321 replies to this topic

[psyche101]

TheMacGuffin, on 29 August 2012 - 05:33 AM, said:

My great grandmother went from the horse and buggy era to watching the Moon landings in 1969 in a single lifetime.  In her day, no one would have imagined such things were possible, since they didn't even have telephones, computers or electric lights.  Think of all the change that occurred in that very brief time, almost overnight, historically speaking.

I would be very hesitant to say what might be possible in 100 years or 1,000 years--just about anything, I suppose.

I have even seen amazing things, like the Internet come to life, but there has to be a limit, if you run one hundred yards in no time flat, then you have to be in 2 places at once. One being cannot be two. So many say that we thought the speed of sound was unobtainable, but we had both man made, and natural examples of this being done, so indeed it was not only possible, but right under our noses the whole time, if I had ever seen a natural phenomena that can exceed light speed I would consider that viable, but as nothing can move faster than light, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that photons have no mass, I do not see how something with mass can move faster than something without mass. It just does not make sense and is a different rule of physics. If there is a way around light speed, it has to be quantum. That is why I put so much faith in Communications being first contact.
I agree we might be in for some amazing inventions, and I do hope that is the case, but I cannot see the impossible being done. I can see us in a world like the Corningware  ad, and not all that far off, but I do not see how we can re-write physics. Because of these amazing advances in science we understand that photons have no mass, and that is why they can travel as the do. I do not know if things like Einstein Rosen bridges are possible, they seem quite a long way from where we reside technologically today just to create one, let alone manipulate one. If others are using such, the energy signatures would be very hard to miss. One thing we all agree on is that if such is possible the energy required is beyond our current understanding.
I am all for moving forward, but I think if we use out knowledge and recognise our limits, that the process might move even faster when we do not have to go over old ideas.

For those who have not seen it, here is the Corning ad I mentioned.

[psyche101]

TheMacGuffin, on 29 August 2012 - 05:36 AM, said:

Neither would I.  It's literally the first generation of space technology, the earliest possible technology we could have used to do anything out there.  I doubt very much that it will be the last word in space technology, any more than the Model-T Ford was the last word in automobile travel.

It's a good marker though! If we double our speed, we can get one year out from the solar system in 8 and a half thousand years, and so on. I find it puts distance into perspective.

[Kludge808]

badeskov, on 28 August 2012 - 09:27 PM, said:

Now picture that the speed of light is the ultimate barrier and that there are no means to get around that (i.e. wormholes etc.).

Hi Bade,

You've hit a favored subject of mine.  I had a double minor at university of math and physics.  Yeah, I did not do anything the easy way in my young and foolish years.  Since I'm not particularly masochistic - in fact quite the opposite - I can't say for sure why I did that to myself but there it is.  Anyway, I got into some interesting discussions with a few of my professors about what we don't know and, further, what we don't know that we don't know.

We build our science and math in layers, each providing a platform for the next however we don’t know what that next breakthrough will be because we simply don’t have the questions to ask to find out.  When we do, we’ll have another layer and another after that and another and so on until we’re at a point where we have a whole new set of rules that encompass the previous ones and are far beyond anything we could previously have imagined.

As a result, to say that the speed of light is an absolute speed limit is true but only in physics as we know it.  It may well be the universal absolute speed limit however that may not matter in the long run if future discoveries uncover workarounds.  I know I won’t see this happen in my lifetime but some of the younger generations currently alive may (assuming we as a species don’t manage to kill ourselves off before hand) and I envy them that.  It will be interesting, though, when we can reach the stars.  Very interesting.  Heck, maybe we’ll be ET to some race on another world …

[TheMacGuffin]

psyche101, on 29 August 2012 - 06:52 AM, said:

It's a good marker though! If we double our speed, we can get one year out from the solar system in 8 and a half thousand years, and so on. I find it puts distance into perspective.

I certainly can't claim to be an expert on physics and engineering, although I have spoken to quite a few scientists about various theoretical ways it could be done, and how we could build our own UFOs and interstellar craft if we had enough power, but it can't be done with rockets.  

Of course, we may be looking at this problem in the completely wrong way and there may well be other approaches that we have never thought of.

[lost_shaman]

psyche101, on 29 August 2012 - 06:27 AM, said:

Gidday LS

Interesting take as always mate. I wonder what a viable limit is? If we travel at c, then we need infinite energy and mass, so at 99% of c, the demand would still be unimaginable by our standards wouldn't they? 99% of infinite is quite a bit I imagine?

Cheers.

Well when people talk about c and talk about infinite energy, it's really misleading in a lot of ways. First nothing can exceed c, so this idea stems basically from Einstein's thought experiments. Let us say we have a rocket spaceship and it magically has "infinite energy". O.k. so the spaceship launches and we watch it begin to fly through space and lets say its thrust is constant so that at first we see what seems like constant acceleration too.  But as the spaceship goes faster the amount of acceleration per whatever arbitrary unit of thrust becomes less and less, so to us it looks like it is taking more energy to achieve the same unit of acceleration. This observed effect becomes more and more dramatic as we observe the spaceship getting closer and closer to c. Now remember the spaceship has infinite energy so as it gets close to c say 99.9% c then all we see is the spaceship burning energy and getting almost no acceleration, so it may take a long time for us to measure the spaceship getting to 99.99% c. So the idea of "infinite energy" stems from the fact that if we observe the spaceship for an "Infinite" amount of time and it was expending energy for that "Infinite" amount of time it would still NEVER be observed by us as exceeding c! It would still be measured as 99.99999_ % of c, something however minutely less than c itself.

So what's happening here? Well, two major things to talk about.

First, mathematically speaking no amount of energy would propel the spaceship faster than c as we would observe it from Earth, so that is the "infinate energy" people talk about. This is mathematically very similar to the concept of Pi where it can never be solved to the last decimal point it just keeps on going infinitely. It becomes meaningless at some point because as an example using Pi you would never need to draw a perfect circle where the imaginary line is even mathematically smaller than the subatomic particles that make up atomic structures.

Second, (and most important to this conversation) the occupants on-board the spaceship never measure any decrease in acceleration per unit of energy! They always observe that they are accelerating faster and faster! But here is where things get complicated, no matter how fast the spaceship goes the occupants always measure c as being c just as we on Earth do. So what they observe is that over time as they accelerate they observe things like the Earth orbiting the Sun faster and faster! As the effect gets more dramatic they observe things like the distance between themselves and the Earth and their destination growing shorter and shorter. Now remember speed is measured as Distance traveled over Time so when the occupants observe the distance to their destination shrinking then obviously they observe themselves arriving at that destination faster.  They experience Time dilation.

If we are talking about Humans or Alienz traveling the Milky Way Galaxy, they don't need "infinite energy". They only need enough energy to reach the destination in the amount of Time they deem reasonable. That is because the energy they use is translated into Time Dilation. As we observe from Earth we don't see the Time Dilation that the spaceship and it's occupants observe. So if you follow what I'm saying to this point then you understand this is a bi-polar issue! If you are on the spaceship you CAN travel the Galaxy, but as we watch from Earth it will take a very long Time for us to watch you traveling less than c from Earth's POV to get there.

[quillius]

Hey LS,

what do you make of Ben Rich statements about - already able to travel the stars, and the parts about Einsteins equation having errors?

[lost_shaman]

quillius, on 30 August 2012 - 09:23 AM, said:

Hey LS,

what do you make of Ben Rich statements about - already able to travel the stars, and the parts about Einsteins equation having errors?

Hey quillius,

I thought about this for a while and I keep getting stuck on the fact that I don't know what he is specifically talking about. Einstein had a lot to say, and it's no secret that Modern Day Science knows Einstein didn't explain everything.

As for being able to travel the stars... I'd like to know what he was talking about?

[quillius]

lost_shaman, on 31 August 2012 - 09:04 AM, said:

Hey quillius,

I thought about this for a while and I keep getting stuck on the fact that I don't know what he is specifically talking about. Einstein had a lot to say, and it's no secret that Modern Day Science knows Einstein didn't explain everything.

As for being able to travel the stars... I'd like to know what he was talking about?

Hey LS, thanks...I guess his comments have created more questions rather than giving answers.

[Captain Zim]

psyche101, on 29 August 2012 - 06:50 AM, said:

I have even seen amazing things, like the Internet come to life, but there has to be a limit, if you run one hundred yards in no time flat, then you have to be in 2 places at once. One being cannot be two. So many say that we thought the speed of sound was unobtainable, but we had both man made, and natural examples of this being done, so indeed it was not only possible, but right under our noses the whole time, if I had ever seen a natural phenomena that can exceed light speed I would consider that viable, but as nothing can move faster than light, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that photons have no mass, I do not see how something with mass can move faster than something without mass. It just does not make sense and is a different rule of physics. If there is a way around light speed, it has to be quantum. That is why I put so much faith in Communications being first contact.
I agree we might be in for some amazing inventions, and I do hope that is the case, but I cannot see the impossible being done. I can see us in a world like the Corningware  ad, and not all that far off, but I do not see how we can re-write physics. Because of these amazing advances in science we understand that photons have no mass, and that is why they can travel as the do. I do not know if things like Einstein Rosen bridges are possible, they seem quite a long way from where we reside technologically today just to create one, let alone manipulate one. If others are using such, the energy signatures would be very hard to miss. One thing we all agree on is that if such is possible the energy required is beyond our current understanding.
I am all for moving forward, but I think if we use out knowledge and recognise our limits, that the process might move even faster when we do not have to go over old ideas.

For those who have not seen it, here is the Corning ad I mentioned.

Particles are by default entangled in time as well as space. This is what the theory says, and if they are entangled in curved spacetime but at separate points then when entanglement collapses, it occurs at two different times.

In the movie Avatar, they have a low bit rate quantum comms system*. Given that the entangled particles are flown out by sublight starship, the office on Pandora is receiving communications from a year or two in the past relative to both planets. The difference is because of time dilation on the ISV Venture Star. This is neither here nor there to the office on Pandora or Earth, however, because the lightspeed roundtrip erases the difference.

There is also a class of trajectories past rotating black hole event horizons that travel faster than light. Theoretical only, but would not be surprised to see it borne out by experiment eventually.

*The ability to measure a quantum entanglement without collapsing it is of course SF. But the point is, the universe doesn't give a **** about causality.

Edited by Captain Zim, 31 August 2012 - 11:01 AM.

[Captain Zim]

Kludge808, on 29 August 2012 - 07:06 PM, said:

Hi Bade,

You've hit a favored subject of mine.  I had a double minor at university of math and physics.  Yeah, I did not do anything the easy way in my young and foolish years.  Since I'm not particularly masochistic - in fact quite the opposite - I can't say for sure why I did that to myself but there it is.  Anyway, I got into some interesting discussions with a few of my professors about what we don't know and, further, what we don't know that we don't know.

We build our science and math in layers, each providing a platform for the next however we don’t know what that next breakthrough will be because we simply don’t have the questions to ask to find out.  When we do, we’ll have another layer and another after that and another and so on until we’re at a point where we have a whole new set of rules that encompass the previous ones and are far beyond anything we could previously have imagined.

As a result, to say that the speed of light is an absolute speed limit is true but only in physics as we know it.  It may well be the universal absolute speed limit however that may not matter in the long run if future discoveries uncover workarounds.  I know I won’t see this happen in my lifetime but some of the younger generations currently alive may (assuming we as a species don’t manage to kill ourselves off before hand) and I envy them that.  It will be interesting, though, when we can reach the stars.  Very interesting.  Heck, maybe we’ll be ET to some race on another world …

Amen brother. I double majored in Environmental Science and Psychology, minored in Com Sci, have an MBA and am now studying a Masters in Energy Studies. I work in Geophysics.

Also, to clarify for the benefit of others, the speed of light is not a limit per se. It's more like you are connected to surrounding space (imagine it as a cage) via stretchy rubber bands. You can almost reach the one side but can never quite get there because the bands get infinitely taught (like in a Loony Tunes cartoon). I hope this is a better intuitive explanation.

As for travelling between the stars, if you have a rotating superdense torus (but along the minor axis, so the donut "twists" - sprinkle side up, sprinkle side down) you have a gravitational cannon that can launch a vessel at near lightspeed without any acceleration felt by the passengers. When they get to the destination star, another torus catches them. No energy is used whatsoever by the craft, and what is lost by the first torus is recovered by the second. This is the ultimate variant of our own gravitational slingshot manoeuvres.

[Captain Zim]

TheMacGuffin, on 29 August 2012 - 08:47 PM, said:

I certainly can't claim to be an expert on physics and engineering, although I have spoken to quite a few scientists about various theoretical ways it could be done, and how we could build our own UFOs and interstellar craft if we had enough power, but it can't be done with rockets.  

Of course, we may be looking at this problem in the completely wrong way and there may well be other approaches that we have never thought of.

It can be done with conventional rockets (look at Voyager) but you better have a lot of episodes of Friends to watch to pass the time.

[Hazzard]

psyche101, on 29 August 2012 - 06:50 AM, said:

For those who have not seen it, here is the Corning ad I mentioned.

That is pretty much how I imagine the near future aswell,... but with a little more grafitti and dirt.

[Captain Zim]

psyche101, on 29 August 2012 - 06:50 AM, said:

Because of these amazing advances in science we understand that photons have no mass, and that is why they can travel as the do. I do not know if things like Einstein Rosen bridges are possible, they seem quite a long way from where we reside technologically today just to create one, let alone manipulate one. If others are using such, the energy signatures would be very hard to miss. One thing we all agree on is that if such is possible the energy required is beyond our current understanding.

Whether or not photons have mass is still a topic of research. We've put lower limits on the mass, but that doesn't mean it's massless. If it has mass, any mass, then that has important implications for physics.

There are at least two active thrusts into developing wormhole tech. One quantum, one general relativity based. Both using the same actual principle. A Stargate-type wormhole is the goal, and (if the physics works) is possible. The engineering is another story, but again it wouldn't require a Jupiter mass of exotic matter.

Beyond that, there is also steady work being done under varying assumptions (such as using different theories of gravity... a workable quantum gravity theory would change a lot about wormholes). One of the most intriguing is Einstein-phantom matter, proposed as a candidate for Dark Matter.

Edited by Captain Zim, 31 August 2012 - 02:52 PM.

[bmk1245]

Captain Zim, on 31 August 2012 - 02:48 PM, said:

[...] A Stargate-type wormhole is the goal, and (if the physics works) is possible.[...]

Can you elaborate a bit? Because parentheses "(if the physics works)" kinda hmmm... If I have powers, I can do anything... Ooops...Tree... Boom... Dead...

[TheMacGuffin]

If you really want to know what happened in New Mexico in 1947, you'd need to see the records of a couple of guys: Lincoln LaPaz and my "old friend" Sheridan Cavitt.  The former was one of the scientist called in to study these crashing "meteors" (LOL) and the other was the base CIG/CIA guy.  I know they called him counter-intelligence but he was well-known to be a CIA spook, and he never talked about anything except what they told him.

He was yet another guy who seemed to have left no real paper trail, either about UFOs or anything else.