faetal on 5/12/2012 at 12:48
Depends on the type and amount of radiation I'd have thought.
ZylonBane on 7/12/2012 at 04:02
Quote Posted by Peanuckle
Would the radiation even be a problem if you kept it limited to space travel?
As opposed to...?
demagogue on 7/12/2012 at 04:14
The physics itself doesn't care where you do it or at what scale. So it's not inconceivable they could have a terrestrial application to send something small some distance on earth. Something like that might have its uses. I was thinking about something like FTL information exchange through miniscule pipes or even the air having communication applications, or something in that neighborhood.
It's incredibly small scale so, I was thinking it'd be more in the realm of possible with our current engineering, it'd need less energy, it'd have less radiation problems, etc. Or at any rate I was thinking something like that would have applications long before some relatively massive thing like a space probe, which might take centuries to actually work out the engineering for all I know. But since I don't know the physics, I could be saying something very dumb & wrong.
Edit: Or step back a second. The technology here isn't just about moving something I think. The actual technology here is surgically folding & unfolding spacetime. While transportation is the obvious application, the real breakthrough here is being able to fold space on the cheap. There may be other things you can do with careful and relatively inexpensive folding of spacetime in precise ways. Make a thing go in a circuit, like a turbine in a vacuum, and maybe you can generate an insane amount of electricity. Edit: Or if it collects and concentrates radiation, maybe that can be controlled in a sealed lab environment & itself be a potential source of energy. Maybe you could move very massive things a short distance, not by actually moving them but just moving the space around them, which might be relatively easier. You're moving something in a way that doesn't care about the mass, only the volume; so it costs the same no matter how dense it is. I don't know if any of these are on the right track, but it just seems like it's begging for some creative thinking.
Fafhrd on 8/12/2012 at 00:06
The biggest problem that I see with it is that you turn the drive on, it contracts the space in front of you and expands the space behind you. When you turn the drive back off wouldn't the warped space go back to the way it was? So you'd need your warp generator that creates the field, and then a vehicle that can penetrate that field without getting annihilated in order to actually get off at your destination. And that vehicle would need another warp generator so you could get back.
demagogue on 8/12/2012 at 03:58
I don't really follow your thinking.
When you say "the warped space go back to the way it was", that's what expanding the space behind you is already doing (I thought). It's not like the field is contracting *all* the space in front of it, and when it turns off all of it goes back.
I understood it's more like you're riding an ocean wave where the water itself moves very little. You contract one side of space in front, push it around the circumference, ride the untouched interior, then expand the backside space back out. The surrounding space is warped & moves a little, but enough to push the inside space through ever new space, like an ocean wave where the water doesn't move much but the warping wave of ever-new water carries it forever. So the effect is to move a region of space by effectively pushing other space around it.
So if you turn it off (or maybe "unwarp", expand the front & contract the back so it's back to flat space), then the little bit of warping in front and behind level out, the wave stops "pushing", and the interior space naturally reintegrates with normal space around it. Then you fly your vehicle under normal propulsion from there. There's never any moment where you have to penetrate anything. That's how I understood it anyway. Anyone understand this better?
Renzatic on 8/12/2012 at 22:08
The biggest question is how dangerous would it be to use terrestrially? Like what exactly happens to space that's been contracted at one end and expanded in the other? If you were to use it in, say, a building, would it collapse the rooms in front of it like someone squeezing it within a giant fist, drawing the compressed material towards the center and shredding it to pieces in the tidal forces surrounding the bubble, then greatly increasing the mass of the debris and expelling it behind it? That doesn't sound like something that'd be safe to use for something as relatively simple as worldwide delivery.
Though I guess it would depend on the size of the drive being used. From the way it sounds, an Alcubierre Drive's max speed is determined by the size of the engine, or how much space it can displace. We'll say that for a drive to reach the speed of light, it requires a ring roughly the size of a football field. As convenient as it might be, I wouldn't want something that large, with that much potentially destructive power flying around the earth to deliver people and goods to certain points in a matter of seconds. If it veers off course by even a fraction and heads on a collision course with a large, populated area, it won't stop as soon as it hits the first obstructing object. Anything within the warp bubble is more or less protected since it expels space and anything within away from the engine itself. It could plow a line right through Manhattan all the way down to Orlando before travelling a geometrically straight line out of the atmosphere and ricocheting off the moon.
...but...
...there isn't any single conceivable need to travel at light speeds within the atmosphere. You can reach any point on earth within a second travelling at 1/7th the speed of light. If I'm right in assuming the Alcubierre drive's max speed is determined by size, you could easily make single passenger vehicles capable of taking objects and people to any point on earth in a matter of seconds without nearly as much danger. Well, no more danger than what comes inherit with propelling something the size of a port-a-potty at 14,000 kilometers per second (1/20th the speed of light) contained within a bubble driven by a miniature version of an engine that drives itself by compressing and displacing the space directly in front of it anyway.
faetal on 9/12/2012 at 15:46
Can't see that there'd be a need for FTL travel within the atmosphere. This drive seems to be aimed at travel on a cosmic rather than terrestrial scale. My guess if there'll be other tech like vacuum tubes or ion tunnels for getting round the world in short times.
demagogue on 10/12/2012 at 06:25
Another thing, could they use this for a particle accelerator, I wonder?
We might see some interesting things if we could crash two speeding warp bubbles, or their contents, into each other FTL.
With a cosmic drive, I'm wondering, even if they are viable, how much use they'll get? I wonder if trips outside our solar system would make sense even if possible. Not manned ones. Maybe we could get a probe to Alpha Centauri or some nearby systems within a lifetime? But we could reduce the time to get to Mars or Venus or some moons of Saturn or Jupiter, if that's what we're talking about. Even then, a probe can already get to Saturn within 2 years.
