How NASA might build its very first warp drive

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Link: How NASA might build its very first warp drive

Any thoughts?

baby steps! i would love to see this.....though it's a long why away.

Money.

Lots and lots of money.

Alcubere's theories are based on the mathematics of relativity theory. There has yet to be built and genuine physical prototype for such a device. And it is not clear that such a prototype can ever be built. It is right up there with using worm holes to get around the universe in a short time.

If a private party wishes to attempt to build such a thing I wish him good luck but I would not want him to pick my pocket to do his thing.

ruveyn

Last edited by ruveyn on 02 Dec 2012, 11:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

wormholes arent even theoretically hashed out yet,

alcubierres drive is at least fully internally consistent and consistent with any physical law we know,

we also know that we can bend spend time to an extent as shown by the falling mirror experiments.

also you do realise that it actually sounds like they have a preliminary prototype in the article?

none of this is to say that it is in any way guaranteed to work but ti does show greater promise than ever before.

Scientists would need a lot of antimatter rather than the few antiprotons at the Large Hadron Collider and there are no known areas with large amounts of antimatter in the universe.

Sounds like? No claim was made that a working prototype exists. And no such claim can be taken seriously unless it is verified by an independent observer. All scientific results have to be corroborated by independent observation.

Do you remember the Big Flap back in 1988 over room temperature fusion? Pons and Fleisher claimed such a device but it was never corroborated. It turned out to be either an error or a hoax.

ruveyn

Fascinating, and I wish the people involved well. It'd be great to see something like this in my lifetime, if only to look at a few of my friends and laugh.

I agree fully with this. Our spending is already so massive that we sure don't need to massively increase it on this.

antimatter is so sparse and its cost of creation so high that it is tens of thousands of times for scarce than gold and therefore equally expensive.

ruveyn

no not a prototype, a prelimenary protoype to test the underlying theory, using already known instrumentation.

It's not even a preliminary prototype - it's a test bed, to see if Alcubierre's theory works in the real world. After all, just because it holds together mathematically and is consistent with what we do know, doesn't guarantee it's completely right...

Now, if the test bed can produce a spatial warp consistent with Alcubierre, then the building of a warp drive becomes a matter of engineering, not just theory. And the engineers, historically, have been able to produce, once the basic theory was proved...

Wait a minute... my understanding was that the requirement for an alcubierre drive was negative matter, not antimatter. You know, like the Casimr effect. You need it in order to bend space-time in the right way. Right? And as far as I know for all practical purposes you can't use antimatter to generate electricity, because it takes lots of energy to produce, and even more to keep from exploding long enough to collect the released energy when it does, and all of that adds up to way more energy than it will produce.

isnt that rather a question of semantics?
even if it isnt it still doesnt change the fact that this is now in the experimental and not theoretical phase,

it might very well be impossible, or it might be possible but unrealistically difficult.

..

Last edited by SpiritBlooms on 04 Dec 2012, 2:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[quote="DeaconBlues"

Now, if the test bed can produce a spatial warp consistent with Alcubierre, then the building of a warp drive becomes a matter of engineering, not just theory. And the engineers, historically, have been able to produce, once the basic theory was proved...[/quote]

We have thermonuclear bombs that work on fusion and, of course, the sun and other stars.

Yes, practical controlled nuclear fusion, which we are told is just 30 years away has been eluding the engineers since the early 1960's about 50 years ago. Which means 100 years from now controlled, practical nuclear fusion will still be 30 years away.

ruveyn