While the concepts outlined in the team’s new paper pave the way toward making travel through space nearing light speed a reality, constructing such an engine is likely something that will only be feasible far in the future, as the present state of technology would not allow for such a device.
… by an astounding margin.
The paper is paywalled and I am too lazy to look for a free/open link, but the shown graphs indicate many squared meters of energy concentrations of 1 - 10 * 10^39 joules.
The entire energy output of the Sun, in a year, is around 10^34 joules. 6.6 * 10^39 joules is apparently the estimated total mass energy of the Moon, if you basically perfectly E = mc^2 transformed it into pure energy.
In 2010 the estimated total energy consumption of humans on Earth was 5 * 10^20 joules.
So we just need something around ten billion * ten billion more joules than that, presumably generated by something i dont know, naval frigate sized?
Yeah. Faaaaaar off indeed.
Like Hippocrates telling people that a new breakthrough in medicine could allow bones to be seen in detail without cutting into flesh
Do we have any plan for how to avoid colliding with asteroids or other things while traveling so fast?
We can’t even travel that fast to even start theorizing how that would work 🤣
From previous reading on the subject, I believe the main issue with this style of transport would be slowing down so as not to cause a massive explosion of forward moving energy at the barrier of the warp bubble which would build up during travel.
Simple, the galaxy is pretty much flat so go up, turn 90°, travel until you’re over your destination, go down, same as an helicopter!
Most of space is empty, analysis of the path beforehand and a structure that can withstand the smaller objects is really all that’s necessary. But those are just as theoretical as this engine.
Problem is that asteroids are very hard to see, as they are both cold and dark, meaning they don’t stand out against space very much at all. And even a micrometeoroid poses a risk even when traveling at low velocities (e.g. someone orbiting earth, the meteoroid itself has a relatively high velocity). Getting hit by a 1cm meteoroid at warp 1 would be devastating.
Yes, as I said theoretically. If/by the time this heavily theoretical engine comes to fruition there will probably be ways to detect asteroids better than we have now. Also materials/structural design that are better than what we have now for sustaining the smaller hits. Maybe quantum prediction scanning, maybe a forcefield. Who knows by then.
Not an issue if you aren’t actually traversing the whole space but rather bending space to get you where you want to go.
I’m almost 50 years old and I’ve been hearing about this for almost 50 years.
Nobody can be excited for anything. Whether or not it’s possible in even the next century or two, I still think it’s awesome that there are dreamers out there trying to make at least a solid theoretical plan on how to accomplish stuff like this. I also think people are discounting the exponential rate of knowledge we accumulate every generation. It might be awhile, but unless society collapses, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have interstellar propulsion like this in the next couple centuries. Hell, I expect to see a thriving commercial space industry in the next 50-some-odd years within our solar system.
I doubt we’ll survive long enough to make a real go at it. And somehow if we do, the rich will just ruin it for everyone anyway.
