/sci/ - Science & Math

I think that it's most likely complete bullshit.
Besides, breaking the light speed barrier (even by "not actually" breaking it, whatever that means) completely destroys any and all ideas we have about causality.

>>5067019
>destroys any and all ideas we have about causality.
No, it doesn't. How the fuck would it do that? An event that happens in andromeda right now happens in andromeda right now even if we can't see it for another several million years on earth. If we could warp there in a fractional millisecond and witness the event, and then report back home, no causality whatsoever would be violated.

Holy shit,someone resolved the energy problem with the Alcubierre Drive?!

For those unfamiliar. An Alcubierre Drive (sometimes called a Warp Drive) was something proposed by a mexifag scientist from UNAM a long time ago. The idea is more or less to treat space like a rubber. To compress the space in front of us and expend it behind us. So imagine that we squeeze the space in front of us to half, this would mean that if we traveled through it at a speed of 100 meters per second it would translate to actually traveling through 200 meters per second worth of space. At high compression rates and high speeds it should allow us to go faster than the speed of light without actually going faster than the speed of light.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Alcubierre

The idea has had lots of problems in the past. The big one was that it would require more energy than existed in the Universe to work. It had been emulated with other matter in some experiments, but I didn't think we were anywhere near a breakthrough.

What's it matter. Breaking the speed of light is nothing. We have to go at least 20 times light speed to get anywhere in less than a decade, and several hundred if we want to have any chance of colonizing the galaxy.

Breaking light speed isn't enough, we have to shit all over it and be able to go as fast as we please.

FTL travel is probably going to end up being something like swapping the position of two objects in space.

>>5067063
You're surely familiar with the twin paradox?
One twin, Abby, stays on Earth and the other, Betty, sets off at some high percentage of the speed of light.
Let's say that after 50 years, from Betty's perspective Abby has only aged 1 year. At that point Abby hops into her ultraluminal Star Trek ship and catches up with Betty in a negligible amount of time.
These two people were once in identical positions and timeframes, and now once again they are in the same position but 49 years apart.
Worse still, consider this situation from Abby's point of view:
Betty has been traveling away at some high portion of the speed of light, and after a year she seems only to have aged 1/10 of that (relativity applies equally in both frames */dilating time in the same direction/*). So she hops in her magic reality-crushing ship and catches up with her twin, who is now several months younger than her.

Wait, what? Which perspective is correct? Betty or Abby? Who is older? WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?

Instant travel breaks shit.

You're surely familiar with the twin paradox?
One twin, Abby, stays on Earth and the other, Betty, sets off at some high percentage of the speed of light.
Let's say that after 50 years, from Betty's perspective Abby has only aged 1 year. At that point Abby hops into her ultraluminal Star Trek ship and catches up with Betty in a negligible amount of time.
These two people were once in identical positions and timeframes, and now once again they are in the same position but 49 years apart.
Worse still, consider this situation from Abby's point of view:
Betty has been traveling away at some high portion of the speed of light, and after a year she seems only to have aged 1/10 of that (relativity applies equally in both frames */dilating time in the same direction/*). So she hops in her magic reality-crushing ship and catches up with her twin, who is now several months younger than her.

Wait, what? Which perspective is correct? Betty or Abby? Who is older? WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?

Instant travel breaks shit.

>>5067063
> An event that happens in andromeda right now happens in andromeda right now even if we can't see it for another several million years on earth.

so it's simultaneously happening right now and several million years ago?
sounds like a violation of causality to me

>>5067063
You're surely familiar with the twin paradox?
One twin, Abby, stays on Earth and the other, Betty, sets off at some high percentage of the speed of light.
Let's say that after 50 years, from Betty's perspective Abby has only aged 1 year. At that point Abby hops into her ultraluminal Star Trek ship and catches up with Betty in a negligible amount of time.
These two people were once in identical positions and timeframes, and now once again they are in the same position but 49 years apart.
Worse still, consider this situation from Abby's point of view:
Betty has been traveling away at some high portion of the speed of light, and after a year she seems only to have aged 1/5 of that (relativity applies equally in both frames */dilating time in the same direction/*). So she hops in her magic reality-crushing ship and catches up with her twin, who is now several months younger than her.

Wait, what? Which perspective is correct? Betty or Abby? Who is older? WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?

Instant travel breaks shit.
>Third post's a charm

>>5067119
wouldn't the process of aging appear to speed up as you move towards the other, rectifying any discrepancy you saw as you were traveling away from each other?

>>5067130
Paradoxes usually mean you fucked up. Waiting for the day time dilation is accounted for and disproved.

>>5067132
Note that this magic ship preserves your frame of reference. That's how it works. A person on Earth and a person on the ship both agree on the time to reach a location, therefore they measure time the same way.

Abby's clock is *always* equivalent to Earth time by this ship's mechanism, no matter how fast she's going. So no, it doesn't mysteriously fix itself as she moves towards Betty.

If that warp drive could work, we would long since have been overrun by aliens or alien robots. (What are the chances we would be the first civilisation to achieve spaceflight? The development of our actual civilisation took mere thousands of years once we had intelligence and sedentism; the laws of probability state that some other planet out there achieved its sentience some millions of years earlier than us, and if we would be able to achieve cheap FTL within the next few million years, some of those before us would already have succeeded.)

>>5067141
The paradox is the instantaneous travel and the shuffling around of reference frames without acceleration.
Normally the twin "paradox" is resolved by a General Relativistic treatment of the situation where the two seemingly impossibly simultaneous viewpoints require an acceleration to converge. It's this acceleration that forces the frames of reference to come to agreement on one true reality.
Moving faster than light in this way eliminates the need for acceleration in order to to reunite the twins, and leaves gaping ambiguities in which set of events actually happens.

>>5067151
Regardless of relative (snicker) aging, once you arrived at your destination, light will still take years to get to you or back to Earth, and that is what causes time discrepancy in the first place.

>>5067161
Just because it works doesn't mean that it's still not crazy expensive in terms of energy. This just took something completely impossible into something somewhat possible.

There's another ongoing thread about this.

>>5065649

>>5067168
Time dilation isn't some "optical illusion" based on observing light--it's an actual metric disagreement between any two bodies moving relative to one another. They must fundamentally measure time and space in different ways in order to keep the laws of physics universal and consistent for all observers.