Have you
ever seen Star Trek? The show with the funny looking spacecraft. Well, apart
from looking funny they can do something special. They can go faster than the
speed of light. To accomplish this amazing feat, they utilize a device called a
warp drive. It gets its name from the fact that it warps space around the ship
thus allowing it to move faster than light without actually violating the laws
of physics. But that is all science fiction, right? Pure fantasy?
Maybe not.
The
following article is about just that.
Heb je ooit Star Trek gezien? De televisieserie met die vreemd uitziende
ruimteschepen. Nou, behalve dat ze er vreemd uizien kunnen ze ook iets
speciaals. Ze gaan sneller dan het licht. Om dit voor elkaar te krijgen
gebruiken ze een zogenaamde Warp Drive. Dit apperaat heet zo omdat het
letterlijk de ruimte rond het schip buigt om sneller dan het licht te kunnen
gaan zonder de natuurwetten te breken. Maar dat is toch allemaal
sciencefiction? Pure fantasie?
Misschien niet.
Het Volgende artikel gaat juist daarover.
NASA working on faster-than-light drive capable of WARP TEN
May not even need 17,000
megaton superbomb for power
A top NASA boffin has outlined
ongoing lab experiments at the space agency aimed at first steps towards the
building of a warp-drive spacecraft theoretically capable of travelling at 10
times the speed of light.
The latest developments at the
"Eagleworks" super-advanced space drive lab at NASA's Johnson Space
Center were outlined by NASA physicist Harold White at a conference on Friday.
The Eagleworks lab was set up at the end of last year to look into such
concepts as the Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster and also so-called "warp
drives" along the lines proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in
the 1990s.
Quantum thrusters are fiendish
kit indeed, but would be mainly of use for explorations within our own solar
system. As most Reg readers are well aware, however, this is a rather
limited canvas for humanity to work on for eternity: especially as it seems
likely that there may be some rather more hospitable alien worlds to be found
orbiting other suns.
The big snag with worlds
orbiting other suns is of course that they are utterly, ridiculously far away
and according to the laws of physics nothing can travel faster than the speed
of light: meaning that journeys even to a few of the nearest stars would take
years at the absolute minimum, and in general interstellar voyages would simply
not be on human timescales.
Thus much classic
scientifiction has assumed the development of warp drive, hyperdrive, stargates
etc - some means of getting to other stars faster than light could.
Alcubierre's calculations over a decade ago appeared to show that such a thing
was at least theoretically feasible: using a ring of exotic matter, a bubble of
unwarped, flat space with a starship in it would be transported through normal
space at effective speeds perhaps 10 times lightspeed by warping the space
around it. Nothing would actually travel through any space faster than light,
and the laws of physics would be unviolated.
Unfortunately, subsequent
investigation appeared to show that while the warp drive might work it would be
unfeasibly power hungry: it would require a minimum amount of energy equivalent
to completely annihilating the mass of the planet Jupiter.
However White and his NASA
Eagleworks colleagues say that's not necessarily so: it's all down to the shape
of the ring. An improved doughnut design, as opposed to a flat ring, would get
the requirement down to something more like just annihilating the Voyager One
probe craft.
Voyager masses in the region
of 800kg, so by our calculations one would still need a lump of antimatter (or
other reasonably compact super power source) which - if it were mishandled -
would explode with a force of some 17,000 megatons, equivalent to several
global nuclear wars all in one (or 600-odd Tunguska meteor strikes etc). This
would inconveniently take humanity's current atom labs billions of years to
make, and there would be other practical issues (see our previous
antimatter-bomb analysis here, and then there'd be the exoto-doughnut to fabricate etc).
But White's not done yet, we
learn courtesy of SPACE.com, reporting from the 100 Year Starship conference
last week. The NASA brainbox calculates that cunningly oscillating the warped
region around the spacecraft could cut power requirements by another big
margin.
"The findings I presented
today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further
investigation," White told
SPACE.com. "The additional energy
reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting
conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab."
It's all pretty crazy stuff:
but as various conference attendees correctly pointed out, if human beings are
ever going to have anything much to do with the universe around us - as opposed
to remaining confined almost totally to our own planet or at best the immediate
neighbourhood around our tiny, insignificant pinprick home star - crazy stuff
will be essential.
If you stick strictly to
regular physics, it's very difficult to think of practical star travel methods
at all. Perhaps the most powerful technology one can imagine under regular
physics is fusion power: but fusion rockets applied to interstellar voyages are
much like today's chemical rockets applied to orbital launch. They are so hard
up against their practical limits that you have to use stages and throw most of
your spacecraft away in order to reach your destination, even to get to nearby
stars over multidecade time spans.
Just as we will need something
better than chemical rockets to explore the solar system, realistically we will
need something faster than light to explore beyond it*. We here on The Reg
space desk will be wishing more power to White and his colleagues' mental
elbows, even as we'd doubt that they'll get very far any time soon. ®
Bootnotes
Obviously "Warp Ten"
- generally thought to mean 10 times light speed - is still really a bit slow.
At Warp Ten a ship would still take several months to reach nearby systems like
Alpha Centauri or Barnard's Star, and years for anything further off.
*Though some science fiction
makes use of the fact that a star ship crew going at close to light speed would
personally experience a much shorter journey time than the decades or centuries
that would pass in the universe outside the ship.
Personal footnote
The article refers to ''Warp ten'' as being ten times the speed of light. This is incorrect. In Star Trek lore, the only series to use Warp as a unit of speed, ''Warp ten'' would be infinite speed. An object traveling at warp 10 would theoretically occupy all points in the universe simultaneously. As you get closer to warp 10 the power requirements rise exponentially, until warp 10, at which point you would require an infinite amount of power. In Star Trek lore 10 times the speed of light would be around
warp 2, not warp 10.
