Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[alway]

Pretty much any collision at near c would be like cosmic rays. Cosmic rays, without shielding will destroy small things (like DNA) but have little to no macroscopic effects on material. Increase the size of those cosmic rays from sub-atomic particles... And you need shielding or your ship gets ripped apart. However, space is such a vaccuum in all but a few places that during interstellar travel, you would likely encounter only a couple of incidents in which shielding to protect the hull would be necessary. For the most part it would be the same as cosmic rays. Between two stars, assuming there is no star between them, the only likely place to encounter debris capable of doing damage would be within the stars' immediate vicinity. The rest would be pretty much clouds of ionized gas/plasma...  cosmic radiation. By the time you were within any danger of a strike you would have already begun slowing down the craft to orbital velocity of the target planet.

As for FTL travel, to my knowledge we do not have any working mechanisms/theories which could make it work. And if it is "within 100 years" that is the technical way of saying "I have no freeking idea if how to do it or if we ever will, but if we do, based on the speed of techtechnological advance it can't be to far off." Basicly the same as my answer. You can bet the same month as FTL is found to be possible, every news and especially science magazine will have that on the front page, followed by several months of follow up articles. Heck, metamaterials (possibility of invisibility) have had several, and that is not nearly as important and world shattering a discovery as FTL travel would be.

And off my brain goes on another tangent... An interesing thing about FTL travel is if we manage to colonize other worlds hundreds of lightyears away, it would be possible for one's grandchildren to one day pull out a telescope (a rather big one...) and watch the maiden voyage of their grandfather's ship as it embarked from earth a hundred years before...

[LegoLord]

And off my brain goes on another tangent... An interesing thing about FTL travel is if we manage to colonize other worlds hundreds of lightyears away, it would be possible for one's grandchildren to one day pull out a telescope (a rather big one...) and watch the maiden voyage of their grandfather's ship as it embarked from earth a hundred years before...

"Today, class, we will be taking a field trip on the Starship voyager to watch the battle of Hastings through a telescope."

"Okay, men, now we'll know just what the deal was with the J.F.K. assassination."

Just think of the possibilities.

[alway]

Hehe, I think we just invented a new branch of archaeology! No more digging in the field required... Just a FTL drive and a REALLY powerful telescope!

Unfortunately, it would take a MASSIVE telescope to gather enough light to see what was going on down on the surface of a planet thousands of lightyears away... Especially if you want to watch it in realtime and not just get an overall view of the city layout...

[RAM]

The light barrier can't be surpassed on either end. STL will always be STL and FTL will always be FTL.

But they would be their own agents, having no known way of talking with home planet in a meaningful matter or even being the same place culturally or politicly when they come back.

But if you can figure out a way to control and accelerate the FTL then you can transmit detectable activity FTL.

And increasing speed requires exponential energy requirement. As you get closer to LS your mass is increasing. Then there also the need for equal time for acceleration and deceleration.

That assumes that you are working purely with your own engine power, this wouldn't be taking place in a vacuum... well, okay, it would, maybe, depending upon the scale you are using, but still, you are accelerating away from a gravity well and towards a gravity well... okay, that makes it worse, but still, they could shoot a laser or something at you from the destination, doesn't help the first group but immigrants would like it. And they would probably be shooting a better laser from the source... if you used a grappling hook... it would be ripped off and take a big chunk of you with it. If you hit an asteroid, that would slow you down, especially if it had the same mass and opposing velocity... Hmmm, you could overshoot a little and orbit the destination for a little bit, which probably wouldn't help. Okay, last effort, you could split your vessel and send most of it's mass out ahead to do orbits around the destination and fire the cargo backwards, it might help a little...


P.S.
 Wow, that is one tough ball...

[MrWiggles]

Ram, no matter where the extra energy is coming from, the amount needed will always dramatically increase with very /very/ little gain.

No matter the breaking technique use it still needs the same amount of time as accelerating. There that whole messy issue of inertia. The passengers are traveling at the same speed of the craft, but independent to it. They change absent of each other. So you need braking speeds that aren't deadly to its passengers. Which oddly are equal to its accelerating speeds.

In reality, when in star trek or star wars and they jump to ultra fast speed, everyone should get slammed to back of the ship, turned to putty. However, they have the magical device called interial dampener. That device can't exist.

[Idiom]

In reality, when in star trek or star wars and they jump to ultra fast speed, everyone should get slammed to back of the ship, turned to putty. However, they have the magical device called interial dampener. That device can't exist.

I could have sworn the engines in Star Trek moved space, not the ship. Stretches it and contracts it in a manner that induces the ship forward in the illusion and for all practical purposes effect that the ship is moving really, really fast when it fact it isn't. I would suspect being caught in a time-space wrinkle would cause serious disorientation and time would pass differently on different ends of the ship.

[MrWiggles]

In reality, when in star trek or star wars and they jump to ultra fast speed, everyone should get slammed to back of the ship, turned to putty. However, they have the magical device called interial dampener. That device can't exist.

I could have sworn the engines in Star Trek moved space, not the ship. Stretches it and contracts it in a manner that induces the ship forward in the illusion and for all practical purposes effect that the ship is moving really, really fast when it fact it isn't. I would suspect being caught in a time-space wrinkle would cause serious disorientation and time would pass differently on different ends of the ship.

Like the bible, Star Trek contradicts itself on exactly how it works. V'ger says traveling faster then light, no left or right. Whereas in all the other series and movies, it makes most sense that it continually traveling at ftl and turning. The only thing they tend to keep constance is that needs a subspace bubble. And subspace is where all the massive objects can go FTL. Most episodes tend to say that its the ship moving FTL.

[Ampersand]

The only present theory on how faster than light travel could be possible is a method by with you don't actually move faster than light within your frame of reference, but do move faster than light from outside your frame of reference.

The concept is that you contract space time in front of the vessel, and expand it behind the vessel. It can be approximated by taking a paper tube, and narrowing one end. Then, as the vessel moves through this bubble of contracted space-time, the space time is decompressed, and and so on. It is like a bubble of space time itself that is moving, while the vessel inside of the bubble is not. The space time itself can move at any speed. In actuality, talking about speed and Space-time doesn't make sense.

There is of course a problem. Actually going about this will cause enough radiation to utterly sterilize the vessel until a human being is little more than it's constituent atoms.

[Muz]

FTL travel impossible? Hah, there was one time when people said it was impossible to find the square root of a negative number. But then again, religion won't let us go faster than light.

Keeping on topic: Speed of light in Islam

A bit of a tough read, though.

[IndonesiaWarMinister]

FTL travel impossible? Hah, there was one time when people said it was impossible to find the square root of a negative number. But then again, religion won't let us go faster than light.

Keeping on topic: Speed of light in Islam

A bit of a tough read, though.

Wow...
It has many interesting read. My free time....

[Idiom]

The only present theory on how faster than light travel could be possible is a method by with you don't actually move faster than light within your frame of reference, but do move faster than light from outside your frame of reference.

The concept is that you contract space time in front of the vessel, and expand it behind the vessel. It can be approximated by taking a paper tube, and narrowing one end. Then, as the vessel moves through this bubble of contracted space-time, the space time is decompressed, and and so on. It is like a bubble of space time itself that is moving, while the vessel inside of the bubble is not. The space time itself can move at any speed. In actuality, talking about speed and Space-time doesn't make sense.

There is of course a problem. Actually going about this will cause enough radiation to utterly sterilize the vessel until a human being is little more than it's constituent atoms.

That's the explanation I remember. Where's the radiation supposed to come from during that anyway?

[alway]

Cosmic radiation is just subatomic particles moving very near c, so if you are in a craft moving at near c, any stationary particles you encounter would act almost exactly like cosmic radiation from the point of view of those on the craft.

[Ampersand]

The only present theory on how faster than light travel could be possible is a method by with you don't actually move faster than light within your frame of reference, but do move faster than light from outside your frame of reference.

The concept is that you contract space time in front of the vessel, and expand it behind the vessel. It can be approximated by taking a paper tube, and narrowing one end. Then, as the vessel moves through this bubble of contracted space-time, the space time is decompressed, and and so on. It is like a bubble of space time itself that is moving, while the vessel inside of the bubble is not. The space time itself can move at any speed. In actuality, talking about speed and Space-time doesn't make sense.

There is of course a problem. Actually going about this will cause enough radiation to utterly sterilize the vessel until a human being is little more than it's constituent atoms.

That's the explanation I remember. Where's the radiation supposed to come from during that anyway?

The radiation that results from that is Hawking radiation. Exactly the sort of thing that comes out of Black Holes.

[Andir]

The problem I have with "Warp" speed is that the stars would vanish as you passed them because the light wouldn't be able to catch the ship... unless of course what we know as the speed of light is actually the minimal (or perfect?) speed which particles traveling emit visible light.  I mean it's totally possible that there is something traveling faster than light, but we can't see them or they appear as "random" waves or background noise to us.  For all we know, the known universe could be traveling faster than light speed which could explain why we don't see beyond a certain aspect. (And no, I don't buy that a person traveling at light speed experiences slower time... just slower perception of time as they "catch up" to the light emitted from the past.)

[MrWiggles]

The problem I have with "Warp" speed is that the stars would vanish as you passed them because the light wouldn't be able to catch the ship... unless of course what we know as the speed of light is actually the minimal (or perfect?) speed which particles traveling emit visible light.  I mean it's totally possible that there is something traveling faster than light, but we can't see them or they appear as "random" waves or background noise to us.  For all we know, the known universe could be traveling faster than light speed which could explain why we don't see beyond a certain aspect. (And no, I don't buy that a person traveling at light speed experiences slower time... just slower perception of time as they "catch up" to the light emitted from the past.)

UM... Yea, time is totally relative to speed. You move faster, time moves slower. That an undeniable fact, with variety of nifty experiments and oddities to prove this. Geosynchronous orbits have to account for time dilation to function properly.  There was an experiment preformed by nasa, having two planes fly at  and around the equator in opposite directions. Each plane carried an atomic clock that was set to a control group atomic clock at ground zero. WHen they did their two loops (?), they experience time dilation as exactly predicted to Einstein model. Spacetime is a fact.

I can foster links for you on easy to follow videos that can explain this fact of reality for you.
I've heard about space warping technique to. It would need need hundred of solar masses to work though, if I recall correctly.