This is a possible real life hyperdrive

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002065.html

If it is possible, I would love, love, love to see one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_Theory

I cannot remember the title of the story, but, two scientists find a way to access hyper space and then are disappointed when they find the speed of light is slower in hyperspace.
Whats that called?

going faster then light can be achieve in a few ways not now though, there is the famous "warp drive" thats just basically shrinking space infront of you and expanding it behind you, there is folding space using gravity and crossing over to the other side and letting it unfold, and there is the idea that there might be a way to place your ship into another demension where the speed of light is much faster and you can move faster and easier then once near your destinate drop out of this dimension and back into real time, of them all warp drive is the most feasible but its still decades if not centuries away from our grasp for now lets just explore the rest of our room (solar system) once we are aquainted more with it all maybe we might then be able to open that door that leads to the rest of this house we call the galaxy.

personally i want to see deep space travel in my lifetime....

Its not really a matter of HOW we move the ship. Its more how the hell do we get the energy for it? until we create anti-matter power sources or zero point we cant do it.

Wouldn't this slaughter the trillions of lifeforms that used to be living in the space before you shrunk and expanded it?

me too, I'm working on how as a part time hobby

However if you even attempt to get your head around osme of the more fundemental concepts of how space/time etc is put together and how its works - I'll be amazed if its anything even close to waht we see in StarTrek - startrek appears quite simple and rational - its just a very fast way of getting from 'x' to 'y', but you still conceive 'x' and 'y' pretty well in the same way as you do in the here and now.

ie - the startrek universe all takes place within the same 'time bubble' - ie switch on the supadupa communication thingy and you can have a real time conversation with someone 500 light years away.

it all comes back to this speed of light thing - the delay.

But there's the issue. Because light travels the speed it does - hence any image of a changing watch will travel at the same speed - hence 'time' as we measure it.

THough thats the analogy always used - trying to view a watch face.

oh dear....

only if they were right in your collapsing space area.

Thank you for starting this thread on Scientific theroy. This is incredibly interesting and would love to see how it pans out. If this happens to be a jump in spacetravel, then we will be able to go places that we have thought were only in science-fiction. (Keeping my fingers crossed.)

But the collapsing space area would be all the space between where you entered hyperspace and where you exited hyperspace.

If you were travelling from one end of the galaxy to the other, then any star that was in the way would be snuffed out along with all the lifeforms in that solar system that depended on that sun.

Looking at hubble photos of spiral galaxies, it seems impossible to travel through a galaxy without hitting a star.

Think of it this way: What if you didnt have to bend PHYSICAL space but DIMENSIONAL space...we are barely scratching the surface of space travel so we dont know much...
making a space craft go through hyperspace might be possible...apart the fact that no known matter can withstand the inertia produced while reaching those speeds (FTL), what if we turn our ship into pure energy, thus reducing if not completely eliminating the possibility of inertia produced on the ship while approaching those speeds. Remember though that all this is theoretical, it cant be proven until we actually do it heres my view on it

It just seems difficult to imagine a device that can bend space for the ship without affecting anything that was already there.

But then agin.... the dimensional aspect of it does make sense.

It's like trying to drive a race car going 250 MPH straight through New York city. You'd never make it.
But if you simply took advantage of the 3rd dimension, you'd easily sail right over the top without hitting anything.

Think of a warp drive system in terms of the water jet drive on a jet ski or sea-doo. Water gets sucked in the front, compressed via the impeller and shot out the back at high speed, producing thrust. If you're going from one side of a lake to another, the whole lake does not get sucked through the motor, just the water in front of the intake. Speed is controlled by varying the speed of the impeller.

For a warp drive system, a powerful magnetic or gravimetric field is produced in front of the ship, pulling "space" towards it, it gets compressed and moved towards the rear of the ship by manipulating the magnetic / gravimetric field and then it is shot out the back where it expands or "gets restored" back to normal, producing a type of thrust. Speed is controlled by varying the rate at which "space" is moved through the magnetic / gravimetric field.




Cz

well explained and pretty much right on the money.

How about the question of "impulse" drive. Surely we need to be able to move short distance quickly (in our own solar system) without using up the amount of energy a warp field would need.

What about the ripples?

Ripples....?




Cz

In addition to propelling the craft forward, a jet-ski also produces a large wake - ripples that spread out across the lake as the jet-ski moves forwards. Wouldn't there be an analog in hyperspace?

Potentially, yes. But just like the ripples or wake don't go on forever, the effects would gradually fade or even themselves out. However, given that there would need to be some seriously exotic technologies and power systems developed for this propulsion system to work, I'm fairly confident that there would be something in place to minimize the wake effect.

Also, space is unbelievably huge, so for someone or something to be caught in that wake effect, it would have to be really close to the spaceship using that propulsion system.


Cz

What happens if foreign material gets sucked into the jet-ski?

Or in the case of our space example...say - a planet?


Oh great. I just got this thing waxed.

Well, with a jet-ski, if something small gets sucked in, it generally goes straight through. Something larger may damage the impeller and / or get stuck in the motor.

As for our hypothetical "Star Trek warp drive":

[Trek Geek Mode: Activate]


If we assume that you were to somehow miraculously survive this collision with a planet, the first thing you do is fire your navigator and helmsman for flying your ship into a planet.

Despite what is seen in "Classic Trek" - Kirk ordering Sulu to break orbit and go to warp 1 - it has been generally established in various other canonical publications that warp drive is not used within a solar system.

But, leaving that behind for a moment, of course it would be of utmost importance to avoid things like stars, planets, asteroids, comets, so you would have to have an exceptionally good and accurate navigational system.

As for smaller particulate matter in interstellar space, again, the navigation system comes into play. The hyper-sensitive and hyper-accurate navigational sensors scan a great distance ahead of the ship. Should something be detected, the navigational deflector would push it out of the way of the ship. Larger objects that cannot be moved by the deflector would prompt a course change to avoid the object. Some things are actually desirable to have get close to the ship. Free hydrogen is collected to be used in the ships power systems.

[Trek Geek Mode: Deactivate]

Of course the above is how its done in science fiction.

How would it really be done? Who knows...


Cz

Lol....

How would the sensors work? If th ship is travelling through hyperspace, how would the sensors be able to look ahead?

All you have to do to go the speed of light is set up a pole that spins. At the end of the pole, set up a smaller pole that spins along the same axis and in the same direction. Keep doing that smaller and smaller. We've already got a head start in that our earth is rotating at 1,000 miles an hour plus it is orbiting the sun which is orbiting the center of our galaxy for a combined speed of hundreds of miles per second.

[Trek Geek Mode: Engage]

Unfortunately technical data on the navigational sensors is classified Starfleet information.

[Trek Geek Mode: Disengage]





Uhm.... ok....?



Cz

D'OH!


I just mean that if there a giant merry-go-round and at one point on the outer edge of the merry-go-round there were a smaller merry-go-round then the rotational speed of the small merry-go-round would cycle through being slower than, equal to and faster then the rotational speed of the main merry-go-round. If you continued to place smaller and smaller mini merry-go-rounds on each merry-go-round then, when the rotation direction of all of them were in sync, the rotational speed of the tiniest merry-go-round would be incredible. Just like we are all, at this very moment, moving hundreds or thousands of miles per second when we combine the rotational speeds of the galaxy, solar system and planet.

"WHAT" all you would be doing is going around in circles really really really fast!

Indeed, it is actually rather interesting. However, there is still some way to go. Heim was quite bright, however, he was also somewhat of a loner and preferred to fiddle with his theories alone. The unfortunate byproduct of this was that he never submitted any of his work for peer review and thus critical scrutiny. When his work was (re)discovered, there was a lot of interest, but it has slightly faded as some problems have been found in his work.

But maybe when they have been hashed out, it might turn out to be very interesting

Here is an article from New Sceintist on the same subject from 2006. When I read about it then I also found a link to a research group that was working on it and had published some of the work, but now that link eludes me

But in the end, it turns out that the Heim-Dröscher means of interstellar traveling has the same drawback as most other methods theorized about: it requires an exorbitant amount of energy to realize.

Cheers,
Badeskov

Interdimensional travel, I'd think, would put you outside the physical dimensions so the only real concerns might be start and finish and wether or not those two points or localities are empty space. The perception of 3D space (4D spacetime) is that it is somewhat globular and expands in all directions. In contrast, the same theories that allow for these forms of high-speed or FTL travel also allow space to actually be contorted naturally despite or perceptions. There are theories that say space is plainly flat and folded over itself (which leads to travel by wormhole). Some theories say it is saddle-shaped. And, some say that space even exists PacMan style where getting form point A on the left edge of the screen to point B on the right might just involve dipping off the left side and popping back into existence on the right.

There's even a theory that the entire perception of the world as 3D is an immensely intricate hologram and that all of existence could be projected in consciousness from a singularity of unfathomably small proportions.

Just plantin' the seed...

Just walking across the room or into the kitchen could involved changes of scale that would be impossible to perceive unless you could freeze frame in the order of trillionths of a second. Once, watching an event in our gymnasium in high school, I witnessed a kind of "skip-frame" action by the people, and wondered if I had a glitch in my brain. A synapse firing-disorder could explain this, but also, the possibility exists in that gym, there is a vortex that swallows light, and so the images didn't follow the expected smooth flow of photons from body to eyeball. One of the problems of the "ether" theory stands on the assumption that there is some "thing" that exists intermediate to all the atoms, and ignores the possibility that the fabric of space and all motions in it are simply complex vibrations of a fixed substrate or "plenum". The idea that "teleportation" or "beaming up" consists of actually "moving" particles from point to point presumes that all atoms are made up of photons, or massless essences and that these actually move. Of course, then you have the situation in which the patterns can be transposed, and that the consciousness associated with them, is already "there" and assumes the "identity" at the "new location". It is interesting to assume that the real substrate of space-time is consciousness, and that the idea of "atom" is merely a convention for the sake of reference. You could jus as easily be "me" and "I" you, and the exchanges of space between now and now are simply patterns vibrating in unimaginable comlexity that can give new meaning to "extra-dimensions". "Up", "down" and "back and forth" vibrations can mean different things according to relative positions. "Momentum", "inertia" etc. can all have unique properties according to mere orientation to each other that gives them specific "identity" without resorting to the concept of sequestered and enduring translating stuffs that are really only forms of sound and its extension as "light". One still has to come up with an interpretation of what that "medium" or substrate is that can sustain all these vibrations, but it could just as easily be seen as a mere program in the omni-capable and consistent consciousness that simply is modeling all things. Then all things do exist, and all things are merely patterns of thought or thinking and maybe even believing and being sold a bill of goods that are not worth a tinker's damn. Everything is select. Majority rule doesn't make it "reality".

That would be cool, to pair the graviton with the photon; yes. But, each definition of one matches the other so that the graviton could be a weak photon or maybe a weak neutrino . . .

The reason that FTl is not possible, or even at light speed, is because the faster you go the more time dialation you have, also, the more weight you gain, essently treated as more mass. You can`t just push really hard and go FTL.