[jr2]

Basically, to get people interested in space travel / science, NASA hired someone who has done stuff for the Star Trek universe to make a plausible model of a ship powered by an Alcubierre drive.


http://www.cnet.com/pictures/the-ixs-enterprise-warp-drive-ship-pictures/

I've gotta say, it looks great. Hummina hummina, where do I get one?

http://www.cnet.com/news/mark-rademaker-designing-a-warp-drive-space-ship-for-nasa/

[Luis Dias]

Typical marketing lipstick on a pig. Alcubierre drives do not work, period.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Typical marketing lipstick on a pig. Alcubierre drives do not work, period.

^{[citation needed]}

[Turambar]

Typical marketing lipstick on a pig. Alcubierre drives do not work, period.

^{[citation needed]}

He got one off amazon.  It sucked, one star, would not attempt FTL travel again.

[Rhys]

Typical marketing lipstick on a pig. Alcubierre drives do not work, period.

^{[citation needed]}

He got one off amazon.  It sucked, one star, would not attempt FTL travel again.

Well yeah, you obviously need at least 14 stars to power the FTL engine. He should've read the manual.

[Aardwolf]

Changes to the curvature of space propagate at the speed of light. At the very best maybe you could make an Alcubierre speedway between places you've already been (but I doubt that's possible either).

[Nuke]

too bad nasa blew its whole budget on graphics artists.

[Phantom Hoover]

Typical marketing lipstick on a pig. Alcubierre drives do not work, period.

****'s sake luis we get it, you read an article saying alcubierre drives wouldn't work and you feel the need to beat others over the head with it. please stop it for christ's sake

[Kopachris]

Changes to the curvature of space propagate at the speed of light. At the very best maybe you could make an Alcubierre speedway between places you've already been (but I doubt that's possible either).

There's that, and there's also Krasnikov tubes, which could be laid in the wake of travel near the speed of light, and would essentially permit a return trip to just after you left.  Multiple Krasnikov tubes could create a closed timelike curve.

Anyway, to those who don't already know, there are a few different problems with Alcubierre drives, not just the mass/energy issue.  The research connected to this concept art may be able to get around the mass/energy requirements if a specific interpretation of brane cosmology is correct (which is what they're testing, and it's still pretty cool if it works, even if there are other issues which make Alcubierre drives impossible).  If their theory holds, the amount of energy required for a realistic spaceship could be less than 700 kg.  This is less than half the energy released in the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake (also a little more than half the total energy consumed by the US in 2001, but about 4x the total electricity consumed by the US that year, according to Wolfram|Alpha), though negative energy and placement of all this energy would still be a problem.  Additionally, being causally disconnected from the walls of the bubble during transit would prevent anyone inside the bubble from steering or decelerating, and particles that build up at the front of the bubble during transit would have enough energy to destroy anything in front of the ship when the bubble comes to rest.

[Bobboau]

if those are the only problems then it sounds like they are the best option at the moment.

[Luis Dias]

Typical marketing lipstick on a pig. Alcubierre drives do not work, period.

****'s sake luis we get it, you read an article saying alcubierre drives wouldn't work and you feel the need to beat others over the head with it. please stop it for christ's sake

No, I didn't "read an article". I consulted with physicists, read quite a lot of material regarding this, and engaged in critical thinking.

I also am aware I'm not the best person to discuss the limitations, but even considering Koprachis' number of 700Kg of energy, it's overtly ridiculous. Not only you have to generate and efficiently manage this energy, you'll even have to turn it into negative energy, which is something we either believe is impossible to exist, or just mindblowingly difficult if we ever come across with some "fluke" like the Casimir Effect and so on.

This idea of creating "lanes" is good for scifi, but please. Anything that is going faster than light from any other perspective is either creating paradoxes or hidden from us by event horizons, and anything that is beyond event horizons can never "go back" to us.

[z64555]

heh. Kg of energy.

[Dragon]

It's a perfectly valid unit if you assume c=1. Natural units are weird like that. And it's a usable unit even if you're not using them. E=mc², "700kg of energy" is what you get from fusing 350kg of matter with 350kg of antimatter.

No, I didn't "read an article". I consulted with physicists, read quite a lot of material regarding this, and engaged in critical thinking.

Dunno what physicists were those, but, let me clear something up. Alcubierre drives do work. Moreover, we can make one that produces a measurable effect right now. This is not science fiction, not speculation, but actual, hard science. It was discussed on KSP forums in somewhat more depth, but the general idea is, an Alcubierre starship is an engineering problem, not a physics one.

The only question is, can an Alcubierre drive go FTL? The answer is no. But assuming negative energy is possible, it could, in a mind-boggingly weird way, mess with the structure of spacetime itself so it "moves faster than light", not only without ever moving, but without violating relativity and causality. I'm currently trying to learn the very basics of algebra that can describe this, and I've got enough already at this point, so don't ask me how exactly it works, but it does. Rest assured, it is incredibly nonintuitive how this stuff works, but it seems that mathematics do work out. The biggest problem is this negative energy, which only exists as a part of a theory at this point. Remember, though, antimatter (essentially "negative matter" from a certain point of view, though with positive mass) and neutrinos started out that way, too, as did Higgs bosons and many other heavy particles, so I'm optimistic.

[jr2]

Aaaand everyone misses the gorgeous model. Go figure.

re: alcubi drives not working: read up on all the science disproving yhe Wright brothers' hair-brained heavier than air flying machine concept.

Does this prove it will work? No. It simply means, that just because science says something doesnt work, doesn't necessarily mean it won't. You might just be making the attempt in the wrong way. Then again, there might be no feasible way! Haha! But it's always fun to try, you learn more regardless of the results being successful or not.

[Dragon]

Actually, in this case, science says it does work. In fact, Flyer 1 was also based on sound calculations and engineering. Same with Alcubierre, IIRC, the effect has already been observed. As I just detailed above, the only problem is getting the drive to "go FTL".

[The E]

Aaaand everyone misses the gorgeous model. Go figure.

re: alcubi drives not working: read up on all the science disproving yhe Wright brothers' hair-brained heavier than air flying machine concept.

Does this prove it will work? No. It simply means, that just because science says something doesnt work, doesn't necessarily mean it won't. You might just be making the attempt in the wrong way. Then again, there might be no feasible way! Haha! But it's always fun to try, you learn more regardless of the results being successful or not.

The case against the Alcubierre drive is much more solid than that, and you should really know better than to equivocate the two. The requirement to have a bunch of exotic matter, which has never been observed to exist and for which no method of manufacturing exists, is a massive dealbreaker.

[Dragon]

That only applies to the FTL version, though. Now, I haven't done any calculations on just how efficient the STL one would be, but if we could travel at, say, something like 90% c for less than a ton of matter/antimatter fuel, I'd say this ship could still get built. Mars in 4 minutes, anyone? I don't know if it can be that efficient without going into negative energy, though.

[Luis Dias]

I was strictly speaking about the FTL aspect of it. Regarding a more modest objective I do not possess enough knowledge to know one way or the other, but the mechanism sounds energetically costly (euphemism) and overall crazy. I'm not expecting Elon Musk presenting the Alcubierre Drive in the next 50 years for the Falcon 23.

[Aesaar]

Basically, to get people interested in space travel / science, NASA hired someone who has done stuff for the Star Trek universe to make a plausible model of a ship powered by an Alcubierre drive.


http://www.cnet.com/pictures/the-ixs-enterprise-warp-drive-ship-pictures/

I've gotta say, it looks great. Hummina hummina, where do I get one?

http://www.cnet.com/news/mark-rademaker-designing-a-warp-drive-space-ship-for-nasa/

Because when I think scientific accuracy, I immediately think Star Trek.

[Luis Dias]

they got ipads and sliding doors right on, why should they be wrong on this one?