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We were talking one night on IRC about methods of attaining lightspeed for starships. I was wondering what all of you believe is the simplest or most likely method. Here's mine:
I believe that a ship fires a laser, and then emits a protective field so the ship can ride the laser and thus attain light speeds. When the distance has been traversed, the laser is simply dispersed. The problems with using engines that would simply be powerful enough to move the ship the speed of light is that it would be an incredible drain, and impossibly stressing on the equipment. As well, it would take the same amount of incredible power to stop the ship, while if riding the laser the ship needs not slow itself down but simply end the laser emission.
To note, the laser method is the way i've assumed it to be in the EVEA's webstory guidelines.
So, what do you think? Please constructive answers only, thus you must provide sufficient reason if you choose to publically challenge my theory.
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Mmm... geekery...
I don't see how an object with mass can "ride" a beam of light unless its own mass is also converted to energy. And if the ship is "riding" the beam of light, it can't stop by just no longer emitting the beam (unless the beam is travelling faster than the ship even now); it would have to either "detach" from the beam, or it could stop when the beam hits and is absorbed by something.
I'd say avoid light-speed altogether, and use hyperspace or dimensional distortion to take a "shortcut" from point A to point B without travelling through the 3-space in between. There's a rather interesting discussion/explanation of such a "dimensional drive" in the Frozen Heart novella.
------------------ The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. - Groucho Marx Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. - Albert Einstein
hmm. Geekery again and Rooster, I asked you on irc how you would stop the laser at the right point, and keep it going. you never answered....
acceleration is the key
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When it comes down to it, light speed is too slow anyway. Think about it - you'd die of old age before you made it from Sol to Priat (or, in real life terms, the several thousand light years from Sol to Canopus)
My theory, even though it makes no sense (just a theory for my brain to look on it as) is that a ship is immersed by the light and thus becomes energy, with subatomic particles travelling with the light that carried information on how that body would transform back into it's normal form, or something like that. <laughs> Certainly wouldn't be fun to be reflected back to your starting location by a planet or another ship when you're in "light speed" mode, would it?
Actually, laser beams can be used to carry vessels. That is one of the current possible theories on how to make in-space transport - a laser beam on Earth carries the ship to Luna, a station is set up there with a laser beam, and that carries you back to Earth, all at light speeds.
Alternatively, look up zeropoint energy. That's another theory, although I do not remember much about it, it is generally using a form of energy carried in what we had thought was the vacuum of space.
I believe that this topic will turn out to be very interesting indeed, and await any more theories on how light speed (and hyperspace) travel would effectively work.
SilverDragon
------------------ "That's all very nice, but where are the guns?" - SilverDragon
Technically there are many different dimensions. 11 if you believe in string or "M" theory. If one could get into another one of these dimensions it is plausible to travel through it to get to another point in another dimension. This is close to what Glenn was thinking. On the other hand what if you just wanted to cruise around the solar system. You could have a big sail and ride the solar wind. It sounds old timey but it really is not a bad idea. Plus there are energy sources that we have not tapped or do not even know about yet so I would not count out something of that nature either.
I'm afraid this one's easy. You can't. At least not normally.
Einstein's relativity says that accelerating any mass to the speed of light would take an infinite amount of energy. Ignoring that, you're still left with the problem of time dilation. The faster you go, the slower time passes for you. The best explanation for this is that, the faster you move through space, more of your motion through time is instead transferred to motion through space. (Remember, spacetime isn't just a sci-fi concept, it's reality. Even if you aren't moving through space at all, you're still travelling in time.) This then, is the limit on speed- at the speed of light, time stands still.
So we're left looking for loopholes. Generation ships and hibernation are one way, but not very satisfying for most people. That leaves the whole hyperdrive, dimensional drive, slipstream, wormhole, quantum tunnelling, etc ideas, as Glenn mentioned above. The easy explaination is folding space, like ye olde "Wrinkle in Time" books. Quantum mechanics, btw, says that this is theoretically possible, but it involves creating the space inbetween point A and point B. (Think wormhole, here)
The other idea is that, while Einstein's equations explicitly rule out travelling at the speed of light, it may be possible to travel faster than light. There's only one enormous problem with it: How do you get from sub-light to hyper-light speeds without ever traveling at the speed of light? A slightly smaller problem: Would going faster than light mean you were travelling backwards in time?
Incidently, the 'powered by laser' craft still can't move at the speed of light, though it can (like ion drive) achieve much greater speeds than chemical rockets. Without finding and bugging my old physics instructor to do the math, I'm betting at about 500 million mph being an upper limit, here. (About .75c, c= roughly 670 million mph) It would take a long time to get to that velocity, and involve lasers far above our current tech level.
Lemme get back to you on zeropoint. Sounds like using the quantum fluctuations, but I can't see a good way to convert that to space travel.
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Well, if you somehow merged your ship into a wave of tachyons, it might be possible to enter a faster than light stage without ever actually going through the speed of light itself. And yes, faster than light is moving backwards in time, which would be fairly dangerous. The best way would be to make half the trip faster than light and then escape the tachyons and make the rest of the journey slower than the speed of light. That way, you should reach the location the same time you set off.
I'm not sure about zeropoint energy, I'll have to look that up a little more. I'm just wondering if catching tachyons would bring you through the speed of light itself. Another point - isn't eternal time the same as no time at all, since eternal time has no boundaries, and , if in that stage you were mere light, wouldn't eternal time pass instantly anyway? That way, the "speed of light" stage wouldn't matter. Also, if light travels at a speed that takes forever, how does it reach us?
Here's how I see it:
Zero speed = Infinite time (still wondering if this is actually possible to achieve) Lower than light = 500 years to reach a certain location Speed of light = A very small amount (5 years) to reach a certain location, following light years Faster than the speed of light (or is it time?) = Negative time, you reach the location before you set off
Here has been asked how can the speed of light be reached. Well, the problen is that the speed of light CAN'T be reached by material objects.
(The following is been translated from Spanish, so I'm sorry if some technical terms are not the ones used in English)
Einstein, in his Special Relativity theory, deduced the following expression: m=m0 / SquareRoot(1-v^2/c^2) , where 'm' is the effective mass perceived by the observer, 'm0' is the still mass of a particle with speed v=0 with regard to an inertial observer, 'v' is the speed with regard to that observer, and 'c' is the speed of ligh (3*10^8 m/s). In that expression we can see that if the speed 'v' is equal to 'c', 'v^2/c^2 = 1', and we will have in the denominator 1-1=0. Something divided by 0 is infinite (m=infinite!!), unless this something is equal to 0 also, as 0/0 has an indefinite (indeterminate) result. So the conclussion is that only particles with m0=0 can reach the speed of light. Moreover, if a particle has m0=0, it can only be at speed of light. So m0=0 implies v=c and viceversa. Some particles with m0=0 are photons, neutrines (not neutrons)...
Don't imagine strange methods to transform the ship and its passengers to fotons, that would be impossible (if possible, it would require too much energy) and very harmful!. Perhaps you could use a impulsion method that makes ships travel at 0.99999 times the speed of light (but not at speed of light). Even at those speeds, as it has already been said, it would take hundreds or thousands of years to travel to nearests stars, so speed of light doesn't seem to be a good solution. You should try already mentioned methods like dimensional curvature distortion of the space to instant travel between distant parts of the space. Next, I will explain what this consist on, so if anybody doesn't know it: Imagine a 2-dimensional world: a flat sheet of paper. Imagine two dots on this paper. Which is the shortest way from one point to another? A straight line at full speed ? The answer is NO. The shortest way is to create a distortion on that sheet of paper, folding it over the third dimension until the two points are joint, so you will be instantly on the other point. How to do that? I don't know.
On Warlock Shipyard (http://www.sendanet....ock/inicio.html) you have a brief description of a mixed hyperspace engine for my latest ship: The Assault Cruiser (http://www.sendanet..../ascruiser.html). It is science-finction, but there it is.
Greetings: Juan
PS: I hope I has been as accurate as possible.
I recall asking a similar question on the EV board months ago. And I got one answer that seemed reasonable, but perhaps a bit head of our time. Ask PlanetPhil as he was the one who posted the answer. There's that one or something similar to Frozen Heart, well dimensinal travel anyways. Near Light Speed and such.
And there is the theory that while going at such speeeds, we tend to age slower while we make such journeys while all around us time would about as always and before us time passes in decades, centuries, or even perhaps miliena while we but age a few years. Thanks to Martain Turner for that one on aging.
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To answer a few questions, in my lightspeed theory the laser is absorbed by the same field it rides on when the ship chooses to stop. As well, Harlan and those that opposed the theory based on energy required, it only uses as much energy as is needed to fire a simple laser. The field can ride it, however small, if it travels at lightspeed.
Also, the slipstream engine as used in the LBS series ran by flying through an opening into subspace and needed much less effort to travel the same relative distance in normalspace, which i believe is similar to the dimension distortion propositions you've put forth.
And Whitey, supposedly technology that could counter those effects would accompany the lightspeed drive. While unexplained, such a mechanism does exist in my theory as it is used in the EVEA.
(This message has been edited by roostersw (edited 06-09-2001).)
Mmmm, I don't know if I have understand well your laser impulsion theory... You are saying that the ship fires a laser, and that the same ship activates a force field against which the laser impacts, pushing the field (and the ship) forwards. Is this what you are saying?
If this is your theory, let me say that it has a major problem. It is true that when anything (material or pure light like the laser)impacts another thing, the second is pushed. But it is also true that when anything fires or emmits another thing (material or pure light like the laser), the emmiter is pushed backwards. So your ship would be pushed forwards when the laser is emmited and pushed forwards when it impacts the force field, making the ship to stay still. Perhaps you could just emmit the laser backwards, causing the ship to pushed forward, but this would not be a very efficient impulsion system.
You may have heard of some laser impulsion methids being investigated to impulse sattelites out of the solar system. But on those cases, the laser is fired from the Earth (very large) or from an orbital satelite (which can be repositioned).
Another 'riding' method is using a solar wing. The ship extents a huge wing (like old naval-ships) to catch solar energy emmissions. Low speed and range limited to solar influence.
Yes that is the concept, but the laser is emitted in a way that it is fired from the ship into the field. Maybe an extended arm that pulls around to sit behind the force field, and fires it. I'm sure it could be done somehow.
No, it can't be done (sorry)
It is impossible to recover from the laser shot more energy than the one emmited.
I'm afraid you still don't understand. My proposition for the extended arm firing the laser is not as well as the forward shot, but instead of it.
There is no way to attain the kind of "Speed" you would need to make EV and EVO possible. However, they never refer to it as "speed" but rather as hyperspace travel. I think that the general idea is that you use quantum mechanics to do a form of teleportation from one place to another(I think i heard that scientists have recently teleported a 10 micron object--not much, but it's a start :)). So that's my theory on how it works.
Uh, we are not discussing the attainment of hyperspeed. If you'll read at least the topic name, you'd know it's lightspeed we're discussing. I'm afraid i'll have to disregard your input.
Oh, so this topic has nothing to do with EVO? So, why is it on this webboard?
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Okay Jess, shall I open it about gluons, boson gauges, tachyons, and so on?
And this topic is perfectly fine. It relates to EVO more than some others...