Re: Re: Re: starship-design: RE: Bugs again

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

KellySt@aol.com writes:
 > The Alberquen (sp) warp drive (see the NASA site WARP drive when?) is a design
 > for a warp drive by a physist of the same name.  (He realized the Star Trek
 > technobable actually made sence.  The ship isn't moving, it shoves a bubble of
 > space around the ship at hyper light speeds.  No relativity effects).

The Alcubierre drive requires some physically dubious stuff in
order to actually work -- mainly a region of "negative energy
density".  Find me some negative energy and we'll talk then.

 > Certain quantum effects do work instently over measurable distences (hence
 > faster then light, thou most don't involve mass traveling).

None involve mass traveling over macroscopic distances at all.
"Quantum interconnectedness" is also proven to be unable to
communicate information.

 > Also Einstines equations don't say you can't go faster then light.  Then say
 > you can't go AT the speed of light.  How you get from slower then to faster
 > then is a big trick, but travel at eiather is 'legal'.

You can plug values of v > c into special relativity equations,
at the cost of ending up with things like time and mass values
that are complex numbers.  I don't know if I'd call that "legal."
Find me some complex mass and we'll talk then.  A quantum
mechanical analysis also indicates that you can either have FTL
particles that aren't localizable (i.e. observable) or you can't
have FTL particles at all.

 > Good news: a lot of pysisist now see FTL and time travel as legal (thou if
 > they are possible a lot of the rest of physics could get run through a
 > blender).  Bad news, no one has a clue how to build a machine to do it.  (The
 > theories suggest power levels that would dwarf a stars output.)

General relativity seems to offer the best potential for allowing
FTL effects, but no one has proven (even theoretically) that FTL
travel could be achieved using things that actually exist or
could be made from things that exist in the universe.  The
implications are, though, that it would indeed take absolutely
incredible amounts of energy to create anything like a wormhole
or a "warp bubble".