressed allowing the ship to "skip" across the tops of the "folds", and stretched out behind the ship. In theory, once activated the drive would require little energy because space/time itself would "push" against the ship, moving it forward.

However as we have seen with items in the universe that are moving away, there is a red shift. The opposite is true as well, objects moving towards us will blue shift. At trans-light speeds the blue shift would be incredible. The blue shift would come from particles that were pushed along in front of the ship. These high energy particles would emit massive amounts of gamma radiation. Plus there seems to be no limit to how much energy would be built up, the farther you travel the more energy from high energy particles would be released. The result would be very much like a huge GRB very near by. Everything at the destination would be blasted into oblivion.

Here is the link to the Universe Today article
Click picture for the WIKI on the

Alcubierre drive

Warp Engine - Possible?

I was reading through some of the listings on Discover News and I came across this headline

• Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light

And I am thinking uh duh that's what warp engines do right?! But I kept reading and the article kept making more and more sense. But the real laugh is I think I saw this concept on an episode of Futurama. Anyway -

• Two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine could possibly work. The warp engine, based on a design first proposed in 1994 by Michael Alcubierre, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble. The ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind.
• It is thought that this has happened once before in the cosmos' history - the big bang.
  

Quite simply that if a beam of light and the ship left the same relative space time local, the ship, utilizing it engine, would arrive well ahead of the beam of light. Relative to any other beam of light traveling relatively tangent to the ship, the ship would not be ftl, but since it beat a beam of light from its own space/time, it is in fact Faster than light. Not a play on words (Einstein flat out said this could not take place) or a trick of what gets taken away from what first. Given enough energy, possible? My sticking point to ftl is the energy curve. To accelerate any mass you need energy. To double the speed, you do not need double the energy, you need geometrically more energy. If you have mass and you acellerate to the physical limit of the universe, it stands to reason that you would need all the energy of the universe. Since the stars are still shining is proff that no one has gone ftl. But what if you are not accelerating mass, but distorting space time. At present we only know of one way to do that effectivly and that is with massive objects. Round and round we go. But is sure is interesting.

<- Read complete article in Discovery News ->