99 réponses à ce sujet

[Swordfishtrombone]

Fozee wrote...

The primary problem with near-light-speed travel isn't necessarily the speed, but how long it would take us to reach that speed without killing all of the humans on board immediately.

Actually, I don't think that would be the problem - at a constant acceleration of 1/2 G, you'd get close to light speed in about a year.

Given the distances involved, a year of acceleration and another year for deceleration would not be bad at all.

The problem really would be where to get the energy to maintain such high constant acceleration/deceleration for two years.


I WAS about to say that the energy need to accelerate further would be increasing exponentially, as your mass is increasing when you accelerate.... but.... after doing a few web searches, I'm actually not at all sure that this is so. I don't have a strong enough background in physics to be able to say. Some sources seem to suggest that this is incorrect, since your mass would only be increasing looking from an outside frame of reference, and that from your point of view, on the spaceship, your mass would be as it always was - and thus, again, from your point of reference, you could accelerate just as you'd expect in a purely Newtonian way: expend X amount of energy, accelerate X amount.

Any physicists/cosmologists lurking around here? 

Modifié par Swordfishtrombone, 09 juillet 2012 - 12:17 .

[f0rmaldehyde]

Tazzmission wrote...

for those who dont know we did find buildings,ruins on mars


same with the moon


i highly suggest you look into it

I assure you no 'ruins' were found on the moon or mars, just some pictures that people thought looked like certain shapes and conspiracy theorists ran with it. Im an astrophysicist. I assure you if we did Id know  

I can however garentee you that there is other intelligent life in the universe, but finding them is complicated. In the grand scheme of things humanity is still very very new and while we have made incredible leaps and bounds in new technologies and understanding the universe we are still a ways off of having the technology to find those civilizations. We are however well on the road to discovering our place and new exoplanets orbiting other stars in our galaxy are discovered every day. At first we could only detect very large planets much like our own gas giants but we are becoming more and more proficient at detecting much smaller planets like our own. Studies are also always being done to fine other life in the form of bacteria and things within our own solar system which in itself helps us understand the extremes life can endure and improve our searches for life in other solar systems. If bacteria can survive on Mars, or on moons then we have new places to look. 

Over the next few months there will probably be a lot of new information in regards to the new Boson that was found however like all new discoveries predicted or not it takes time to tunderstand it useful applications if any. Its only now that quantum entanglement is being looked into very seriously as a means of communication, and that things like teleportation are being taken seriously and studied. Its awesome that we can teleport lasers across a distance, but are there truly any practical applications to this? its all small steps and a part of putting together a puzzle that when we have more pieces in place we can begin to truly understand its implications and practical uses. Same goes for finding the Higgs. It might never have any practical applications other than being a crucial piece of a large puzzle which when the pieces are in place suddenly give us not only a better understanding of the universe, but ways in which we can use it. 

[Sumthing]

Swordfishtrombone wrote...

Sumthing wrote...

Swordfishtrombone wrote...

Very unlikely that it is possible to prevent particles from interacting with the higgs, to reduce or eliminate their mass - and even more unlikely that it is possible to do for large scale objects. And if it is theoretically possible in some way, I suspect that the energies needed to achieve such a feat would make it practically impossible.

And even if you could eliminate the mass of an object (without damaging or destroying the object), that wouldn't mean that that object would be able to travel faster than light. It would mean that it would be able to reach light speed, but not exceed it.

Such a technology, if it were to turn out to be possible, would make travelling between stars a little more plausible - travel times would be in terms of years and decades, instead of tens or hundeds of thousands of years.

I am pessimistic on this issue though - I suspect humanity will not achieve that kinds of speeds, and I really don't think that there's a "star treck" or "mass effect" kinda future in store for us - or any other intelligent species in our universe.

But what about the sheer number of planets in our galaxy? There are too many to rule out the possibility of sentient life forms. I mean, there is an estimated 400 billion planets in our solar system alone, it seems rather shortsighted to assume that.

I don't believe I said anything about ruling out the possibility of sentient lifeforms. I even REFERRED to "any other inteligent species" in our universe, which pretty much implies that I think that their existence is pretty likely.

Indeed, there may be other sentient lifeforms around the galaxy and the universe - we don't know. What I am saying is that the limitations on travel in the universe, with the laws of physics as we know them, it is unlikely that any sort of a galactic community of species is in the books. The distances are too great, and the light speed limitation makes communication between distant civilizations implausible.

Since accelarating to an appreciable percentage of the speed of light requires HUGE amounts of energy, and similar amounts of energy are needed to decelerate at the destination, I'm very sceptical that we'll ever reach, say, 50 % of the speed of light for any space ship, with an acceleration/deceleration time that isn't measured in years, decades or more. (As an object's speed increases, it's mass increases, and the energy required to accelerate it further increases, approaching infinity at light speed.)

Saying "hi" to a civilization a hundred light years from us, and them saying "hi" back, would take two hundred years, so even conversations through light-speed communication take dozens or hundreds of generations to exchange any meaningful information.

And that is, if you actually manage to FIND another civilization. We don't know how common or rare they are, but even at a density of, say, one advanced civilization in every cubic thousand-light-years of space (and that's optimistic), we'd also have to happen to match in the time dimension - they may be in their equivalent of "stone age" while we are in the space age, and by the time they reach space age, we'll be extinct.  There's just so many unknowns, that we can say nothing certain, but when you look at all the variables, and what is known, I think that, unfortunately, galactic communities of species like in Star Treck or Mass Effect will remain purely fictional.

I see, you are saying that the distance between them in space and time is too immense to be able to say that we will find one.

[Zaxares]

Unless wormhole technology turns out to be feasible, in which case near-instantaneous travel between unfathomably distant parts of the galaxy, or even the universe, is possible.

[AHadley23]

Pfft, speed isn't dangerous. It's slowing down too quickly that kills you.

[Wiggly]

Heh yeah I've had the same thought about the Higgs since I read about it years ago, manipulate the Higgs field around a space ship bam instant light speed since particles without mass must go at the speed of light, but yeah it's decades if not centuries away for any kind if Higgs device, no blue pole dancers yet

Either way light speed is way too slow for any practical space exploration, we need speeds of millions of times the speed of light to reach any significant part of the universe in an acceptable time frame since light itself uses millions of years to reach the more distant galaxies, and lets not forget that time is relative, close to speed of light your time almost stops so your folks back home would be 1000 years in the future by the time you get back so just "traveling fast" in normal space-time won't work. From what I've read around we got basically 2 "plausible" options, and 2 other ones which I think look interesting but I've not read about anywhere,

1) Worme Holes (or more correctly Einstein-Rosen bridge)
2) Warp drives (or more correctly Alcubierre drive)
3) Use of other dimensions as conduit for FTL travel to avoid light speed barrier. I guess this assumes string theory with 11 dimensions to be correct, but pretty big IFs, they may not be accessible by us at all
4) Some use of dark energy and/or dark matter to go around quickly. But we really have no idea what dark matter and dark energy is, just that it's alot more of it than matter (matter is like11% or something and the rest is dark stuff)

So yeah, we were born a few hundred years to early guys

Modifié par Wiggly, 09 juillet 2012 - 12:51 .

[TomSurman1]

Aceattack wrote...

Einstein theory of general relativity leaves the possibility of faster than light travel through what would be called special relativity. In essence it allows for space/time to be folded in on it self through any of the speculated phenomena that were postulated. Such as a Einstein Rosen bridge (wormhole) or the uniform reduction of mass to the point of null mass (IE Mass effect field). Al though the problem with that is at higher speeds space time would be effected. Now whats this nerdgasm all about, FTL is possible.

I wouldn't say it "allows" the folding of spacetime, it just doesn't rule it out.  There's no way we currently know of to actually achieve that effect.

[Tenshi]

no, earth has not enough resources for fleets of huge ships.

[TomSurman1]

xxx2emo4Uxxx wrote...

no, earth has not enough resources for fleets of huge ships.

Earth has loads of resources, we just suck at using them.

[Sumthing]

xxx2emo4Uxxx wrote...

no, earth has not enough resources for fleets of huge ships.

That is more greenpeace propoganda, like the idea that nuclear power is bad.

[Mackan8910]

If you take a look at these past 50 years technology has come to a point right now were the things we have was sci-fi once.

Who knows what the future will bring.

[SimKoning]

Any kind of "bubble" or "warp" drive will be impossible, because there would be no way to transmit the energy/force/effect in front of the ship faster than light. In other words, you would need some kind of tachyonic (ftl) matter/energy to create the warp drive in the first place. In other words, you would need a warp drive for your warp drive! This would apply to the Mass Effect FTL concept as well. What ever particle is carrying the effect would need to be tachyonic, which would result in causality violations (time travel).

Hope is not lost however. Thanks to special relativity, we know that a ship traveling near the speed of light would experience time at a slower rate than people back home on Earth. Decades of travel may seem like forever for us, but we should keep in mind that any society that can build near light speed starships would have also long since extended their lifespans. 1 or 2 years out at sea must have seemed like an enormous amount of time for people living during the 15th century, especially considering their average lifespan was probably around 40-50 years at best.

Who knows what kind of propulsion systems will be in use a 1,000 years from now. If future humans discover magnetic monopoles, they might be able to use them to induce baryonic decay, which means they may have rockets that convert matter directly into energy. They might develop superconducting materials that could allow them to construct "ramjet" style rockets. Who knows, they might create low mass black holes that could convert any matter into Hawking radiation. Such a rocket would easily propel a ship to near the speed of light.

About the only hope we have for FTL travel is in wormholes. Wormholes themselves are not actually faster than light propulsion. If we create them someday, it would probably involve massive amounts of energy (like a planet's worth) and one of the "mouths" would have to be transported to the target destination. The end result might be something like the relay network in Mass Effect. Heck, if one of them collapsed, it would probably result in a supernova like explosion just like in ME2. There might be civilizations millions, or even billions of years more advanced than us out there, and for all we know, they might have something like the Mass Relay network, but they would be wormholes, and I doubt they would be so easy to use, what with extreme tidal forces and stability issues and all that.

[Swordfishtrombone]

Mackan8910 wrote...

If you take a look at these past 50 years technology has come to a point right now were the things we have was sci-fi once.

Who knows what the future will bring.

Yes, and when you look at what people 50 years ago imagined the world would be like today, you'll see that they were 99% wrong - and usually in the too-optimistic direction, while at the same time failing to foresee new technology of the kind we didn't have anything analogous to before. So nobody imagined the Internet, but flying cars and bases on Mars and the Moon, and futuristic looking cities were common in the imaginings.

People usually don't take into account what could be called societal, or infrastructure inertia - meaning that to build new buildings to replace the old is costly, when the old still works, and drastic changes in how the world looks take time. They also ingnore the financial aspect - today, in the US, NASA's budget isn't even a penny on the dollar out of the tax income of the country, and most countries do not have a space program.

To go into space costs a LOT of money, with rather dubious prospects of making a profit on any timescale that a typical businessman, or a government considers. There are needs for money that are currently judged more pressing than space exploration, and no reason to think that that'll be any different twenty, fifty or a hundred years from now.

So unless something can trigger another space race, I don't foresee things like bases on mars and the moon in the next few hundred years at least.

Considering the effort, and the huge macinery and the huge energy expenditure in just DETECTING the presense of the higgs boson, I don't foresee the ability to manipulate it in the next thousand years, if it is even theoretically possible - it may even be theoretically possible, but simply too energy intensive to EVER be a plausible option. If I had to put my money on an eventuality, that would be it.

[BP93]

Design by Adrian wrote...


I disagree with light speed as the top speed. Light speed is the fastest speed we can perceive, not achieve. 

Which is why "aliens" always have human characteristics. Head(s), hands, feet, speech..etc. because it's all that the human mind can fathom. Think about it, you can't quite picture an "alien" without any sort of human characteristics to it. Our minds simply don't allow us to think that far out of the box. We need similiarities and/or familiarities. The mind just can't perceive something that it's not familiar with.

When was the last time you saw an "alien" in a movie, tv show, or game that did NOT have any human or even animal characteristics to it?

Modifié par BP93, 10 juillet 2012 - 01:53 .

[.458]

capncraycray wrote...

I'm looking forward to blue pole dancers.

/signed

[Swordfishtrombone]

Design by Adrian wrote...


I disagree with light speed as the top speed. Light speed is the fastest speed we can perceive, not achieve. 

I disagree with gravity, because it gets in the way of my flying by flapping my arms.


The light speed limit isn't just some arbitrary decision made by someone, it actually follows from the theory of relativity, a theory who's predictions have been confirmed time and again. There's an actual REASON you cannot go at, or faster than the speed of light.

As you accelerate, your mass increases, your lenght decreases (seeing form an external frame of reference), and time slows down. As you approach light speed, your mass approaches infinity, your lengh approaches zero, and your passage of time approaches time stopping.

AT light speed, or higher, these values would be absurd, and contradictory, not to mention that to accelerate an infinite mass you'd need infinite energy.

These aren't just imaginings - effects like time dillation have been measured, and you actually have to take into account relativistic effects even in some modern technology applications, like GPS, that depend on satellites.

So  while you might "disagree" with the light speed limit, that doesn't change the facts of the universe we live in; travelling at, or faster than the speed of light simply is not within the realm of possibility.

[.458]

It's funny that there is all this argument about breaking the speed of light, but nobody talks about locally altering the speed of light itself. If you can't break the speed limit, why not change it? I know, many people will say that is not possible, none of which know WHY the speed of light is where it is. There is some sci fi room there.

For those who want more, remember this formula?
              1
--------------------------
(1 - (v^2/c^2))^(1/2)

Try integrating it with trig sub from 1 to lim as v->c from the left, let u^2 = c^2 * sin^2(theta)
And 1 = (c^2/c^2).

Most trig subs are reversed at the end of the integral as a ratio. This ends as an inverse trig function, thus a phase angle. One might expect the answer being infinity, but it is not...it is a right angle rotation. It is a LOT like transmission theory for a common radio antenna, e.g., inductive or capacitive reactance, where the transmission line is in phase and the antenna element is out of phase. SO much story line there...

[Wiggly]

SimKoning wrote...



Any kind of "bubble" or "warp" drive will be impossible, because there would be no way to transmit the energy/force/effect in front of the ship faster than light. In other words, you would need some kind of tachyonic (ftl) matter/energy to create the warp drive in the first place. In other words, you would need a warp drive for your warp drive! This would apply to the Mass Effect FTL concept as well. What ever particle is carrying the effect would need to be tachyonic, which would result in causality violations (time travel).

Hope is not lost however. Thanks to special relativity, we know that a ship traveling near the speed of light would experience time at a slower rate than people back home on Earth. Decades of travel may seem like forever for us, but we should keep in mind that any society that can build near light speed starships would have also long since extended their lifespans. 1 or 2 years out at sea must have seemed like an enormous amount of time for people living during the 15th century, especially considering their average lifespan was probably around 40-50 years at best.

Who knows what kind of propulsion systems will be in use a 1,000 years from now. If future humans discover magnetic monopoles, they might be able to use them to induce baryonic decay, which means they may have rockets that convert matter directly into energy. They might develop superconducting materials that could allow them to construct "ramjet" style rockets. Who knows, they might create low mass black holes that could convert any matter into Hawking radiation. Such a rocket would easily propel a ship to near the speed of light.

About the only hope we have for FTL travel is in wormholes. Wormholes themselves are not actually faster than light propulsion. If we create them someday, it would probably involve massive amounts of energy (like a planet's worth) and one of the "mouths" would have to be transported to the target destination. The end result might be something like the relay network in Mass Effect. Heck, if one of them collapsed, it would probably result in a supernova like explosion just like in ME2. There might be civilizations millions, or even billions of years more advanced than us out there, and for all we know, they might have something like the Mass Relay network, but they would be wormholes, and I doubt they would be so easy to use, what with extreme tidal forces and stability issues and all that.

You could create a naked singularity in front of the bubble, but yeah the energy requirements is quite staggering, better get those Zero Point Modules up and running on vacum energy :happy: 

Besides quantum nonlocality shows that an action can produce a reaction faster than the speed of light, while not all that useful right now, it shows there is lots more to discover which may present new foundations for space tech, I mean we haven't even found the graviton yet  and lets not forget dark energy and dark matter.

We presumably  just
 got the Higgs so negative energy is next 

[SimKoning]

It's funny that there is all this argument about breaking the speed of light, but nobody talks about locally altering the speed of light itself. If you can't break the speed limit, why not change it? I know, many people will say that is not possible, none of which know WHY the speed of light is where it is. There is some sci fi room there.

For those who want more, remember this formula?

There might be a small increase in the speed of light with the Casimir effect, but it would be incredibly slight. Again, even if you could increase the speed of light, you would need an FTL particle of some kind to create the effect in front of the ship; there is no real way around this.

Some of the people on this board need to take the time to read some space opera that doesn't involve FTL. Space opera is actually more interesting with realistic space travel. That may seem counterinuitive, but give it a chance.

those Zero Point Modules up and running on vacum energy

You can't use the vacum energy to do work. There is no way to create a vacum energy reactor. Arthur C. Clarke speculated on it in a few novels, but now they know better.

To go into space costs a LOT of money, with rather dubious prospects of making a profit on any timescale that a typical businessman, or a government considers. There are needs for money that are currently judged more pressing than space exploration, and no reason to think that that'll be any different twenty, fifty or a hundred years from now.
So unless something can trigger another space race, I don't foresee things like bases on mars and the moon in the next few hundred years at least.

Cameron and Google and a few other mega-investors are planning on mining asteroids. Sounds crazy, but it's actually cheaper to mine asteroids in space than it is to mine asteroids that are buried under thousands of feet of solid rock down here on Earth. Also, it far cheaper to transport water from an asteroid to the space station while you're already in space than it is to propel it to escape velocity from the surface. 

If nuclear fusion reactors become viable in the next 50 years, you'll see a space race to the moon thanks to the presence of helium-3 all over its surface.

The craziest idea so far is the comany that is palnning on paying for the colonization of Mars with a reality show! 

Modifié par SimKoning, 10 juillet 2012 - 07:22 .

[Wayning_Star]

Don't know about time travel, but EZo apparently exists in some form.

http://kas-ruthis.bl...ement-zero.html

[SimKoning]

In the Mass Effect universe, Eezo would have to emit a field that travels faster than light. So, while the ship within the Mass Effect field is not actually traveling faster than light, the energy that creates the effect would be.

[RyanSoup]

galaxy366 wrote...

So the Higgs Boson really reminds me of Element Zero, while it doesn't increase or decrease mass the Higgs does control it.

So maybe in 10 years we can master the Higgs to have a mass less vessel !!

What do you people think? Is the Higgs the key to unlocking faster then light?

A mass-less volume is called a vaccuum
A mass-less vessel is called a fallacy

The Higgs-Boson really just supports String Theory.  I don't know that it's even been confirmed as the Higgs-Boson yet, do you?

[Ruined Requiem]

AHadley23 wrote...

ME violates known physical laws in a variety of ways. So no, probably not gonna happen.

[/buzzkill]

So do Black Holes. 

[SimKoning]

Ruined Requiem wrote...

AHadley23 wrote...

ME violates known physical laws in a variety of ways. So no, probably not gonna happen.

[/buzzkill]

So do Black Holes. 

Yes, but there is actually a theory that blackholes don't actually contain a singularity, but rather an entire universe : )

 
The Higgs-Boson really just supports String Theory.  I don't know that it's even been confirmed as the Higgs-Boson yet, do you?

They said they have a sigma 5 level confidence, so basically I think they are 99.999% certain that it's the Higgs Boson. Also, the Higgs is predicted by the standard model, which is the basis for GUTs and other "higher level" physics. 

Modifié par SimKoning, 10 juillet 2012 - 09:37 .

[Sumthing]

SimKoning wrote...

Ruined Requiem wrote...

AHadley23 wrote...

ME violates known physical laws in a variety of ways. So no, probably not gonna happen.

[/buzzkill]

So do Black Holes. 

Yes, but there is actually a theory that blackholes don't actually contain a singularity, but rather an entire universe : )

That is just speculation. There is no real evidence for that.