General / Off-Topic Ftl travel, 5 to 10 years?
- Thread starter Almondclint
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There is no "empty space" unless you leave any universe you may currently be in. (edit) And anywhere you are can not be empty space unless you are physically nihilist.
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Panticus
Banned
Oh don't be silly. The concept is reasonable enough and used all the time in cosmological models.
It's not going to happen. We're early on the history of the Milky Way, but not so early that it's likely we're the first technological civilization in the galaxy. Fermi's Paradox tells us that spreading out to colonise the stars isn't happening.
Sorry guys. We live in a hard Sci-Fi setting.
Sorry guys. We live in a hard Sci-Fi setting.
Uhmm, none of the inventions we have made and use are physically impossible as far as I know...
The periodic table which is understood and has not been disregarded, were not even glints of lust in the eyes of Wilhelm the Conqueror in 1066. Our knowledge of space/time is limited at best and far to much is not clearly understood.
A theory usually has a basic foundation to build upon. FTL has none. Mine is as good as yours, and nobody knows, it might even be true.
But strength of man is imagination and a plodding along, that will reveal what is possible, if we survive our own foibles. If.
Having been a grown up since the 70 ties, makes you a bit cynic, I hope coming generations will be more clever, than them before them.
Lets settle for now to conquer the Solar system, we can do that if we try seriously. Make the Solar system home of mankind, beat the challenges and slowly the stars will become the next real goal.
Cheers Cmdr's
The periodic table which is understood and has not been disregarded, were not even glints of lust in the eyes of Wilhelm the Conqueror in 1066. Our knowledge of space/time is limited at best and far to much is not clearly understood.
A theory usually has a basic foundation to build upon. FTL has none. Mine is as good as yours, and nobody knows, it might even be true.
But strength of man is imagination and a plodding along, that will reveal what is possible, if we survive our own foibles. If.
Having been a grown up since the 70 ties, makes you a bit cynic, I hope coming generations will be more clever, than them before them.
Lets settle for now to conquer the Solar system, we can do that if we try seriously. Make the Solar system home of mankind, beat the challenges and slowly the stars will become the next real goal.
Cheers Cmdr's
It's been suggested that ultra-high energy cosmic rays could be the reaction matter (ie. exhaust ejecta) of hi-tech alien propulsion systems who's whips just happen to have been oriented directly away from us at the moment they were ejected. Wikipedia's entry on these "Oh my God" particles mentions that:
- although we can only speculate the range they've traveled, obviously, the further out they've come from, the larger volume of space that 20° arc correlates to... point being, that we're not talking about a point source here, but possibly an area far larger than ED's 'bubble' of colonised systems... which is what you'd expect from a society possessing such powerful drives.
Needless to say that's too tenuous a speculation to warrant much credence, and they could just as well be originating from a dense cluster of interacting quasars, magnetars or black holes etc., however we've identified no such viable source thus far..
Just how early or late we are to the party remains an issue of some contention - obviously we're into the 3rd generation of star formation, with a good few more to come, however studies in recent years have suggested that the universal rate of new star formation is currently at a mere 3% of its historical peak, and will only continue declining towards the eventual heat death.
More recent studies still have nonetheless offered much more optimistic revisions to that estimate, however with regards to Fermi's paradox (and similarly, the Drake equation), perhaps the more pressing variable is the 3 billion years or so that it took for multicellular life to get a leg up.
There's been very tentative findings (just over the last few months in fact) that suggest tenuous fungal-like filaments of very basic multicellular (or just cooperative unicellular) fossil structures from very deep-earth samples may have been around billions of years earlier than previously thought, however there's no question that for 3 billion years prior to the Cambrian explosion, there were insurmountable constraints upon diversification and proliferation of life as we know it.
Until we can eliminate the possibility of a second genesis within our own system (such as at hydrothermal vents within Enceladus's or Ganymede's cores, or likewise in the rich hydrocarbon environs of Titan etc.), it's largely guesswork as to the probabilities of even the most basic forms of life developing... but even at the most optimistic outcomes of that search, it seems evident that multicellular life is an exceedingly rare occurrence, likely made possible in our case only through the happenstance symbiosis of the mitochondrial progenitor, which is the singular factor making multicellularity even viable in terms of its energy requirements and ability to share nutrients in a homeostatic positive-feedback. Suffice to say, parasitic colonisation is most usually detrimental to the host cell, if not outright fatal. But of course it also hinges upon the need for a high degree of diversity within the unicellular lifeforms that might constitute such a cooperative union in the first place. Maybe whatever mitochondria developed from necessarily evolved in an environment substantially different to, and thus remote from, the cells it eventually became hosted by, and thus such occurrences are further precluded by the sheer geological isolation between the component organisms.
TL;DR - the chances that we are the first technologically advanced species in the galaxy are actually far higher than one might like to imagine - purely in terms of the energy requirement of successful, mutually-profitable multicellular cooperation. Remember, that the average active Human turns over (and constantly regenerates) around 1.5 times their own body weight in adenosine tri-phosphate every 24 hours - a rate of combustion itself dependent upon the availability of free oxygen, which in turn is dependent upon the overwhelming abundance of the unicellular lifeforms we have to thank for its release into our atmosphere in the first place.. So just in terms of the raw physics, we're in an extremely privileged position, with a hugely complex and wholly improbable sequence of incredibly fortunate coincidences to thank for our existence..
Given these unfavourable odds, it's unsurprising that Hoyle et al's pan spermia hypothesis is seeing something of a renaissance, after 50 years of initially promising searches for abiotic spontaneous genesis have proved fruitless. We've found amino acids just about everywhere, from comets to test tubes of basic elements zapped with electricity - and even coaxed them into spontaneously self-organising closed catalytic systems (wherein the ratio of molecular species to that of the reactions they're able to catalyse forms a stable closed system)... but for all this, anything truly resembling 'life' remains well beyond our means to replicate. Let alone complex, ie. multicellular, life.
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Well plenty of theoretical physicists seem to think there is a big problem with negative energy / matter......... specifically getting any of it....... if it even exists........ which nobody's sure of.
"Thus, as the energy density is negative, one needs exotic matter to travel faster than the speed of light. The existence of exotic matter is not theoretically ruled out, the Casimir effect and the accelerating universe both lending support to the proposed existence of such matter. However, generating enough exotic matter and sustaining it to perform feats such as faster-than-light travel (and also to keep open the 'throat' of a wormhole) is thought to be impractical. Low has argued that within the context of general relativity, it is impossible to construct a warp drive in the absence of exotic matter."
The whole article if you're interested.... http://www.andersoninstitute.com/alcubierre-warp-drive.html
Look at the bright side.
We are ALREADY traveling faster than light... ...relative to the stars beyond the observable universe.
We are ALREADY traveling faster than light... ...relative to the stars beyond the observable universe.