Ok if ANTHING was going to get here soon, it would have to travel at or extremly close too the speed of light since E=MC2 proves NOTHING can move that fast, it would have to move very close to it. So that means for every pound that the space craft weighed it would take 10 million tons of oil/gas. So they would have to make them very light and barley anything could go along. So it would have to have been a probe. For the other cases with alien bodies, i cant explain that i bet it is a type of cold fusion or some other atomic power that we cant harness...
Wat do you think?

Yes, as far as we know, only light can travel at the speed of light, and nothing can travel faster than light.

Space travellers wouldn't be using oil and gas, and probably not chemical rockets, either. But even with advanced propulsion systems, travelling to another solar system would be a huge undertaking. Most of the ship's mass would be fuel.

what about this anti-gravatational technology?

What ever it would be it would have to be light just as said before and mostly fuel.
But there is always a way! to have something done if you just think about it.

How about the aliens that come to visit us aren't from another star system but are actually people left over from Mars before it's habitable environment was destroyed and have been just hanging out all this time?

You assume that "aliens" would have our same level of technology.

You also assume they would have developed technology the same way we did-not necessarily true.

What if the alien race was much older than us?

What if they developed technology much faster than us?

What if they did not have a 7-800 year period of time when developing technology was a death sentence-dark ages.

Another issue, I believe our true level of high technology-read military- is much higher than we commonly know.

i allways thouhgt they travled ways of black hole and such.

what if were the oldest race?

yeah I agree with mrmonsoon, I heard a while ago about the dark ages thing- 800 years down the drain, partly because of the Church.
Im not a big military conspiracist, but it has happened before, e.g. stealth planes in the USA...

I'm pretty sure but dont quote me that if you ask a mathematician they will say human or alien they are all governed by mathimatics. The presentation might be different but the mechanics would be the same.

NO, gravity is an attraction between two masses. In the void of space they would not be near enough to any planets for gravity to have much of an affect on them. Whehter that is positive or negative. Perhaps they could skip from planet to planet, pushing off each but that would be slow and indirect. Also anti gravity hasnt been done with our understanding of physics. Even if they could use antigravity and maybe skipped from planet to planet they would still need energy to power whatever makes the antigravity. THats why I think if there are aliens they are fairly close to earth becuase long distance travel just doesnt seem to make sense.

Can you explain to me how E=MC^2 proves nothing can move that fast? As I was taught, simply put, E=MC^2 is the equation used to calculate the energy of an object.



We'll... you'd be smart to realise that even travelling at the speed of light, interstellar travel isnt practicable.

Being able to create wormholes or use wormholes, however...

Stellar, the wormholes thing is a common idea, but then again it's just a theory right now.

And, the laws of physics as we know them says we can't travel the speed of light.. but there are usually "loop holes" that can take that way. Let's say you put a reflected gravitational field around your space craft, then no matter how fast you go, everything inside the spacecraft stays as if it were not moving at all, but the field around it is moving at incredible speeds. Of course this is just theory, haha.

So is the theory of relativity.



The wormhole theory doesnt defy that. Plus, what you described isnt a law, its a theory also IIRC.

Relativity has been repeatedly confirmed by experimentation and observation. Wormholes on the other hand are purely hypothetical. And faster-than-light travel, no matter how you do it - wormholes, warp drives, whatever- would still violate causality.

It hasnt been confirmed past "Theory" so far... and the "nothing can go faster than the speed of light" even less so.



Wormholes do not violate the speed of light limit. You dont actually travel faster than light when travelling through a wormhole.

There are some alternative propulsion theories on Jan Pajak's site. Sorry I no longer have his link. Just Google it, you wont be disappointed. The man is incredibly brilliant and advanced in this field.
Be prepared to wade through a lot of speculation on good and evil though.

I have visited Jan Pajak's site. However, I do not think telekinesis would allow one to travel faster than the speed of light, because ones mass approaches infinity as one approaches C.

I suggest teleportation, a well-known phenomenon from psychical research. Of course, we are a new and primitive species, and only rarely is anyone born with any teleporting abilities. But we can evolve, and someday, perhaps we too can teleport across hundreds of light-years in an instant. This does not violate Einstein's speed limit, since one is not traveling through space-time. While no one knows for sure, perhaps an apport takes one on a shortcut through the extra spatial dimensions required by String Theory. See my own web site below.

HM it could be solar powered, thta means as long as a star is around, you don't need gas, maybe thats why they shine?

Another thread that presents an old argument as a profound inspiration. Do a bit of search before posting.

If an alien race is coming from another solar system, they may be using some sort of interstellar travel that does not comform to known physics. To try and reason about it with the level of physics we have at the moment will only lead us to speculate from a biased position.

Stellar, you're sounding like a creationist. So you refuse to take seriously any theory that is not declared to be a law? There is extensive experimental evidence for relativity. Its predictions have been verified with extraordinary accuracy.

list of experiments concerning relativity

more detailed descriptions of certain experiments



Okay, Stellar, tell me what this image represents, and tell me its significance to the subject of faster-then-light travel:



Note that I said travel through wormholes violate causality, even when you do not exceed the speed of light locally.

When you go from point A to point B through a wormhole faster than it would take a photon to travel the same distance through "normal" space, you are violating causality, because there exists a reference frame somewhere in which the object entering the wormhole will exit the other end before it enters. That is why faster-than-light travel is identical to time travel in relativity.

You can have relativity and causality, or you can have faster-than-light travel, but you cannot have all three in the same universe.

What about folding space like you do a book? closed you step across open it up and you are across the galaxy in the blink of an eye.

It's impossible for an object with a mass to travel at the speed of light, and so alien craft can NEVER travel at the speed of light. When an object travels through space, it needs energy equal to the object's mass to push it along. The faster an object travels, the more massive it becomes, so it needs more energy to propel it. BUT, at about three-quarters the speed of light, an object acquires infinite mass, so it needs infinite energy to travel, and it is impossible to have infinite energy. All the energy in the universe will not be sufficient to propel it along. There is only a limited amount of energy in the universe, and energy cannot be created. So it it impossible even for an object to reach the speed where it would have infinite mass. The fastest possible speed that an object could attain would be when it acquires a mass equal to that of the Universe and would need all the energy in the Universe to propel it!

So speed-of-light travel can NEVER be a possibility, no matter how advanced you are.

So I reckon advanced extraterrestrials have the ability to bend space to make distant objects come closer to them.

To picture it, imagine an A4-sized piece of paper, with a dot near the top of the page and a dot near the bottom. Keeping the paper flat on the table, you could draw a long line between the two. But if you folded the paper and brought one of the dots nearer to the other dot, you could still draw a line between them but the line would be a lot shorter.

Now, extraterrestrials may have acquired technolgy that allows them to bend space in between two distant planets, sort of like folding the space between them in half. So they could travel the from their planet to another planet in a much shorter distance. BUT, other creatures on both planets and the space between don't notice that space has been bent - to them the space they are in isnormal and the planets are still distant. Only to the aliens travelling have the distances been shortened.

And, even if speed-of-light travel was possible, bear in mind that the NEAREST star to our Solar System, Alpha Centauri, is 4.5 light years away, which means that even when you travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second/300,000 kms per second) it would still take you 4.5 years to get there! Imagine if you needed to travel to a planet 3 MILLION light years away. You would be dead before you reached it, even travelling at the speed of light.

So the only way I think of that extraterrestrials reach this planet is if they bend space or use wormholes or something similar.

Im not saying that at all. I am, however, saying that theres always the possibility that it is wrong (no matter how small), and that wormhole theory doesnt disprove/contradict the other theories.



Im not quite sure what you mean...



That's more or less the idea of wormholes.

THERE IS NO GRAVITY in space, that's why you can go top speed for a minute and still go that fast without even using more gas, MAYBE, they have to things to use, LETS SAY, they use oxygen for gas, they use it then it turns into carbon dioxside, NOW, they can use carbon dieoxside too and it turns into oxygen, understand what i think?

There is plenty of gravity in space, just not strong enough to make much of a difference. The reason you maintain a set speed is that there is almost no friction. You say they turn oxygen into carbon dixide? Do you mean by breathing? Because im not sure where all the carbon atoms needed to do this would come from. The carbon expelled from human breathe comes from the breakdown of food we eat ( Correct me if im wrong) as its converted into energy. I dont really get what you mean.

Teleportion is not a well known phenomenon. It isnt real. The closest thing would be to move very quickly and then all the limits to the speed of light come in to play. In order to telleport without those resrictions you would have to have no mass. That would mean your not made of matter. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, although it can be converted into energy. Im pretty sure if you were converted into energy you would die though.

you shouldn't give the laws of phsics as an exuse. skateboarders defy them. An ollie (skateboards are not atached to peoples feet) is a jump requiring a pop and a drag.

i think the ets are us in the future!why?because it seems easier to find a way to time travel than it is to travel 1 billion light years.who knows?there could be wormholes that move through time as well as distance!

IBM Teleportation research
Teleportation is a proven fact. Faster than light speed last time I looked was up to 40 times the speed of light so far tested. Scientists once said that heavier than air flight was impossible but the Wright Brothers, a couple of bicycle mechanics proved them wrong. Teleportation is the only way real space flight is possible as it is the only way to accelerate to faster than light speed without the occupants knowing. The only thing that is impossible is time travel.

From the IBM Research:
How this is accomplished is usually not explained in detail, but the general idea seems to be that the original object is scanned in such a way as to extract all the information from it, then this information is transmitted to the receiving location and used to construct the replica, not necessarily from the actual material of the original, but perhaps from atoms of the same kinds, arranged in exactly the same pattern as the original. A teleportation machine would be like a fax machine, except that it would work on 3-dimensional objects as well as documents, it would produce an exact copy rather than an approximate facsimile, and it would destroy the original in the process of scanning it.

Ok, to teleport an object is one thing, but life forms? I think they would die or at least be a mindless clone. Nothing more. Im still not saying teleportation is real though.

Actually teleportation does exist now, but probably not in the way you would have hoped or expected. If you dont know already some Australians did it using firbre optics and photons (don't know if they did it first though).
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...eportation.html

Wait... a while back didn't they conduct an experiment and actually teleport an atom in a controlled environment? I remember it being on TV a while back.

But as for alien propulsion... gaaah it always amazes me how people think that with an ENTIRE half century of knowledge of space travel we are suddenly the undisputed authorities on interstellar travel, and we KNOW what can and can't be done. I think the truth is we only know what WE can and cannot do.. I don't think we have the authority to speak for OTHER races far in advance of ours... in fact it is pretty arrogant.

How the frick don't you know that there are different levels of space, levels that do not conform to laws of the standard one we exist in that a ship could jump into, make the journey, then jump out of? How do you know that some alien civilisations with centuries of space travel under their belt have not devised what would seem to us miraculous means of propulsion, or messing with the actual fabric of reality? I am speculating here naturally... but if you can tell me that these sort of things are 100% beyond any shadow of a doubt completely impossible then fair enough...

Just ask yourselves this first... seeing as we have never made it out of our solar system in any way shape or form, and have only actually made manned flights to the moon... a piddling distance in relative terms... how much do we ACTUALLY know about the universe we live in and how it works? My guess would be... very, very little...

No, I'm saying that according to physics as we understand it today, faster-than-light travel seems impossible. Relatively has been tested repeatedly and seems to be on solid ground. Therefore, to have FTL travel become a reality would require the discovery of new principles of physics that would modify relativity.

Actually NASA has a "Breakthrough Propulsion Physics" program that attempts to see if the laws of the universe may allow for the possibility FTL travel. It is entirely theoretical at this point, though. They aren't building a warp drive in their basement; they're playing with models and formulae.

NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program - overview

There is also another theory whereby matter can occupy the same space as other matter, since at a sub atomic level it is merely energy. Matter from another world on another "frequency" can pass through matter from this world, therefore they are not travelling through distance to get here, they may only be inches away.

Subatomic particles have been found to travel at the speed of light under given conditions for minute periods of time and this has actually lead to talk of them briefly traveling through time. I believe it was even proven in some fashion. Not that this means much now, but the fact that it IS POSSIBLE says ALOT. I believe that once the speed of light is breached...we will unlock time travel.

We cant travel faster then light. Tho we can travel faster then light, with out traveling faster then light. We can warp space, to make the area between to points smaller for the ship, and only that ship. Then theres the fold and punch (worm holes) method, were you can travel between 2 points vary quickly, these are theoretical.

~Thanato

too all: thats why i said 'or an energy we havent harnessed;

Antimatter is the best bet, except it is too hard to use since it can touch matter and is extremly trying to make...