Universal speed limit – Nothing travels faster than light, this is a real disappointment to our hopes of traveling between stars – star hoping.
- moving between stars or planetary systems in a galaxy requires speeds close to or greater than the speed of light.
- suppose we managed to travel at the speed of light, It would take us four years to arrive at Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun.
- Infinite energy is required to accelerate an object with positive mass to light speed.
- In 1915, Alber Einstein’s general theory of relativity revealed that the fabric of space and time is mutable and dynamic it can be warped.
- you can’t travel through space at faster than the speed of light – but there’s no speed limit for the fabric of space itself – this hints at a possibility for faster than light/superluminal travel.
- Inside black holes, we can think of space as flowing downwards faster than light.
- The warp drive takes advantage of this loophole by accelerating a patch of space relative to its surroundings.
- Objects in that warp bubble move with that patch without themselves ever feeling any acceleration.
- The space behind the bubble is expanded while the space in front is contracted, and the resulting push-pull propels the bubble and any spaceship that it contains – Alcubierre warp field.
- The Alcubierre warp field may be a valid solution to the Einstein field questions, but it might not be physically possible.
- The warp bubbles are un-steerable because the interior of the bubble is causally disconnected from parts of the front warp field.
- Warp fields have been much better studied, but remained probably impossible.
- Recently two papers have claimed breakthroughs, they have defined warp fields as
- bubbles that slide through space -potential at superluminal speeds.
- a special type of isolated wave moving through space – a soliton.
- Other possibly-impossible hurdles remain
- can the required energy densities be created without creating black holes for any useful-sized warp bubble.
- can a warp bubble be created at sub-luminal speeds and then accelerated past the speed of light.
- So far there are no know ways to do this and warp fields may suffer
- the same strict speed limit as does matter
- the time travel issue – accelerating across the speed of light breaks causality and so probably can’t be a thing.
- Our star hoping ideas seems to be inspired and crushed at the same time however, these studies have made one thing clear if warp travel is possible, humanity will figure it out; scientists are very persistent and they will try to make it a thing – propel humanity into the galaxy on waves of warped space-time.
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