Science!: Spider-Man, Tut and Light Speed

[HuntrRose]

With this evidence I think we can safely table the motion of near light speed travel. Hey, at least we still have the warp drive. Or... maybe not.

No, that's why starships have magnetic shielding. You'd have to repel the odd meteor as well. Though FTL travel is the way to go anyway.

The problem with faster than light speeds is avoiding obstacles. By the time you see them, you have already passed them.

On a more serious note though, science has proved itself to make the impossible possible time and time again, so FTL will, as long as we don't blow ourselves up first, probably be available to humanity at some point in the future. Though I have some SERIOUS doubts it will happen in my lifetime.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

I don't think I'll play Sci Fi games the same way again.

 

[wtrmute]

In page 2, that would be TERAelectron-volts, not TETRAelectron-volts.

And, just for fun, 7 TeV (Teraelectron-volts) are equivalent to 1.21 microjoules. It sounds little, but that is for just one proton. Since there's two in every cubic centimetre (2 million per cubic metre) and you're travelling just about 300 000 metres every second, that means that a ship with a cross-section of 3.5 square metres (a circle with just a bit over two metres or 6'8") will be sweeping 2.1*10^15 (two point one quatrillion in the US, two point one thousand billion in the UK) protons, for a total energy of 2.4 Gigajoules hitting the ship every second (2.4 Gigawatts power). That's enough power to send McFly back to 1985 twice, or the output of two decent-sized nuclear plants.

Most spaceships will have a cross-section considerably larger than those 3.5 square metres I quoted, too, so it's pretty bad. And we're just talking about hydrogen here; there's also heavier stuff out there, like silicate dust or water ice, which would pack a proportionally bigger punch. We're better off hoping for some breakthrough in metric engineering that will allow us to use an Alcubierre drive or something akin to it...

 

[Lauren Admire]

When antiparticles and particles exist in equal amounts, they will annihilate one another, leaving us with a whole lot of nothing, or, in physicist's terms, a whole lot of antimatter

Hey, apparently I have had this account for a while but this is my first post Mostly because that quote annoyed me xD. Antimatter does not equal nothingness. When matter and antimatter annihilate they release energy in the form of photons and leave nothing behind. That's kinda the point.

Also just to make sure people know: local FTL travel is impossible, no matter what. Read up on relativity. Due to length contraction and time dilation it would be possible to reach distant galaxies in a short space of time relative to you but this would require HUGE amounts of energy. Also I hope you don't mind when you come back to Earth and all your family and friends have been dead for years . Of course we don't know about wormholes and bending spacetime and stuff which could theoretically allow us to teleport around the place but that's mostly speculation and guesswork at the moment. Sorry to bore you all with my first post but I'm kind of a physicsy guy so that little mistake in the article made me want to post. Also, just to clarify: don't talk about local FTL travel because it just is not possible and it would take a MASSIVE re working of everything we think we know about the universe if it were.

Thanks for pointing that out - I'll fix the article. Particle physics tends to blow my mind. I had a feeling matter + antimatter = nothing was too simple an equation...

I'm glad you posted!

 

[Tears of Blood]

Are you a teenage girl, or did you just word your reply like one would to be ironic?

I was saying that I thought you were wrong without being insulting.

There's no reason we cannot do both. Just because the human race likes to kill each other doesn't mean that we shouldn't keep science from advancing in important and meaningful ways.

Plus, who knows whether or not we'll -ever- figure that one out. I mean, we're making some progress, but we've still got a ways to go.

 

[Tears of Blood]

*Snap*

The tech would be useful even if we couldn't live peacefully together. o_o We may never be able to live peacefully together, so we must do something. Saying "Oh, we shouldn't investigate this sort of technology" just limits us unnecessarily. It'd be the same thing as if we said "Oh, we can't live together peacefully, so we shouldn't have made the Internet." >>; We're an entire race, we can work on more than one thing at a time. Science probably isn't the answer to world peace. Let the people who are good at world peace handle it.

But, maybe science is the answer. Perhaps, similar to what happens in Mass Effect, people will begin to come together out of necessity once we are able to reach other planets. There will always be conflict and fighting, we should not aspire to it, but we shouldn't expect it to ever go away either.

EDIT: Also, I see got suspended. >_>; You should probably consider being less of a jerk to other people. Y'know. This is The Escapist not Aeris Lives or 4Chan.

 

[Grahav]

Interesting as ever! Keep us smart, Lauren

 

[Sporky111]

Don't ever table the idea of lightspeed travel. As long as we have generations of scientists inspired by sci-fi we're going to keep trying, damn it! It doesn't matter if it's warp speed, Mass Effect drives, or Slipspace; it's going to happen.