OT Faster than light was: Hollywood OS wars

On Monday 06 March 2006 18:00, The Ghost In The Machine stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

Actually, accelerating a ship to lightspeed would take either finite acceleration with infinite energy, or infinite acceleration with finite energy. Ergo, nothing that has mbutt can ever achieve lightspeed.

A second thought with that is that no ship could ever hope to really travel faster than light because the forces that keep all the particles of the ship together travel at the speed of light, and thus any object made of matter attempting to surpbutt the speed of light would disintegrate.

Another course of thinking - which I find much more interesting - is getting a spaceship to do *apparent* *FTL,* i.e. the ship covers a distance in less time than it would take light to cover that distance, but without that the ship itself moves faster than light.

In fact, the Alcubierre drive - the theoretical model as developed by Miguel Alcubierre and currently under investigation with NASA as a possible propulsion system - would not have the ship moving at all.

Instead of moving, the ship would be stationary inside a so-calledwarp-bubble- ironically, Alcubierre conceived this idea long after the "Star Trek" producers did, but much of what they attribute to the Warp Drive as characteristics - e.g. the nacelles - seems to match the theory. Thewarp-bubbleas conceived by Miguel Alcubierre is an isolated bubble of regular spacetime.

Observations have already shown that while the speed of light cannot be overcome as a barrier, the Universe itself seems to expand at speeds far greater than that of life, which would be an indication of spacetime itself being able to travel faster than light. Einstein has also shown that spacetime can be warped, e.g. by the presence of mbutt - this is what gravity is, to further notice.

Alcubierre's model is therefore based upon a ship that can warp spacetime in such a way that space in front of the ship is being compressed while space behind the ship is being expanded.

There are however a few practical problems... First of all, warping spacetime in this manner would - or so the current belief is - require an enormous amount of dark matter. Secondly, it seems unlikely that the drive could be controlled from within the warp bubble, since it's isolated from the rest of the Universe, and this isolation is necessary as the tidal forces would otherwise just squish the ship.

There would be great advantage though, should this drive technology ever work. First of all, as the ship is stationary inside its bubble of spacetime, there would not be any acceleration or deceleration effects.

Secondly, there would not be any time dilation in comparison to the inertial observers as all the laws of inertia are preserved within the bubble. For comparison, if a ship were to travel at 86% of the speed of light using conventional propulsion methods, the time expired for the astronauts would be about half as long as the time expired for the inertial observers on Earth - give and take some accuracy fluctuations due to the time dilation effects of Earth's gravity.

Thirdly, as spacetime is being bent around the ship, thewarp-bubbleitself would serve as a very effective shield against spacedust, asteroids or any other kind of inert or slowly moving spatial matter, which would otherwise simply penetrate the hull - just ask the Space Shuttle astronauts on the effects of the Shuttle moving at 27'000 kph and colliding with spacedust or eventual spatial debris from a previous satellite launch. ;-) Even harmful radiation would be bent away.

Personally, I find this theoretical model very interesting, and much more realistic than other forms of spacefolding - e.g. wormholes, which in reality would require far more dark matter, even - or than the so-calledion-driveused in some science-fiction works.

Theion-driveactually does exist, and it is a much more efficient propulsion method than the use of solid fuel. However, it's also a much slower method of propulsion, which is why it's not useful on manned spacecraft like the Space Shuttle. ;-)

-- With kind regards,

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