Ive been reading up online about potential ways of travelling faster than light.

Im aware its only yet a dream and a bunch of loose theories but , based on past discoveries over the last 100 years, is there a chance that the ability to travel to other stars could be come a possibility in all of our lifetimes or is it something that , in all your opinions ( and you most likely know much more on the topic than i) something that will take thousands of years, if ever to discover?

If we get a unified theory of everything, would that help in development of such technologies, or would it just give us a better understanding of the universe?

There was a young lady named Bright,
whose speed was much faster than light.
She set off one day
in a relative way,
and returned on the previous night.

The problem with all these theories is the insane amounts of energy they all require us to have at our disposal. I just don't see that happening in our life times. In fact, I hope it doesn't happen within our lifetimes or our lives will all be truncated. We are not ready for even the amount of power we can tap, let alone more!

Bart.

Hi Fintan, interesting questions indeed!
Rocket technology in its primitive form has been around for quite a few hundred years now and in that time we have simply refined and improved rockets as technology progresses (for war and space travel applications). We have sent robotic spacecraft towards the edge of our solar system in the form of the Voyagers and Pioneer probes. Voyager 1 has taken ~30 years to cover a distance of ~105.3 AUs (as of Feb 2008), light would take ~14 ½ hours for the same journey.

Fintan, even we do succeed in theoretical physics regarding unified field theory and other forms of advanced physics does not mean that we will also have the technological capabilities to implement and test those theories as in your example of faster than light travel. A reasonable example of what I mean is the case of George Boole of Boolean algebra fame. His work was profound but not well known and of no real practical use at the time, technology however caught up and with the advent of computer applications in later years, Mr. Boole’s work proved to be most useful indeed.

If light travel or indeed faster than light travel is to be accomplished there are logical steps to be taken, a thought process like the following example maybe… Stage one “conjecture”; stage two “speculation”, stage three “the science”, stage four “the technology” and stage five “the application” as you can probably gather we are perhaps between stage one and two, the time line for progression to each stage is anyone’s guess, it maybe sooner than we think or a very long way off yet.

The idea of physically traveling at light speed (even approaching close to light speed) and faster than light is fascinating and many theories by many people as you know have been proposed, some that come to mind is; Alcubierre, Diametric, Pitch, Induction, Disjunction and Slip String Drives, Worm holes, etc etc.
Perhaps as a species we could also research faster than light communication (personal thought), who knows what the Universe (or Multiverse) has in surprise for us in the years ahead when we truly search, apply logic and use our technology and means thereof in a noble way.

Who would have thought in the 13th century while we were firing rockets at each other for war purposes that the same basic technology would send humans to the Moon and allow us a means of exploring the solar system but as Bart said in his last post and I am in 100% agreement with him as with any of our technologies it can be miss-used, perhaps we are too immature presently to be responsible for such massive power (just research our history and current state of affairs), but perhaps in time we could take our place amongst the stars as responsible and respected humans. In the meantime lets get back to the Moon and then onto Mars, perhaps achievable in your lifetime Fintan! Sorry for the long ramblings!

"We embarked on our cosmic voyage with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars".

Carl Sagan

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket
voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/fastfacts.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole
math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/FTL.html

Clear Skies
Mike

Bart and Mike excellent answers, nice limerick PeterMark, but a bit clean for my tastes :wink:


Thanks for your viewpoints. I had not really considered the fact that such a technology would almost certainly be used for evil before good. its a pity that almost all of our technological advances come from advances of warefare technology.

Until we start making significant advances in technology for the sake of bettering ourselves, and not for the sake of finding better ways of destroying eachother we are going to be stuck in quite a rutt and i would view our current actions as those of a small minded species.

how is it that the people who think in this way ( who initiate wars, advancing ways of killing eachother) almost always end up in power. it would be nice to see how the world would be if some more open minded more forward thinking minds got into power.

The question for this topic came up from two areas, one when watching that 70s show, where Red Foreman said Eric's only regret was that he didnt live in space and I actually thought "wow, thats one of my huge regrets!!!" and from a post on these boards showing what would happen if a neutron star passed close to our sun, destroying our solarsystem in a heartbeat.

we really are betting on nothing happening ( asteroid, rogue blackhole, some unknown change in the sun we dont foresee due to our lack of understanding of it, comet etc etc etc) and us being safe on earth for the forseeable future but until we branch out, and i mean out of the solarsystem into other areas of the galaxy the human race is very very vunerable. i know the odds are stacked against something cataclysmic happing but the odds are still there. think about it, someone usually wins the lottery and look at the odds there!

anyway, thats just more ramblings of my idle mind! thanks for humoring me guys!

Faster than light travel is not possible in the normal sense of the word. Any matter accelerated to light speed unfortunately is predicted to be ripped apart to its constituent components (quarks).
The only matter so far observed travelling close to light speed is a proton dubbed the Oh My God Particle. (see www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/ )

So maybe we can cheat and create something like a "wormhole" i.e. a tunnel from one part of space to another - well this might be possible if the universe were saddle shaped or had some other geometry that we could use to create a shorter straight line distance between points. The current thought process indicates that the shape of the universe is flat, so this may rule out wormholes (I could be talking bullocks here).

Warping spacetime though is another matter - all matter warps spacetime. So maybe if we can isolate, trap and or create Higgs particles and use them to warp spacetime then maybe "faster than light" travel will be an option in the future. We still won't be travelling faster than light but rather we will be taking a shortcut from A to B.

BTW the Higgs Boson has yet to be detected - but they are getting close - the LHC may just be capable of producing one.

The only matter so far observed travelling close to light speed is a proton dubbed the Oh My God Particle.

& Neutrinos. Also the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven (& others) is designed to accelerate particles up to 99.something% of lightspeed.

Cheers,
~Al

When we talk about warping space and shortcuts from A-B etc does this take relativity out of the equation. ie. JOurney at close to relativistic speeds to alpha Centuri takes 4 years from the travelers perspective but 400 or 4000 from ours here on Earth .etc and on a grander scale from our perspective that photon from M31 took 2 million years to get here but from the photons perspective it only left Andromeda a few minutes ago.

Cause if relativity is still part of the equation then I just can't see the powers that be investing in such an undertaking. "Hey guys, we're sending you to Alpha Centauri. When you come back, everyone and everything you have ever known will be dust, Oh and to the public? We are going to invest half our GNP in this great undertaking and just think, your great, great, great,great,great.....etc etc children will find out what our guys found at alpha centauri!!"

Nasa can't even get a few billion to fast track to Mars!!

If the technology can side-step relativity, and the governments investing in this can see the fruits of their labours within their members lifetimes, then maybe just maybe they would be prepared to fork up the cash.

Thats my opinion anyway.

Could not have put it better myself, if fact, by the time they would return to excite us with thier adventure stories....we would probably all have left on superior ships and swithched out the lights.....hello is there anybody there?.....guess where we have been? hellllooo... :shock:
I can't conceive of any technology that would allow us to visit the cosmos in an effective way except maybe deep space probes, even then it would be more for our ego's than for science. Im sure that mankind, like a person who asks a question: the longer we have to wait for the answer, the less relevent the answer becomes.
:?

You're not wrong guys. Government will never stump up the cash for such things - though the military might kick it about for a bit. However, private enterprise may have a different take on it. If there's a buck to be made anywhere in it then it will get serious attention. Space no longers belongs to governments, private enterprise will be the next great leap, starting with Virgin.

Could you imagine Ryan Air getting involved......space suit, "that will be extra". bring your own sandwitches......flight to saturn....and you are dropped off at Jupiter.....cargo still on Mars? ....and you still have to get the shuttle service the rest of the way to your destination :shock:

Ryanair aren't that bad.
They do tend to use obscure little airfields a "bit" further away, so I think you're exagerating when you say "drop off at Jupiter" - I'm sure you know that Ryanair operate from a perfectly "accessible" base on Enceladus, and that's close enough. What do you expect for €2.50 to Saturn. The return trip will be more expensive though (keeping with Earth traditions) €45M plus taxes.

Yeah rite.....what about the 7 month delay in the departure lounge....vacumn toilets out of order. kids squabbling...... :cry:

For Ryanair to be involved the technology would have to be cheap.

Come to think of it I agree with the sentiments of earlier posts - for Governments to get involved it would have to be cheap!

The sad truth is that a lot of the advances in technology since 1900 in particular have been spurred on by the military either due to outright war or 'Geopolitical' reasons - eg Radio, Radar, Integrated Circuits, Jet engines . Even US space technology initially depended on a cadre of ex-Nazi rocket engineers made redundant by the closure of the V2 rocket programme at the end of WW2.

Proof of concept stage will only be reached if a military or strategic advantage is within sight (no pun intended). Maybe the impending shortage of hydrocarbons might see acceleration (again no pun) of a means for interplanetary travel to Jupiter's moons, some of which are now thought of as containing vast quantities of black gold.

{snipped}Warping spacetime though is another matter - all matter warps spacetime. So maybe if we can isolate, trap and or create Higgs particles and use.{snipped}

Dr. Randell Mills has suggested yet another GUT in which he quite agrees with you. He offers a free PDF copy at
www.blacklightpower.com/theory/bookdownload.shtml
The label on the link says, "Entire book."

One interesting aspect of his GUT is that everything (particle, wave, field, etc) can correctly be described by an equation. One impliciation of this situation is that space, time, mass, and energy are not necessarily real. That is, because this universe, and every aspect of it, can be accurately described by one or another equation, then this universe, in toto, might be a virtual reality.

The idea, that we are in a virtual reality, has been spreading more quickly since 1993.
On the off-chance that this idea has not yet come to your attention, the details of it can be found at:
Wikipedia, overview
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulism
Nick Bostrom, 2002
www.simulation-argument.com/
Brian Whitworth, 2007
www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/200...r&nsref=blogtech

In addition to those arguments, one way to explain the apparent fact that space and time and mass and energy are quantized would be to say that their quantization is a result of the fact that the 3-D monitor, in which our virtual reality is displayed, has a finite spatial screen resolution, and a finite repetition rate.

However that might be, it remains that known virtual realities are not self-originated. If they were self-originated, then they would be natural realities, that is, realities without an originator. It also remains that known virtual realities are not self-sustained. If they were self-sustained, then they would have become natural realities which is a contradiction by definition.

So if it were the case that this were a virtual reality, then it would logically follow that there is an originator of this virtual reality. It would also logically follow that this virtual reality would have a sustainer. In the case that the originator of this virtual reality were to be a character in another virtual reality, then the ultimate sustainer would be the originator of the virtual reality in which all other virtual realities were nested.

An additional result, if this were to be a virtual reality, would be that it could be tailored to each character. That is to say, not everybody would necessarily experience the same version of this virtual reality. They would, if this were a natural reality; but not necessarily in the case that this were to be a virtual reality.

This list of consequences to this being a virtual reality is not complete. For instance, on the topic of UFOs, many aspects of that topic can be immediately understood if we suppose that this is a virtual reality. Ditto for visions, Fortean events, time travel, faster than light travel, and many additional topics which otherwise remain incomprehensible.

One interesting consequence is that this idea offers an explanation of why, when anything unusual happens, we immediately turn to the nearest person and ask, "Did you see that?" We do that as if we innately know that this is a virtual reality, and that we therefore might not all experience the same version of it.

However that might be, the idea that this is a virtual reality seems to have the potential of explaining many circumstances which have otherwise baffled us. So let us closely examine this idea in order to get the maximum possible benefit from it.

I'm off to get a virtual Starbucks with some virtual money...

I'm off to get a virtual Starbucks with some virtual money...

Ha! Thanks for the chuckle. I certainly would agree that the idea of nested virtual realities is new and therefore discomforting.

One discomforting aspect of the idea is that it provides a glimpse of us being in an endless welter, seemingly cut off from the originator of the virtual reality in which all other VRs are nested. So it is perhaps helpful to emphasize that regardless of how many virtual realities are made by how many copies of the orginator of all originators, it nevertheless logically remains that all of them are sustained in the imagination of the originator of all originators, so said entity is unavoidably always aware of everything and everybody.

Virtual realities. mmmmm....

I agree in principle to this accord. I believe that we are all capable of creating our own reality - mine is no doubt different than yours, and where they overlap (shared reality if you will) is what you termed "natural reality". We are all capable of fixing in place a quantum event merely by observing it - prior to the observation what was reality, did it exist? Can you define reality as the fixation of quantum events in a localised region of spacetime reinforced by shared observations which eventually lock reality in place at least for a brief period of time?

"The never ending days of being dead" by Marcus Chown touches briefly on virtual reality, as in maybe we are all taking part in a big computer simulation type idea. This to me is a bit bogus (though not impossible) as it brings up the problem of origin, i.e. are we a simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation inside a sumulation ad infinitum.

BTW thanks for the link to Mills book I must download and read it.

Virtual realities. mmmmm....{snipped}I believe that we are all capable of creating our own reality - mine is no doubt different than yours, and where they overlap (shared reality if you will) is what you termed "natural reality".

Well, although shared reality perhaps need an additional name, I had in mind self-existent reality as the definition for the phrase "natural reality" in contrast to an artificial reality, that is, a non-self-existent reality, which is more well-known as a virtual reality.

As to a natural, or self-existent reality, I believe that there is merely one, the entity who originated the virtual reality in which all of the additional virtual realities are nested, ad infinitum, and who sustains all of the virtual realities, including the first one. That is to say, the originator of all originators does not have an environment because space, time, mass and energy exist only in the imagination of the originator of all originators, and the imagined copies of said entity.

This {nested virtual realities} to me is a bit bogus (though not impossible) as it brings up the problem of origin, i.e. are we a simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation ad infinitum.

Yes, exactly so.

BTW thanks for the link to Mills book I must download and read it.

Good idea, although it's over 1,200 pages.

www.theweirdpost.com/wordpress/2008/05/p...aller-than-a-marble/ offers a report about an attempt of ours to form a scale model of a universe.

As to a natural, or self-existent reality, I believe that there is merely one, the entity who originated the virtual reality in which all of the additional virtual realities are nested, ad infinitum, and who sustains all of the virtual realities, including the first one. That is to say, the originator of all originators does not have an environment because space, time, mass and energy exist only in the imagination of the originator of all originators, and the imagined copies of said entity.

This sounds like a familiar God Quest to me. I hope that is not your intent. If you are suggesting that we are all a creation in the mind of some "being" external to our "reality" (Universe or whatever), who are we to say that he is not also a creation of someone else's intellect? Back to ad-infintum again. This path has no answer or end, and I will not argue it further as it is pointless and purely speculative and can never be contemplated as even remotely scientific.

If on the other hand you have some scientifically verifiable evidence of this Original Entity then, pray, do share........

OOooops sorry just cliked on the link in your profile ( greatriddle.flifree.com/a-new.htm ) and I will not contribute any more to this post. I just don't see the point in arguing over the existence or not of a non-entity. Sorry if that offends, it's just my reality. :)

Ah, the 19th century version of Scientology!