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Warp drives: Physicists give chances of faster-than-light space travel a boost

18 Comments
By Mario Borunda

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18 Comments
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We have a lot of negative energy in our workplace, maybe we should pivot into space travel.

18 ( +19 / -1 )

Good sci-fi stuff and maybe this research can be used in other applications but speed of light travel will never happen for humans as we are now. After earthly death or after Judgement Day, maybe.

-5 ( +5 / -10 )

Please, send Elon Musk on the first mission! Plus, he has oodles of negative energy.

-3 ( +5 / -8 )

Please target speed of light first.

Distance depends on speed of ligth by definition that is not supposed to be changing sooner or later.

Maths and physics are two different things. First one is a tool used for the latter.

-5 ( +0 / -5 )

Good sci-fi stuff and maybe this research can be used in other applications but speed of light travel will never happen for humans as we are now. After earthly death or after Judgement Day, maybe.

As the article makes clear, speed if light travel is not possible with our current understanding of physics. The warp drive idea gets round that by changing the space between objects.

As far as we know, after death the atoms that make up our bodies return to the environment.

-1 ( +3 / -4 )

Please target speed of light first.

Distance depends on speed of ligth by definition that is not supposed to be changing sooner or later.

Maths and physics are two different things. First one is a tool used for the latter.

As far as we know, it is impossible for anything to go faster than the speed of light, so we are unlikely to ever achieve this.

However, distance depends on space, and space can expand (and therefore presumably shrink) faster than the speed of light. The Big Bang was an expansion of space and time, not an explosion from a single point, as we often see it.

3 ( +4 / -1 )

I often travel fast than the speed of light in my dreams. Let's just leave it at that.

We do not want visitors here either by the way. We would become food.

-2 ( +1 / -3 )

Currently it is theoretical, but if the theory is right then it just becomes engineering and we clever monkeys are quote good at that. At the moment we are still working on the theory so very sadly I will not be taking a warp ship to the stars in my lifetime.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

It is amazing that the Star Trek series was created about 55 years ago but the writers already understood the concepts. "Negative energy" = "anti-matter".

At the rate of technological advances, these things might be reality within 200 years, if continued research and investments are applied.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

Great article! Nobody can bash Japan here.

Just when the pundits claim that we are about to run out of fossil fuel, technology develops and new pockets, larger than those to date, are found.

Some of us (not me) remember when it was IMPOSSIBLE to fly to the moon. We are way beyond that now.

So will be the case with faster-than-light travel. What is science fiction today becomes science fact tomorrow.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Practical interstellar space travel is impossible with the technology that we have now. That does not mean that it will always be impossible.

If we give credence to suggestions that at least some percentage of the UFOs that have been observed are interstellar in origin, then it would seem that practical space travel is already practiced by unknown space-faring beings.

What other improbable feats might become commonplace in the future? We can hardly imagine.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

@ 1glenn;

 "The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible."

~Arthur C. Clarke

2 ( +2 / -0 )

I would love to live long enough to see real pictures of other worlds in far off star systems, and perhaps glimpse life on other worlds. I would be too old to travel myself but to see such wonders would be amazing. No doubt in time more secrets of the universe will be uncovered and like attaining the ability to fly, then to leave the planet and return all done within less than a century, What seems impossible today will be old news in a hundred years. providing we dont destroy our world, or our civilization. The future could be a miracle of wonders or a catastrophe.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

Prior to 1945 many with aviation backgrounds thought it impossible to fly an aircraft faster than the speed of sound. That barrier was overcome and supersonic flight is now routine. Sustained atmospheric hypersonic flight with air breathing engines will be routine before the end of this decade. Combustion engineers have long thought airflow through an engine must be subsonic for combustion to be controllable and have gone through all kinds of technologies to slow down supersonic airflow at engine intakes, then accelerate it again at the exhaust. The successful testing of prototype scramjet engines have shown this long held engineering principle is not necessarily true and that it is indeed possible to sustain combustion in a supersonic airflow. I have every reason to be confident man will master spaceflight at speeds greater than the speed of light. Man is persistent that way in the face of technical challenges. There is always someone who wants to push the envelope. Always.

4 ( +4 / -0 )

My own hope is in electron 'tunneling' and the fact that the electron contains 'mass' (~1/1740th the mass of the proton) and, as such, seems to move 'mass' across ALMOST a sort of 'hyperspace' in moving from one Moore-law challenged conductor to another even if only a few nanometers. Something lurks there. maybe, which would give us new insight but, with as many eyes as have looked at it, that insight will not come easy. Sadly, at the moment it seems to be regarded in our commercially oriented world mostly as a 'problem' for chip makers rather than as a potential peephole into the future...but Biologists (sigh) really should not opine in the crazy world of Physics, I suppose...

1 ( +1 / -0 )

I have been buying some flux capacitors from a well known auction site from marti81 I hope that ive not been conned.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

"I have been buying some flux capacitors from a well known auction site from marti81 I hope that ive not been conned."

Hope you have a DeLorean to fit it on. If you require any help my good friend Doctor Brown can pitch in.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Sorry that I tried to be realistic.

It is good to dream but what they forgot to mention is that if it was even done, the watchers of the travellers would age many many many times faster than them.

No way time and space can be separated for the rules. It may change some day but that it dreaming, which I am not against.

I love sci-Fi with Clarke, Herbert, Asimov, Barjavel...

2 ( +2 / -0 )

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