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~Brigade Bar~ => General Discussion => Headline News => Topic started by: Zen on November 27, 2012, 10:40


Title: "Warp Drive" theoretically possible? WOW!
Post by: Zen on November 27, 2012, 10:40
Evidently this has been known since 1994 when a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre published a paper titled The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity (http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/11/5/001). The basic concept is to use tremendous amounts of energy to compress space-time in front of the ship, while expanding it behind the ship, creating a bubble that is pushed along at speeds faster than the speed of light, while the object inside the bubble is actually not moving relative to its own little pocket of space-time. The drawback to this theoretical concept? It would take energy equivalent to the mass of Jupiter to go as far as Alpha Centauri.

Well, a few months ago, physicist Harold White came out with a shocker: It can be done with less energy, (http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive?post=54588781) perhaps as little as something that has the mass of the Voyeger space probe. (Of course, this is a mass of negative particles, or anti-matter, basically. It exists in theory, but as far as I know, there has never been anything beyond theory.) In any case, NASA actually has a team working in the lab to test this theory on an extremely small scale... Warp speed, Mr. Sulu!

Title: Re: "Warp Drive" theoretically possible? WOW!
Post by: Genichiro on November 27, 2012, 19:01
I've heard about stuff like this before. The biggest problem has always been the energy costs; not to mention it takes a serious drain of resources just to produce the smallest amounts of anti-matter.
Title: Re: "Warp Drive" theoretically possible? WOW!
Post by: Cirno on December 02, 2012, 06:09
I think the both of you just had a shared nerd-gasm