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[Sirus]

It's science FICTION. Note the fiction, sil vous plais. You've got to be willing to suspend disbelief, or anything softer than a biography is gonna piss you off

[Sirus]

No thanks, I get enough of that from my mom 

[kaijyuu]

I don't mind impossible stuff, like sci fi staples such as FTL travel, or things like magic, so long as they're intrinsic and initial parts of the premise. It's only when impossible stuff pops up in the middle that it kills my suspension of disbelief.

[Loud Whispers]

I don't mind impossible stuff, like sci fi staples such as FTL travel, or things like magic, so long as they're intrinsic and initial parts of the premise. It's only when impossible stuff pops up in the middle that it kills my suspension of disbelief.

It toasts bread AND slices it?

That's it, I'm out.

[kaijyuu]

Eeeeeexcactly.

[Osmosis Jones]

Sooo. Ummm. Yeah. Maybe FTL won't be fiction within our lifetimes.


I'm kinda floored by this. I mean, on the one hand, I've always understood there to be some pretty big impossibilities with FTL travel (namely violation of causality). However, this is a legitimate attempt by someone who is by no means a crank; he's a respected scientist at NASA. If he thinks it's possible... 

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I am now going to base all of my political decisions on whether or not the politician in question wants to fund NASA.

[Starver]

IIRC, the idea behind Warp Drive (in its most scientifically consistent fictional representation, and hence every 'RL' idea directly associated with that) is not that one goes faster than light (because one can't), but that one engineers things such that things that don't go as fast as light get to a destination ('slowly') faster than light would normally go in an 'unengineered' transit situation, through shortening the intervening space in some manner.  (In 'warp drive', in a manner that travels with the ship using the 'shorter' space.  In wormhole tech, by linking the far points together with a shorter path, etc...)

If that's what's being planned, I've got no problem with it.  (Except for WTF are they going to do to 'Make It So', because the whole bending of space thing that the hypothetical 'warp-drive-like' mechanism uses is...  difficult.  Yes, that's a word I can use, if only an understatement.  Any ideas what their background ideas actually are?)

Worthwhile to look at, I suppose.  At least to start to rule out certain possibilities.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Well yeah, that's why they call it a warp drive. It artificially warps spacetime so that the subjective movement of the craft within the warped bubble is way faster than everything else.

[Starver]

Sorry, started off by wanting to say that Warp Drive isn't exactly FTL (to deal with the whole "I've always understood there to be some pretty big impossibilities with FTL travel (namely violation of causality)" comment), and it got away with me.

The maintenance of Causality aside, it may not be necessarily Impossible, but I definitely want to say how it'll be Difficult.  At least to work out from our current level of tech (although once we have the capability, it'll probably be as easy to take advantage of as a bike is for riding).

[MonkeyHead]

Oh, given enough energy, we could move stuff at speeds close to FTL, or cheat and take shortcuts through higher dimensions. The caveat is "enough energy" and "how much stuff"... oh, and probably not anything iving, if you wanted it to be alive after the trip.

This "going fast to other stars" crap isnt that new an idea. British Rail (yea, you heared me) seriously messed around with the idea in the 1970's.

[Siquo]

Well, the trick is not to move your ship, but to move space around your ship so you end up somewhere else. Technically you didn't "move" as per the classical definition since you did not accelerate. Physicists start to look like lawyers: circumventing laws by exploiting loopholes and technicalities.

[palsch]

Sooo. Ummm. Yeah. Maybe FTL won't be fiction within our lifetimes.

The Eagleworks team has discovered that the energy requirements are much lower than previously thought. If they optimize the warp bubble thickness and "oscillate its intensity to reduce the stiffness of space time," they would be able to reduce the amount of fuel to manageable amount: instead of a Jupiter-sized ball of exotic matter, you will only need 500 kilograms to "send a 10-meter bubble (32.8 feet) at an effective velocity of 10c."

Ah, right. Exotic matter. No clearer on that point?

I mean, if the right exotic matter existed we could create Stargate style stable wormholes. We just need some material that is a) completely stable, b) can be passed through as well as easily manipulated and c) has negative mass.

My understanding here is that a warp drive would use similar negative mass matter. There is no real reason to believe that such stuff exists.

[i2amroy]

Sooo. Ummm. Yeah. Maybe FTL won't be fiction within our lifetimes.

So not to put a damper on the festivities or anything, but maybe you might want to take a closer look at that article that you linked to. Sure the article starts out by putting a "just around the corner", "building one now" type spin on it, but if you actually read the article you will notice a few things:
1) They haven't actually done the tests to see if the bubble creation machine works.
2) The bubbles they are talking about are measured on the nano/micro scale. They are nowhere near big enough to actually fit anything inside.
3) Yes, his equations allow you to reduce the amount of exotic mass required from a ball the size of jupiter to one of 500 kg. But keep in mind that currently the exotic matter they are talking about exists in theory only, and we have yet to actually find any of it.

So while the ideas are certainly possible, and could indeed come about in our lifetimes, they are not "being built" in any sense of the phrase right now.

[alway]

Here's the actual paper; a much better source than journalists whose average grasp of science is on an elementary school level.
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110023492_2011024705.pdf