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Is faster than light travel possible, do you think?
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Poll Result
  Is travel faster than light speed possible?  
 
No
20%
 20%  [ 6 ]
Yes, nothing is impossible
17%
 17%  [ 5 ]
Yes, cause I think we'd know if all these UFOs in the sightings came from around here
3%
 3%  [ 1 ]
Yes, we just don't know how to do it yet
48%
 48%  [ 14 ]
Yes, its merely a case of we know how to do it, but the government is holding it from us
3%
 3%  [ 1 ]
Yes, we have the technology now but we just don't know we could use it for this
6%
 6%  [ 2 ]
 
  Total Votes : 29  

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Sorrow



Joined: 16 Jan 2004
Posts: 146
Location: Australia



PostPosted: Fri Aug 05, 2005 3:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mathematically, like many of the particles mentioned in String Theory.

thats probly the funniest thing i have heard today, all i can do to stop myself laughting is write this message.

The seccond half of the things name should tell everyone everthing they need to know.
It is a Theory and therefore not mathamatecly proven, and enstien spent alot of time saying: The physiscs started driving the maths instead of the maths driving the physics, so alot of modern day physics are driven purly by themselves and have no true mathamatical grounds.

meh.
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Rup



Joined: 19 May 2003
Posts: 363
Location: London, UK



PostPosted: Fri Aug 05, 2005 11:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sorrow wrote:
The seccond half of the things name should tell everyone everthing they need to know.
It is a Theory and therefore not mathamatecly proven,

Well, OK, but it's not disproven either - and if it weren't mathematically consistent then it'd be easy to disprove :-p And formally proving something can be really very difficult. Something isn't a useless model for consideration or research just because it hasn't been formally proven - after all, use and study might show you things that would help prove or disprove it.

Wikipedia says string theory has driven advances in mathematics so there must be something pretty funky in there.
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Kinakin



Joined: 07 Aug 2005
Posts: 3



PostPosted: Sun Aug 07, 2005 3:59 pm    Post subject: Your approaching it wrong Reply with quote

The question you should ask yourself is not not if but how.
In space traveling at light speed means if you collide with a grain of dust you will die !

In space an orbiting pice of paint can destroy a space station.

Even if interstellar space travel trough faster then light travel was available today. We do not have any kind of shield tech to make it viable.
The idea of energy shields are old yet the real life tech on it's barely being discussed. no working hypotosis even deals with the subject.

and until shield tech becomes available interstellar travel trough faster then light travel is impossible. Its like playing russian rulett with a full chamber hoping for a missfire.
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Fost
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Pod Team


Joined: 14 Oct 2002
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 07, 2005 5:35 pm    Post subject: Re: Your approaching it wrong Reply with quote

Kinakin wrote:
In space traveling at light speed means if you collide with a grain of dust you will die !

I forget which series of scifi books it was (probably 'Bio of a Space Tyrant'), but in it they developed a way of converting matter into light. Basically you sat in a giant machine that converted you into a laser beam, then at the other end you wer converted back by another machine. The two had to line up perfectly and take into account time shifts and passing bodies. The front of the ship that you sat in was an enormous disc of lead - so when it encountered space dust, hopefully it vapourised it instantly.
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Kinakin



Joined: 07 Aug 2005
Posts: 3



PostPosted: Sun Aug 07, 2005 8:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

that probes the question of our soul. Are we just a bunch of molecules? will beaming ( star trek) and what you mentioned really be possible?
Wont it be that al it does is not transfer the molecules that are you but manipulate particles elsewhere and make a mirror image of you? and thereby really killing the origional?
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ragnarok



Joined: 05 Jun 2003
Posts: 34
Location: Madison Heights, MI



PostPosted: Sun Aug 07, 2005 11:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I want to say yes, just because that would make things more interesting. but maybe not.

as I am a lazy *******, I will be giving all information purely from memory. as such, I begin.

I read an article in discover? a few years back where some guy proposed that the speed of light was fractionally higher in the beginning of the universe and has been slowing ever so slightly since then. I forget why exactly, but the slight difference in speed helped make some early universe math work better. He was not adamant that this happened, but simply developed the math for the possibility.

while tacyons have not yet been detected, there is also no proof that they are immune from interactions with normal matter. there is no proof of anything, and any theorys about this are purely conjecture.

and neutrinos definitely interact with matter, it's just a rare event.

also, would any faster then light system be a time travel device as well? escaping from direct causality of the speed of light limit we're normally in seems like it would double as a time machine type thing. I read a more complete description of this idea in a charles stross novel.

Summery: Maybe.
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Poo Bear
Pod Team
Pod Team


Joined: 14 Oct 2002
Posts: 4121
Location: Sheffield, UK



PostPosted: Sun Aug 07, 2005 11:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Alastair Reynolds wrote a great series of scifi books, the first being Revelation Space:

http://www.sfreviews.com/docs/Alastair%20Reynolds_2000_Revelation%20Space.htm

Amongst a ton of other cool stuff he looks at just the issue you mention, take computers many orders of magnitude more powerful than now and add a much deeper understanding of the mechanics of brains, physics and human biology. The result is the capability to scan a human brain and build a perfect computer simulation of it. Why wouldn't that work in reality one day? You might not get a person out the other end but it would be interesting to see what you did get. In the books you can have a light "trawl" performed which doesn't hurt and the result is called a "beta" which is definitely not concious. In the stories people use them to attend important meetings or visit hostile locations they cannot get to in person, later the beta's memories can be re-integrated so you can "feel" what happened. To make a proper copy, an "alpha" requires a deep trawl that does indeed kill the human. In the book this is done only once in secret with 80 volunteers and causes an outcry when people find out.
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Fost
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Pod Team


Joined: 14 Oct 2002
Posts: 3734



PostPosted: Sun Aug 07, 2005 11:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Kinakin wrote:
Wont it be that al it does is not transfer the molecules that are you but manipulate particles elsewhere and make a mirror image of you? and thereby really killing the origional?


Ha, you just gave me a flashback to Tamara Knight- the story included with spectrum computer magazine 'Crash' in the 80's.

In the story, Tamara works as a salesperson for the Mcdonalds teleporter corporation, who:

'encode you digitally, reassemble a copy of you at your destination, drop your original through the floor of the booth, and make it into something called Hamburgers'

Actually, you can read the whole thing at crashonline:

http://www.crashonline.org.uk/36/tknight1.htm
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OvermindDL1



Joined: 29 Mar 2004
Posts: 138



PostPosted: Mon Aug 08, 2005 7:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

There was an episode of "The Outer Limits" on recently. An alien race had contacted earth some years beforehand. There was a colony on the moon for the purpose of transporting humans to another planet, set up by this alien race. They did not trust humans with the technology, due to the way it worked. What it did was that a person would get in it, get covered in this goop stuff that went over the bodies, putting them in a stasis while they were scanned (the body had to be perfectly still, no breathing, no brain activity, nothing), scanning took about two seconds. Once scanned, they would transmit the scan to another station where the body would be built back up exactly as it was at the other station. This posed a problem, there were then two copies of a person, so then a human's job was to push a button that destroyed the previous body.

That kind of transportation I could see occuring, Star Trek's is a little more... odd. Theoretically they could create as many people as they wanted just by 'transporting' multiple copies, but they don't, and no race does...
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ragnarok



Joined: 05 Jun 2003
Posts: 34
Location: Madison Heights, MI



PostPosted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 4:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

there was the next generation episode where a transporter malfunction caused a duplicate riker to be made, and they found him on a planet decades later.
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mAIOR



Joined: 25 Sep 2005
Posts: 2
Location: Portugal



PostPosted: Sun Sep 25, 2005 11:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I will make my first post here.
It is not possible to travel faster than light. Even in String or Super string theories you cannot travel faster than light. The reason why you can't do it is because you'd achieve infinite mass and then turn into energy. you wouldn't create a black hole (you'd need to contract a lot to do so and you'd more likely expand because of lorenz transformations that is) you'd simply transform in some alpha-charged photons and that'd be the end of it. The shielding technology would do you no good.at speed of light a grain of sand would have more energy than a 120 Mega ton hydrogen bomb.
The variation of the speed of light is a constant. It's variation is closing to 2.998something X 10^8 m/s and will stick to it it's mathematicaly prooved.
the case of light being slowed and you eing able to be faser than light is also wrong. If you walked into that gas you'd be slowed down as well relativity would prevail. There are some much more plausible theories in physics for deep interstellar travel than to pass the speed of light. Take wormholes (dimensional doors. It's much more plausible since 9 dimensions are prooved to exist) or even some high energy places where the speed of light is higher than in our place. that'd be more plausible cause if that happened, than you could crete that atmosphere and make light "highways"...
Hope my post was enlightning to you.


Cheers...
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icarus
Troll
Troll


Joined: 01 Mar 2004

Location: Olympia Washington



PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2005 10:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

but we can slow down the speed of light and then walk faster than it


but that doesn't solve the problem

maybe the trick is not going faster than light but folding space
or maybe space is already folded and we can use wormholes

or perhaps we don't need to go faster than light
just get to relativistic speeds and time slows down so you can get to the next star in a few years (while everyone back on earth gets old and grey)

or maybe just use a dimension drive
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mAIOR



Joined: 25 Sep 2005
Posts: 2
Location: Portugal



PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2005 9:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you slow down light then you'll be slowed down yourself. that doesn't solve the problem. As I said there are 9 dimensions mathematicaly proved so, what in 3dimensions is lightyears away, in fourth or upper dimensions can be at the same place or much nearer... and, you have no problems about coliding with objects and such because you wont cross normal matter.



Cheers...
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Weeble
Starscape Jedi
Starscape Jedi


Joined: 25 Apr 2003
Posts: 1143
Location: Glasgow, Scotland



PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2005 9:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You can't really mathematically prove anything about the universe. Empirical testing is the only way to prove anything about reality. I think we have a long way to go before we can prove the truth of any particular string theory variant.

Also, the theories based on large numbers of extra dimensions all, to my knowledge, suggest that the extra ones are "rolled up", meaning that you can only move through them by nanoscopic (or smaller) distances before finding yourself back where you started.
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Konedima
Grammar Police
Grammar Police


Joined: 25 Oct 2003
Posts: 1068
Location: Sydney, Land of Censorship



PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2005 11:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i love scientific arguing, but remember people, scientists can speed up light Smile at least according to a slashdot story from a few weeks ago

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/20/1440228
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