Detection of artificial extrasolar signals...

As for interstellar travel, a Mexican scientist recently proposed that it would be theoretically possible for a spaceship to basically 'grab' a bubble of spacetime around it, in order to overcome the Einsteinian limits on faster-than-light travel. At least, that is how I understood what he wrote. I do not pretend to even come close to understanding the technical details involved.

But it would seem the Trekkies had it right all along

hanuman wrote:As for interstellar travel, a Mexican scientist recently proposed that it would be theoretically possible for a spaceship to basically 'grab' a bubble of spacetime around it, in order to overcome the Einsteinian limits on faster-than-light travel. At least, that is how I understood what he wrote. I do not pretend to even come close to understanding the technical details involved.

But it would seem the Trekkies had it right all along

Actually, Trek Warp is through another plane of space known as "subspace". The warp drive featured in the show and film are actually more closely related to Weber's hyperspace than what Miguel Alclubierre proposes.

What he proposes is that you can actually twist the spacetime around the vessel, allowing the space itself to propel you forward. The vessel itself does not move at all, the space around the vessel is what moves, so the vehicle essentially sits at zero-g with no stress on the frame of the craft. No need for any fancy SIF or compensators. Essentially, the craft is sitting in the middle of a wave of spacetime.

There is some theoretical testing going on at NASA to determine feasibility, on an extremely small scale. They've done some measurements that seem to point to Alclubierre's findings. Some of their measurements do indeed show the warping effect proposed by the man, but the scale is so small as to be a huge uncertainty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M8yht_ofHc

The Star Carrier series by Ian Douglas uses the principles put forth by Miguel Alclubierre, and he does a decent job of explaining it. Quite an interesting series, although there's a lot of internal inconsistencies. Still fun, though.

Uroboros wrote:Actually, Trek Warp is through another plane of space known as "subspace". The warp drive featured in the show and film are actually more closely related to Weber's hyperspace than what Miguel Alclubierre proposes.

I hate to split hairs with you, espcially since my source for the splitting goes back to the 25th Trek Anniversey tape, but Trek war Drive actually creates an area of warped space around the ship, which they then use to, for lack of a better term, surf through space like a surfer on the waves. By waxing his board he can get less friction and that is how the warp drive works, by "waxing" the space around the ship, and the warp field/bubble takes the warped space with the ship, allowing it to continue to surf.

hanuman wrote:As for interstellar travel, a Mexican scientist recently proposed that it would be theoretically possible for a spaceship to basically 'grab' a bubble of spacetime around it, in order to overcome the Einsteinian limits on faster-than-light travel. At least, that is how I understood what he wrote. I do not pretend to even come close to understanding the technical details involved.

But it would seem the Trekkies had it right all along

That has sometimes been called "warp" yes.
Not the exact same thing but might achieve the same effect. And close enough.


There are other options however. Space folding would be the neatest, as it would be point to point and take almost no time, but the degree of finesse in manipulating space over vast distances makes it unfortunately unlikely.

Then there´s tunneling, local and "long distance", where you stretch and contract space either between endpoints or in vicinity of the craft, allowing the craft to move at one speed relative to the manipulated space, and at a very different speed compared to the rest of the universe. The local variation sounds similar to the "bubble", but is a lot simpler, more "brute force" approach.

I expect the local tunneling variant to have the best chance of becoming real first.

There´s also some ideas about "hyperspace", mostly variations on playing with dimensions to move around. Until a way to interact with dimensions at all is found(if at all possible), it´s not very viable ideas yet.

Guys, this is actually very exciting, especially if, as Uroboros says, NASA's research seems not only to have confirmed that scientist's research but has actually moved into the practical application thereof, on however small a scale.

That's how a lot of innovation works - the first applications of new scientific knowledge often are completely impractical or very 'coarse' or expensive, but with time become less and less so.

Not that it is always possible to turn pure science into applied technique, but it often is, and in this case it gives us hope that interstellar travel might indeed be not only possible but possible without the time and resource costs that a purely Einsteinian effort to travel to another star would require.

This is not meant to be serious .... I think! Way back in July of 1945 when we popped off that first small nuke, it created a small sub space pulse. Yep .... at the core of the detonation, space and time were briefly warped.

The test blast sent off a ommi-directional pulse, like a ripple across smooth water. Sub space pulses travel very fast ... millions of times faster than light. Unfortunately, said pulse gathered the wrong attention.

Off floating in deep space are many sensor buoys of the evil Draconian Empire. Their function is to detect up and coming primitive civilizations that might eventually compete with the Draconians. With me so far?

This is bad. Very bad. Then we humans popped off over 1000 bombs, all creating a sub space pulse. The evil Draconians now have an angle on us and know where we are. The Draconian Battle Cruisers will arrive in 50 years.

I mean the Draconians are very .... draconian. They have lots of long wormy tentacles and look yuckie and have lots of eye stalks. They smell also. The Battle Cruisers are 5 miles long and dripping with guns. Not good at all.

The good news is that since we popped off so many A and H bomb shots the dumb sensor buoys just figured that we wiped ourselves out with a long nasty war. The Battle Cruisers have turned around...for now. Thank goodness!

HB of CJ (old coot) Cm.