OT Faster than light was: Hollywood OS wars 3317

On Monday 06 March 2006 22:00, The Ghost In The Machine stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

Near-lightspeed, yes, but I was talking of surpbutting lightspeed, should infinite energy be available to make it happen.

This I know, yes.

Hmm... I don't clbuttify that as apparent FTL, as this is a matter of time dilation effects and deviations in observations from difference reference frames.

But you can see what I meant from what I wrote below. ;-)

That's what I meant, yes. I often don't express myself correctly - I apologize.

So far it's only a thought experiment. Theoretically, it seems to hold promise for realization, but the practical concerns are at this stage still far beyond our capabilities.

Who knows? Alcubierre is contemporary to ourselves, so it's still quite recent.

The general consensus seems to be that the Universe does indeed expand faster than light could travel. It's also quite credible that this is also what happened during the first phases of the Universe's existence, i.e. right after the Big Bang.

I'm going to give some very crude numbers here - I'm really too tired to look it up right now - but it is generally believed that the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old, while it is over 76 billion lightyears in diameter. Hence, there must have been a stage at which the Universe expanded faster than the speed of light, and all evidence seems to indicate that its expansion is (still) accelerating now.

Sure, but they could become slightly more significant on a much larger scale, i.e. over a longer timespan. Either way, I threw that in just to say that I was only approximating the ratio of time dilation. ;-)

What I've read about them is that the creation of a wormhole would require two rings located in space(time) and having the size of the orbit of the Earth around the sun. They would have to be filled with dark matter, which would have to be spun up to lightspeed.

Don't know what the resulting aperture would be like, though... ;-)

Indeed. ;-) Another - similar - approach is using lightsails illuminated by starlight in deep space, and by a gigantic lasercannon at departure time. That would also take forever to accelerate to any speed beyond what we're capable of when using solid rocket fuel. ;-)

I don't think an ion drive would ever make it possible to achieve the required escape velocity. ;-)

On the other hand, I've also read something not too long ago about how superconductors seem to diminish gravitational effects above their position - speaking from the terrestrial sense of up and down. That seems to be a very recent discovery, but I didn't read up more about it at the time and I lost the link. :-

I'll try looking for it again once I've got a bit more energy again. ;-)

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)