Sci-fi universe ideas

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Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 7:38 am

Will it be possible to have a drink while we're travelling at gazzilion miles per second and doing this hyper warpo jump through the whatevers?

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 7:58 am

"Jumpers"? Wormholes? Been watching Stargate Atlantis much? Laughing

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:09 am

#@$%!!!!!

I come here to clear the mind after studying thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and structural analysis into the wee hours of the morning... and see this! Oy!!!

@ Zorro: I don't know if we can drink while going that fast w/out serious risk of alcohol abuse (that being spilling your beer).

After reading a few of the more physics based replies here I did ask one of my female study buddies for a shot of whiskey and a slap to the face... still waiting for the whiskey. Laughing

edit: Reads reply below and starts head banging desk while blaring Insane Clown Posse as loud as possible on the head phones. banghead

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:10 am

@ BLZ Bubb - My thoughts exactly... Wormholes and FTL drives have been done to death. Try some Piers Anthony, alternative frames (dimensions or realities). The Sliders series was good at it...

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:46 am

Zorro wrote:

Will it be possible to have a drink while we're travelling at gazzilion miles per second and doing this hyper warpo jump through the whatevers?

And more important, will our keyboards be safe?

Baiting Guru Joined: 19 Mar 2007 Posts: 2628

What we really need is the Heart of Gold and a nice hot cup of tea.
I'll away put the kettle on Very Happy

Elite Baiter Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 1702

Ah but with my blazar engine - everything would be travelling at the same speed - 99.9% of the speed of light, so yea you could drink, same as when we travel on concorde you could drink, the liquid would not suddenly fly backwards, c'mon thats a basic principle, and you would have full gravity anyway so would probably be unaware of the speed, as something 5 times the size of jupiter then people would literally "take planets" on intergalaxy joyrides - the heat from the engines would act as a sun, keep the planet rotation and you have one hell of a nice way to explore the galaxy, and recoup the costs as you could take 6bn passengers each with there own hotels and homes etc. Now there is a problem with my blazar engines - with so much thrust they could "shift" molecules they are after all the jet engines of space, and i would say they are NOT green, as consuming an entire galaxy vapourising it, turning it into a gas bubble and super heating it might by some seem an expensive fuel type, But as Jeremy Clarkson would say "yea but 99.9% the speed of light and it has a nice pool too"

And for intergalactic travel you do need to think massive not small, with so much energy you would turn planets into space-craft rather than go looking for raw materials, the center of your engine is a nuke going off, so technically life onboard a blazar powered craft would be tropical to say the least and comfortable - such a large item would have its own gravity, so you wont float around and feel sick.

419Eater is my life Joined: 18 May 2007 Posts: 428

The problem is, the faster you go, the more time slows down... if you are going at 99.9% of light speed, time will be slowed down proportionately. To you, only a few minutes would have passed, while outside, several thousand or even million years are passing. That's one of the main problems with "regular" faster-then-light travel. Unless you have a time machine capable of going backwards, you're stuck thousands or millions of years in the future.

@B.L.Z Bubb- Yes, some of it is similar to Stargate: SG1 and Atlantis, but unlike the Stargate series, the wormholes established are permanent. The jumpcraft are incapable of space travel without modification.

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

Light is a physical speed barrier. At c the mass of the spacecraft is multiplied by infinity:

m' = m(sqroot(1/(1 - v2/c2)))

So unless your spacecraft is massless or it has infinite energy, it can not travel at exactly the speed of light. Not even a blazar would be enough.

On the other hand, you don't need a blazar to get to 99.9%c. You don't want to accelerate much beyond 1g anyway, and 99%c takes about a year at that rate (IIRC). The extra 0.9% may take a bit longer but it's a diminishing return. If you put a blazar in your ship, then your ship may reach 99.9%c quite quickly, but you'd be strawberry jam on the rear bulkhead.

You can get an inertialess drive using planets, but their effects are limited by their gravity, which is limited by tidal effect, so you wont get too many g even then. A constructed sparse structure would probably collapse under its own weight before getting any better than a neutron star at its tidal limit.

Of course if you can avoid traveling at exactly the speed of light, it is quite possible to travel faster - so long as you don't mind your mass being imaginary. Unfortunately we don't know any way of accelerating a spacecraft that doesn't involve hitting every speed on the way up.

Light is not slow on-board a spacecraft traveling at speed. It travels at c (modified for the medium) for everyone.

BTW: the energy released by a matter/antimatter collision is E=mc2. It is not 1000ktons for elementary particles. It is huge for non-subatomic objects, but not outrageously so. Two 1/2 kg masses colliding would release about 20 megatonnes, TNT equivalent. To achieve this with a fusion device would require at least 4 tonnes. The most powerful fusion device ever built was a 24 tonne device that produced 50Mt.

Now I'm off to put the kettle on. It is indeed time for a nice hot cup of tea.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 1:17 pm

I always liked the idea of "folding space" In Dune. Travelling without moving by joining two points in spacetime... Of course, we'd need some Spice... Would cinnamon do? I like cinnamon. Confused

Elite Baiter Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 1702

Hmm ive asked an engineer - heres roughly what he replied

You grab your planet, use some future energy to shield it from extreme heat and being crushed - then you get one very very big planet and hollow it out, again shield it and attach it to the free orbiting planet by both gravitational pull and some type of tractor beam.

Then you fire the wormhole units up, and fly into them and at that point you engage full throttle. Congratualtions you have a working machine that breaks the rules of physics Your speed might not be light speed, but because your now travelling in both time and space "technically" your going over it by a infinate amount.

Light travels 186,282.397 miles per second because your also in time those seconds count, if your going backwards in time your speed would be double that or forwards HALF of that to explain it simply in real space your speed would be your speed, regardless of travelling at any speed - at light speed your planet would have to have a ZERO rest mass, that could be achieved by sticking antimatter generators into your blazar engine assembly so in effect you surround yourself in a antimatter box creating 0 then theres nothing stopping your planet exploration.

hope that makes it clear lol.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 1:29 pm

When they make antimatter, then also normal matter is created, so the energetic balance stays. If the two particles collide, they annihilate and turn into pure energy once again.

I looked up warp drives.
Alcubierre warpdrive allows "faster than light" travel, since it would presume you could use (exotic) matter in a way that would expand the room behind your starting point and contract the space in front of you. So you are actually not moving, instead space is.
General theory of relativity says, that matter causes the surface of spacetime around it to curve, so Alcubierre warpdrives can work.

Speed is relative to time travel. It's called time dilation. But in order to move back in time, you would have to move faster than light(c). Theoretical particles, known as tachyons, constantly move faster than light, and so, they always move back in time.

When we talk about the speed of light, we don't mean that we can slow it down, and so we move faster....the speed of light is a constant(c).
Light itself can ACTUALLY move faster than c, because empty space is still filled with background noise(waves and stuff). In labs, light has been made to move faster than c, by removing the interference, so achieving quantum emptiness. This doesn't upset Einstein, since this is described in Special Theory of relativity(or was it in General).

An object with normal matter, can NEVER physically move faster than light, since the more energy you apply to it, the more it will gain in velocity and in mass, but as the speed reaches c, the more the energy will increase mass and not speed, so when an object is VERY near to c, then it will take more energy than there actually exists to accelerate it even further...fun.

The size of the motor doesn't matter if you are trying to cross the light barrier!

Why the heck do you need fast computers for time travel? Time moves relatively to the frames it's in, so If I try to fly to Vega(25 ly), then it would only take me 3 months at 0.9995*c. That's called time dilation.

EDIT: Sorry, I didn't see that this topic had 2 pages already, I answered to problems on pg. 1

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 1:35 pm

So is it possible to get to Magrathea or not? And will Slartibartfast be in when I get there?

I'm confused. But that's easily done.

419Eater is my life Joined: 18 May 2007 Posts: 428

This is a very interesting and stimulating discussion, but it's getting slightly off-topic... What do you think of the outline discussed in the original post, disregarding technicalities about faster-than-light travel?

And, Mugatu, is Magrathea the place where you can buy planets? If so, no. It won't be there.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 2:07 pm

so has any one read the book a winkle in time? my feeling is in stead of trying to go faster than the speed of light it would be easyer to bend time... take a time line mark two points bend time till the two points meet, you do that with space... hence "warp" space.. or make a "engine" powered by the fastest thing in the universe..... the fart... a fart is so fast that it can rip though your pants and never leave a hole Smile

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

Anti-matter has positive mass. There is no such thing as negative mass.

If you suspended your spaceship over a neutron star and then accelerated the neutron star, the star would pull you along by gravity. Because every bit of you is being pulled, you would feel no acceleration. As the acceleration went up, you would get closer to the star and so cancel out the inertia. The limit is about 760 thousand g, because that close to a neutron star, 1g at your feet would be 0.4g at your head. (Because gravity reduces the further you get from the star.) If you lie down, you can get up over 4M g. More reasonably, using a hollow planet 1000km diameter, the limiting acceleration would be 119g.

Using Newton as a first approximation, (good enough up to beyond 90%c), it would take 70 hours to reach (a significant fraction of) c at an acceleration of 119 g, (but only 4 seconds at 760k g.)

It would take a significant power source to accelerate 2.8E30 kg of neutron star at even 119 g. At the moment the formula escapes me.

This is not FTL; it would still take many years to get anywhere interesting. However time dilation would mean you didn't experience that time.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 2:22 pm

stephen hawkings talks (you know what i mean) about the diffrence in gravity between youf head and feet as your pass the event horizon. it would start to stretching you out like spagetti the film "a brief history of time" explanes it so well

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

^^^ by my calculation the gravity on the surface of a neutron star is 50 billion g, with a difference between your head and feet of 9 million g. (cripes!)

@hacker9. Isn't the hyperspace/warpdrive thing too complex? Why have both, and is there a worthwhile difference between them? There's an interesting wrinkle in that it would take several hours to reach transport that would flip you instantly many light years, and then take you several hours more to get where you're going. I assume there are not thousands of worm-holes on every planet, nor that buses use warp drive.

Edit: you'd have a huge escalation in property prices depending on how near a worm-hole/spaceport they were.

Reedit: What is the cost of this technology? Can the average man afford it? What about if it's free?

419Eater is my life Joined: 18 May 2007 Posts: 428

A typical node would have five or six wormhole connections, creating a partial mesh topology.

And I'm including both hyperspace and warp because warp was developed first, before the technology was developed to enable hyperspace travel. Warp travel requires less energy and is more reliable, but much slower. Hyperspace is similar to travelling at warp 10, if you're familiar with the Star Trek: Voyager episode on that subject. It requires, however, immense amounts of energy, too much for a small craft.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 2:44 pm

Gravity could be called "negative mass".

When you reach the event horizon, you do strech, but a person is very tiny compared to the hole, so it's not easily noticeable.

INTERESTING INFO:
If you are falling into a black hole and someone is observing you, then for the observer you are moving more slowly as you reach the event horizon, since the light is moving slower and slower towards you. When at the event horizon, the observer only sees that you have been "frozen"(your image carried by photons).

You can do time travels with a cilinder that is that is accelerated to spin on its axis(very fast of course), since spacetime will start dragging itself around it and space and time will mix up in uncertain ways.

I'm currently trying to locate my Estonian version of my "The universe in a nutshell" by Hawking.../searching

EDIT: I presume by your six sided wormhole node, you mean the one described by Matt Visser of Washington University?

If so(and for any wormhole actually), you'd have to find an exotic matter, that would be placed in the end of ordinary(round, 3D) wormholes or an exotic matter frame around the edges of the six sided(flat) cube node.
Even with this method, the forces in the wormhole would make it impossible for anything reasonable to pass though it.
Oh, and the exotic matter, that would stabilize the ends of the holes, would need enormous(by this I mean HUUGE!) amounts of energy.
What would you use?

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 3:06 pm

^^^ahhhhhhhhhhhh, I'm just a biology major, don't screw my head up!
But wouldn't you not be able to see the person approaching the black hole at all because the light would not be able to escape the hole at all, so you can't see the light because it's not coming to you. Confused

By the way, will there be aliens in the future that I can blow up? If not, I might as well just go kill my self, all this combat training for nothing....

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 3:09 pm

Formula for going faster than the Speed of Light.

Running Shoes + Lad + MTCN.

Harness the power of the desperate mugu and the possibilities are endless.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 3:09 pm

You cans see him while he has not crossed the event horizon. That's why it's called "Event horizon". Light can escape until then but slowly.

The event horizon is the line where the escape velocity equals the speed of light. Beyond that point the escape velocity is larger than the speed of light, so light cannot exit.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 3:16 pm

^^ah, I see. what actually happens in a black hole though? It can't really be photographed, and it can't really be studied, unless by studying what it is made of, but you can't be sure of what it's made out of if you can't study it first hand.

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 3:16 pm

Hell with this crap, let's discuss something close to my heart.