More at the link: http://sploid.gizmodo.com/holy-crap-nasas-interplanetary-spaceship-concept-is-fr-1589001939 Problem is, there's still way more fiction than science here, and the people involved seem to know that. Look at the 7th image down, at the linked page, just under the "PR" in "ENTERPRISE". (ETA: The 8th image down shows it even more clearly.)
I've said it before, I'll say it again: we'll get FTL when some grad student looks at some obscure data and says "hey, did anybody notice this? This is a little weird . . . " Foreheads will be slapped and we'll be off to the races.
Of course it reminds me of Hitchhiker's Galaxy where the student invents the Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air and gets lynched by a rampaging mob of physicists upset over it.
It's a bit premature to plan our FTL adventures. Real, warp drive-like FTL is going to involve a very intense localized distortion of space-time and that's not going to be easy to attain. It may not even be possible, let alone practical. Alcubierre's theory relies on a configuration of energy that may not actually exist and, even if it exists, may only be achievable on a near-microscopic scale. My guess is that neither FTL nor a real roadmap for achieving it will arrive in our lifetimes. Sorry to be a wet blanket, but this is still in the hugely speculative category. NASA's looking at it because the cost for some analysis and a few experiments is low and--who knows?--maybe something will come out of it.
I figured "ISX" was meant to mean "International Starship Experimental". At any rate, I got the Inventions issue of Science Uncovered that had a good look at it. Noticing how life (might) imitate fiction, almost all the FTL "warp drive" stuff in Star Trek involves some kind of ring like structures (warp drive coils) to propel a ship at those speeds.
Working with electromagnetic fields often involves coils; we imagine other field manipulation technologies will be somewhat analogous. So it's not too surprising that Star Trek's writers created "warp coils" that distort space-time when charged.
The only way I can think to distort spacetime in the necessary manner for a "warp drive" is via gravity. Gravity does not seem to be analagous to electromagnetic energy. So the coil/ring shape may not offer any advantage. Then again, this is all little more than speculation at this point, so who knows?
The only way to whip up some gravity is to have lots of mass handy. You can do that either with big clumps of matter, OR, make something go really fast, and build its mass up that way. So, you're gonna have to have something inside the nacelles spinning to within a squillionth of lightspeed.
^Actually, gravity arises from energy as well (E=mc^2, after all). So, if you could concentrate enough energy, you could also distort space-time.
Even if it is both possible and practical, it may still not be anything remotely resembling a good idea to use it inside a star system. I'm just thinking out loud, here, but if you're talking about enough gravity/mass/whatever to disrupt space, wouldn't that also disrupt planetary orbits? I don't know that I'd like my last thought to be, "Well, those bastards had better find something around Alpha Centauri, because as of a few seconds ago, this solar system is proper fucked."
IIRC, Star Trek at various times (The Motion Picture) flirted with the idea of it being "dangerous to activate warp drive within a solar system" . Yet of course whenever it was needed by the plot (too many times to count) ships activated their warp drives while in orbit or even within the atmosphere.
Don't know. I imagine it would depend on how localized the effect is. Of course, anything that could significantly distort space would make a tremendous weapon. If you could, say, crunch 10 feet of space down to the thickness of an atom, nothing inside that region would remain intact.
Yeah, well, 7 billion plus lives would probably take precedence over "hurry up and advance the plot" concerns in the real world. Which raises a secondary question. Assume that we can, and do, build a macroscale warp drive. Assume that we play it safe and don't test it inside the solar system. That still means it'll take decades just to find out whether or not the damned thing even works.
I suppose we'd have to hope that the passage of a warp bubble would not, by itself, leave residual distortions in its wake. That'd be one "bubble gun" people would take pretty fuckin' seriously.
Actually a nuclear pulse-detonation drive (project Orion) could get us out to the Kuiper Belt pretty quickly. From there fire up the warp drive and off you go.
The Alcubierre drive would work (hypothetically) by expanding space behind a vehicle and contracting space in front of it. If space is expanded or contracted it simply remains space. What happens to matter inside (or in close proximity to) this region is an interesting question. It might get moved along with the vehicle, pushed aside by the vehicle, or torn apart by distortions in space-time.
Hmmm. I wonder if such technology could be used to isolate two points in space. Imagine point A and B in space, situated, say, 1 light-year apart. A device is positioned at their midway point that expands space such that the apparent distance between them is 100 light-years. Or, more ominously, suppose you put a device between a planet and its sun and contracted the space between them by a few million miles...
On the other hand, assume that it's perfectly safe for use... anywhere. Suborbital worldwide same-day delivery, anyone? (It would have to be at least suborbital so that your new television didn't end up buried a couple miles underground.)
Assuming we can generate enough power to activate a warp drive, I figure we could use the same power to produce a slower than light drive that could move a starship at an acceleration of at least one tenth of a G continously. Which means you could get beyond Pluto in just a matter of days or at most weeks And I'm assuming that when we talk about "out of the solar system" we are probably talking about beyond the major planets and not all the way to the Oort Cloud.
Last I heard, it would require the mass of Jupiter to power such a ship if the optimistic projections of the power demands were true (nobody knows, yet). If there's life on Europa, they kind of need Jupiter, and that's assuming there's nothing living in the atmosphere of Jupiter. So, we'd need to mine the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud for comets that have the necessary materials for fuel.
^ I assume you are referring to the power necessary a warp drive? Now the "mass of Jupiter" is staggering, but it is an order of magnitude LOWER than some of the first estimates I remember that the Acubierre warp drive would require all the energy of the known universe in order to work! That said, if efficient production and large scale storage of antimatter ever becomes possible (see Dr. Forward's book "Mirror Matter") then all bets are off as virtually anything might be possible energy wise.
According to the article, White's optimization studies have gotten the amount of energy required down to about the level contained in a mass the size of an automobile. Make no mistake, that's still a shit-ton of energy--an H-bomb doesn't come anywhere near that--but it might be doable down the road. The energy requirements aren't the most daunting part. The real challenge is coming up with the exotic matter required...matter which is not even known to exist. This whole thing is built on several IFs that are each in themselves pretty speculative. That's why I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Wait, I thought this was a fan fiction project? I could have sworn that Rick Sternbach shared this on Facebook as such.
A 1 megaton nuclear bomb converts about 40 grams of matter into energy. This warp drive will require the mass of an automobile--let's say 2000 kilograms for ease of calculation--to be converted in order to operate. So, the energy required is on the order of 50,000 1 megaton H-bombs. (2000 kg / 0.04 kg) Okay, perhaps that's doable. We'll have to learn how to make anti-matter in order to get the energy we need in a size we can use... But here's a huge problem... We react our pile of anti-matter with some normal matter and use that energy to create a warp bubble. Great. Except that no process is 100% efficient. Let's say we're REALLY good and we achieve 99.9% efficiency. Somehow. That means that 0.1% of the energy generated becomes waste heat in the system. 0.1% of 50,000 1 megaton H-bombs is 50 1 megaton H-bombs. So, this little ship is going to have to manage the heat equivalent to 50 megatons worth of H-bomb. That much energy spread over the ship's mass would turn the ship into a cloud of vapor. So forget about sinking that heat. You've got to radiate it away somehow. You're going to have to collect the equivalent energy of a 50 megaton H-bomb and, somehow, turn it into a laser that transfers the energy away from the ship. Please make sure you've got it pointed in the right direction.
True or False: The technology for Have Blue (F-117 proof of concept) came from a research paper written by a nobody Soviet scientist (Pyotr Ufimtsev) that was so esoteric it took 12 years for the CIA to translate it and another 3 years for any American physicist to actually read it; and when they did they realized it held the keys to stealth technology?
^I believe that's correct. However, even if the paper had been known sooner, it would not necessarily have resulted in stealth arriving earlier. A big part of stealth was in computing: figuring out the facet shapes and making a flight control system for the inherently unstable aircraft that resulted. Obviously, the Russians had knowledge of this much sooner, but lacked the capabilities to translate it into working technology...
