Science News

[Zema Bus]

[Grogan]

Ah well, landing SOMETHING (unmanned) on the moon is not that difficult. Americans didn't invent rocket technology either. They always have to be the first, biggest, baddest on the scene though, no matter what it is. Russians were also more irresponsible and wouldn't spend as much time on details, so there's that.

One thing that's certain, anything we've put on the moon will still be there.

As for "aliens", I've become more skeptical about space travel of hundreds of light years. It would be ridiculous to think that we're the only life out there, but whether they existed as a technological species that had the capabilities to visit us ~20,000 years ago is more likely to be fantasy. I wouldn't completely discount it though. A lot of things that we'd consider impossible are only because we can't comprehend a way.

[Zema Bus]

Yeah it's like what Dr. Lee said in Stargate Atlantis: "Space is quite vast"



Warp drive tech may actually be a way of dealing with those distances in the future.

Nearly 60 years ago, the original Star Trek series ignited a dream in the public’s imagination: that one day, people would travel the galaxy in ships propelled by faster-than-light “warp drives.”

The idea that future humans could hop in a vessel and arrive at a distant star system that afternoon soon became a staple of science fiction, not just in Star Trek but in dozens of other movies, TV shows, and books beloved by generations of fans.

Many of those fans were children who would grow up to become scientists. And today, some of those scientists are bending spacetime itself to bring warp drive closer to reality.

For decades, most physicists considered warp drive to be impossible. But in the past few years, theoretical research has suggested that the fictional technology does not necessarily violate any laws of physics—a discovery that has ignited a wave of interest in creating real warp drive technology.

And while there are still many practical challenges to work out—in particular, how to generate and harness the immense energy needed—some physicists say it’s not outside the realm of possibility.

“It’s amazing how science fiction writers imagine things, and we then figure out they can work,” says Alexey Bobrick, an astrophysicist and pioneering warp drive researcher at Applied Physics, a public benefit company that works with governments and the private sector. “It’s really quite beautiful.”
From sci-fi to theoretical physics

There’s a reason physicists like Bobrick are taking warp drive seriously: The concept isn’t actually that far-fetched. Compared with other sci-fi ideas for moving faster-than-light, like wormholes and extradimensional hyperdrives, warp drive is “the easiest to make compatible with known physics,” says physicist and science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder, who regularly shares new warp drive research on her popular YouTube channel.

In science fiction, a warp drive is a propulsion system that creates a bubble of spacetime around a spaceship. That bubble is then accelerated to move faster than the speed of light. Taken at face value, this may sound impossible: After all, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, objects in our universe cannot be accelerated beyond the lightspeed barrier.

But spacetime itself can bend or warp at any speed.

Star Trek science advisor and astrophysicist Erin MacDonald says it’s useful to think of spacetime as a fabric within which objects—from stars to spaceships—are embedded. “If you wrap your ship in the fabric of spacetime and then that fabric goes faster than light, carrying you with it, that's actually not breaking any laws of physics,” says MacDonald.

From nationalgeographic.com

[Grogan]

Eureka! Now all they have to do is figure out how to create, and accelerate a space time bubble, without mashing the contents into subatomic shitpaste, and we'll be joining the Galactic Community in no time! Oh wait...

[mlangdn]

They better figure out the long range sensors first so as not to run into an innocent plant. Maybe that's how the dinos died. A ship coming out of warp ran into earth. Yea I'm talking smack - I have no clue even remotely how this stuff would work.

[Grogan]

I have no clue even remotely how this stuff would work.

If you did, you'd be the only one on Earth that does

You're quite right though, computing a route and decelerating is equally important.

(However, pretending this is all true for a sec... if they can somehow accelerate a warp bubble with a payload within, the laws of physics with regard to momentum and inertia would also not be in effect, relatively, inside that warp bubble, and they could stop the warp bubble as instantly as they could accelerate it)

[mlangdn]

I like the Stargate wormhole idea better. Its in the math somewhere. Maybe the Asgardians will come back to check on us someday.

[Grogan]

I like the theoretical "Warp 10" (Star Trek The Next Generation era pseudoscience) best of all. The absolute limit where you would be in all places at once if you could achieve it

It's a logarithmic scale though, where energy usage approaches infinity the higher you go. Warp 9 is orders of magnitude slower than, say, 9.2, once you get up there. Warp 1 is light speed, Warp 2 is 10x and so on.

I found this, it describes it completely, including the "all places at once" limit. The exception it speaks of was an episode of TNG where a bloviating warp engine expert (Kazinski or something like that) brought an alien assistant, who was the actual source of this buffoon's breakthroughs, able to influence the warp engines and transport them to the edge of the universe, sort of thing. "The Traveller" was what they called him.

warpspeedchart.jpg

[mlangdn]

I think Wesley Crusher became a traveler. Next seen in Star Trek Picard. Need someone now like Katherine on Hidden Figures. She could do the math. One of my favorite movies.

[Zema Bus]

[Grogan]

That's probably right... organic sulfide producing bacteria (or organisms using similar metabolic pathways). Sure it's possible for it to be produced non-biologically but why would dimethyl sulfide form? Hydrogen sulfide sure, but organics are less likely. That's fairly specific on Earth, certain phytoplankton produce a more complex organic sulfur compound, and these bacteria metabolize it into dimethyl sulfide. On the order of like a billion tons of it a year on Earth.

It shows how far away shit is too... e.g. 100 light years. Those bacteria don't have warp technology, so Earth won't be overrun with alien fart gas any time soon