Extrasolar exploration: only a fantasy?

[nyrath]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

What Relativity describes, it describes quite accurately. Whether it describes all aspects of reality, is another question. <shrug> For example, Newton hypothesized light to be a particle. More proved it to be a wave via the initial 2 slit interference test around 1800. Quantum theory has proven that reality (as best as we can currently measure) to be far more subtle than either viewpoint.

Question, are there subtleties to reality that Relativity that haven't taken into account? I merely mentioned a piece of mathematics inherent in the logic chain. It had been a dead letter for over a hundred years, because there was no way to alter the quantities in question. That has changed in the last 10 years (or so).

I merely point out an avenue of research that fits the mathematics and might have an interesting result, to a S/F writer.

(Finally, it allow you to have all three, assuming you define FTL as faster than C, the speed of light in an unmodified vacuum. It doesn't allow you to exceed the speed of light in the area of lower e0mu0, it would just speed up light in that region.
Riddle me this, if C = 1/ sq root (e0 * mu0), which is a boundary definition for Maxwell's equations, why can't you mathematically substitute 1 / sq root (e0 * mu0) for C in all relativity equations?)

As a side note, be aware that my site requires Javascript to make the menu work. The link you read is page 33 of 64.

Yes, subtleties might avenue of research that fits the mathematics and might have an interesting result, to a S/F writer. But as I point out, there is a better than 50% chance that pursuing that avenue of research will make matters worse with respect to the desires of an S/F writer.

And riddle me this, if one can come to a marvelous result by simply mathematically substituting 1 / sq root (e0 * mu0) for C in all relativity equations, why have you not done so, published your results, and won the Nobel prize for physics? If it was anything so simple, some theoretician would have tried it decades ago.

This is still all beside the point that any FTL drive is the same thing as a time machine, and would thus destroy causality (short of Parallel Universes, Consistency Protection, Restricted Space-Time Areas, Special Frames, or some related way of straining at the gnat but swallowing the camel)

It still all boils down to the S/F writer whining "That meany Einstein and his relativity won't let me have my FTL drive!"

[nyrath]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

This is a great link. I just read the whole thing.

Why, thank you!

Originally Posted by ardeegee

Reminded me of a rant I made about how movies reflect horribly poor science eduction on the part of everyone involved in making the movie. This particular rant was in reference to the (at the time unreleased) movie 2012-- but the same could apply to pretty much everything that comes out of Hollywood. I had to search it down (originally posted at www.cgsociety.org, a site for computer graphics artists and wannabes-- I'm strictly a wannabe):

"Let's pick an analogy to this. Say you make a WWII movie. Nobody will (or should) complain that there were no actual soldiers central to the plot of the movie going by those names in those specific battles-- it is perfectly okay to invent the characters for your setting. But if you have all of the American soldiers fighting using Uzis with laser sights, you better have a damn good, plot centric, explained reason why those soldiers are using Uzis with laser sights and it not simply be because you didn't know that Uzis and laser sights hadn't been invented in WWII.

What 2012 is doing is the equivalent of giving those soldiers Uzis with laser sights and mounting them on 20-foot tall cyborg battle-elephants from which they fight the Nazi Flying Death Monkeys and their Telekenetic Venusian Bloodsnail allies. And when people complain that, in WWII, soldiers did not use Uzis with laser sights, ride cyborg battle-elephants, and fight Nazi Flying Death Monkeys and Telekenetic Venusian Bloodsnails, others (after being shocked to find out that none of that is true because of their failed basic educations) tell you "it is just a movie maaaaaaan. Turn off your brain and enjoy it.""

Eloquently written! I love it.

[fjtorres]

Going back to the OP, there *is* an alternative that doesn't get much attention. Not as "sexy" I suppose...

Originally Posted by MartinParish

Many sci-fi authors like Heinlein have assumed that faster-than-light travel and/or extrasolar exploration would become possible in the future, and that humanity will colonize worlds beyond the solar system. They've been wrong on that prediction so far, of course, but will they eventually be proven right? I wouldn't bet on it. Based on our current understanding of physics, faster-than-light travel is extremely impractical and it's unlikely it will ever become possible, simply because the energy required to warp space time would be too great.

Extrasolar exploration is *NOT* just about FTL.
Or even human travel.
First of all, we're already doing extrasolar exploration; remote viewing is a form of exploration and we have probes headed out of the system.

Second, STL probes are a likely possibility this century. STL travel (hybernation/generation ships/clone growers) remains a possibility for future generations to engineer.

My primary objection remains to the word NEVER.
"Unlikely" I have no issue with.
(I'm a skeptic on UFOs, too.)

One thing I'm keeping an eye out for is the ongoing battle in Physics between the reductionists and the geometers and the current battlelines between the standard model (decried as "curve-fitting") and the infinite variations of string- and m-theory (decried as "mathematical pipe dreams") and I wonder what if they're *both* right.

We know a bit about how the universe works.
We don't know everything.
And lately we're running into stuff that is harder and harder to accomodate (and not just quantum weirdness like the shrinking Proton thing, which may or not be real) and odds are that the more we learn the more weirdness we'll find at the fringes. The quantum realms are very very weird. Holographic reality even more so. We need to know more before passing judgment.

Never is a long time.
Just because today we're bottled up doesn't mean we'll always be bottled up.
Never to me means "why bother?".

I prefer to see us keep plugging away, looking for loopholes, new models, new approaches to the tech. Don't care if it takes centuries or millenia; the reward is in trying and learning and learning is a journey unto itself.
Negative answers have value, too.

To me the only acceptable answer to whether star travel is possible is: "we don't know how."

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by nyrath

As a side note, be aware that my site requires Javascript to make the menu work. The link you read is page 33 of 64.

Yes, subtleties might avenue of research that fits the mathematics and might have an interesting result, to a S/F writer. But as I point out, there is a better than 50% chance that pursuing that avenue of research will make matters worse with respect to the desires of an S/F writer.

And riddle me this, if one can come to a marvelous result by simply mathematically substituting 1 / sq root (e0 * mu0) for C in all relativity equations, why have you not done so, published your results, and won the Nobel prize for physics? If it was anything so simple, some theoretician would have tried it decades ago.

This is still all beside the point that any FTL drive is the same thing as a time machine, and would thus destroy causality (short of Parallel Universes, Consistency Protection, Restricted Space-Time Areas, Special Frames, or some related way of straining at the gnat but swallowing the camel)

It still all boils down to the S/F writer whining "That meany Einstein and his relativity won't let me have my FTL drive!"

When I have a few spare million to have the experimental research done, I'll do it.

Question, If you were in charge of a grant pool, would you fund the research? Not by me, but by a young post-doc physicist starting out? Or would you automatically write it off as impossible.

There are holes in various part of our understanding of physics. I was at a Physics colloqia back in the nineties. The physicist's total talk was on the fact that the standard model, which explains subatomic particles so well, was off in calculating the value of zero vacuum energy, but nobody seemed to care because it was so good at modeling subatomic particles. It was only off on the zero vacuum energy by a order of magnitude of 58... The physicist giving the Colloqia talk was named John Wheeler...

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

My primary objection remains to the word NEVER.
"Unlikely" I have no issue with.

That's a good point. There's always the possibility that there are aspects of nature of which we are currently unaware, and loopholes to nature's laws we haven't discovered. That being said, some things do appear highly unlikely.

Originally Posted by fjtorres

We know a bit about how the universe works.
We don't know everything.
And lately we're running into stuff that is harder and harder to accomodate ...

Check out the excerpt from Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible that I posted today in the "Noteable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines" thread. I think you'll enjoy it, even if you don't agree with the author's conclusions.

[Adoby]

I suspect that we will visit remote stars long before FTL travel. But not using corporal travel. Transfer of information is not only possible at lightspeed, we routinely use it already. I think it is more efficient to encode our consious and send it to do some exploration, and back again, than to travel with our whole body.

When I say "encode our consious" I mean some sort of AI that can transfer memories to/from us. That is "all" it takes.

So we'll send some small intelligent probes at a fraction of the lightspeed to distant stars, and when the time comes download the experience. Or we could even send along information about how to rebuild a whole bio-sphere, with enough energy and machinery to get it started.

Who knows, that may be how life here started? I wonder when the download starts ...

[PKFFW]

Originally Posted by nyrath

The old saying is "Causality, Relativity, FTL travel: chose any two." You cannot have all three.

You can if there is no such thing as time.

Joking aside, and I realise this thread is about science and not philosophy/religion but.....

Many spiritual traditions claim there is no past, present and future and instead there is only now. So if there is only now, FTL doesn't violate anything.

It's a nice thought from a S/F writers point of view and a nice way around the whole issue of whether or not FTL could ever happen.

For the record I would put myself in the "We don't know everything and there may be a loop hole" camp. However, I realise that is pretty unlikely based on our current understanding.

Cheers,
PKFFW

[nyrath]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Going back to the OP, there *is* an alternative that doesn't get much attention. Not as "sexy" I suppose...

Extrasolar exploration is *NOT* just about FTL.
Or even human travel.
First of all, we're already doing extrasolar exploration; remote viewing is a form of exploration and we have probes headed out of the system.

Second, STL probes are a likely possibility this century. STL travel (hybernation/generation ships/clone growers) remains a possibility for future generations to engineer.

My primary objection remains to the word NEVER.

Agreed. Never say "never", say "highly unlikely" instead.

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3aj.html
As Gordon Woodcock put it, the three methods of travelling to other stars are "go slow", "go fast", and "go tricky." That is,

"Go Slow": travel at low percentages of lightspeed, and somehow deal with the fact that human beings have lifespans of around a hundred years while slow star travel can take thousands of years. There are several methods.

"Go Fast": travel at high percentages of lightspeed. Einstein's time dilation will solve the lifespan problem. The trouble now is that such speeds require absurdly high (dare I say "astronomical?") amounts of energy. They though they had the solution with the infamous "Bussard Ramjet", until the flaws showed up.

"Go Tricky": travel faster than light. Then the causality problem rises up and bites you on the fundament.