Maybe it's not as fictional as we thought. I'm no scientist but it does seem that a lot of things we take for granted today were once scifi. Read more @ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2014/09/17/close-star-trek-propulsion/
If I remember correctly, the Alcubierre drive was time-lined to be out several hundred to a thousand years from now... And, it requires a lot of power and some experimental physics that we don't know if it's a reality or not. If we could figure out quantum gravity some people say we would have enough knowledge to build space drives with it, but I don't know the details. I personally think that faster than light space flight is possible but it won't happen in this century. Or at least not in this half of the century. I'm expecting energy and biology to advance in this century, but not space flight. I could be wrong, after all they are making a lot of quantum discoveries lately. Maybe they'll find something one of these days.
NASA put out some press releases about a doughnut spaceship that could travel at warp with realistically achievable levels of power. This must have been around for awhile because in Star Wars 7 which was several years ago now the Jedi fighter used a ring to travel in hyperspace with.
The deal with quantum gravity (which so far is just a name, no one has figured out how to quantize gravity) is that you could warp space-time to suit your needs. The Alcubierre drive is kind of similar, like riding a wave. The Alcubierre drive needs negative mass, which is not known to exist. Both theories suffer from a major problem: tidal forces. If you make a gravitational field large enough to warp space-time significantly, you'd be squeezed and stretched. The scientific term is "spaghettified". My personal opinion is that there are other ways around the speed of light. The limit on the speed of light is only valid in inertial frames. For example, there are stars that are currently visible from Earth but won't be in the future, because they are traveling away from us faster than the light will reach us. This is possible because of non-inertial frames.
Dilithium is depicted as an extremely hard crystalline mineral that occurs naturally on some planets. When placed in a high-frequency electromagnetic field, magnetic eddies are induced in its structure which keep charged particles away from the crystal lattice. This prevents it from reacting with antimatter when so energized, because the antimatter particles never actually touch it. Therefore, it is used to contain and regulate the annihilation reaction of matter and antimatter in a starship's warp core, which otherwise would explode from the uncontrolled annihilation reaction. Though low-quality artificial crystals can be grown or replicated, they are limited in the power of the reaction they can regulate without fragmenting, and are therefore largely unsuitable for warp drive applications. Due to the need for natural dilithium crystals for interstellar travel, deposits of this material are, much like real-world equivalents such as oil, a highly contested resource, and as such, dilithium crystals have led to more interstellar conflict than all other reasons combined. Liberals ain't gonna like this part. We finally make a break from fossil fuel and look what happens....Interstellar War.
Lol Like all the replies but the last one was my fav. Anyway barring any unexpected discoveries I doubt we will have warp drives for many hundreds of years. Plain ole matter anti matter drive seems far more doable and less than five hundred years seems plausible seeing how we have already created a few atoms worth of anti matter. Fusion drive may be feasible in a couple hundred years when the torus or magnetic bottle and nozzle doesn't use more energy than is created (all these are rank guesses). What makes me crazy is our fear of atomic power has killed off nuclear rockets that could if we had launched in the early 70's unmanned craft near or at least WELL on their way to the nearest star by now. We have had the technology to produce (un-manned) interstellar space craft with nearly unlimited on board power for heat and running the equipment for decades. In fact Voyager is still transmitting decades into its mission and is just outside our solar system. It uses a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. For our interstellar craft propulsion could been pulse fission type that would generate velocities in up to 10% light speed (according to some estimates). The fastest spacecraft to date is about 157,000 mph. 10% light speed would be far more than one hundred million miles per hour! (too lazy to do the math). Now that is blistering fast! The moon in what? A few min? Mars in a day or three? Any way it so saddens me that we have the technology but lack the will power to achieve our birthright ~the ability to visit the stars.... man I feel our nutless leaders are so freaking dumb...naive... and other words a christian shouldn't be thinking about! reva
Not close at all. We first have to slow down ourselves politically to ever reach Star Trek Propulsion.
Would be pretty cool not to have to take 2+ years to get to and back from Mars.. I'm sure at some point interstellar travel will be much like the airlines are today.
The thing about that 'socialism' is that there is even a larger gap between the 'elite' class and 'commoners'. (those who's lot it is to 'service' the system, and those who's lot it is to benefit from that service. Yes, a lot like socialism).
in capitalism the commoner seem to be servicing the system 40 hours a week running their butts off, in socialism, the same is true but less running your butt off and more security that you wont be homeless and lose all your saving next week if your sick .
Most likely I am one of the few posters around who's spent a great deal of time on a submarine -- for seventy days at a time submerged, having to work in close confines with people whom one does not necessarily like; but also putting the safety of the vessel and crew and the mission itself first. What people seem to miss in regards to Star Trek style existence outside of a planetary confines is that one's personal desires and ideology must take a distinct second place to the vital necessity of adhering to the strictures of group discipline and -- heck -- being where you are supposed to be on time and doing what you are supposed to be doing no matter what. Of course by the time that we get into space on a significant scale of population perhaps one will not need to be disciplined and goal oriented. You never know.
Yeah...capitalism does require a more pro-active citizen. Whereas socialism is fine with in-active citizens. Trouble is, eventually, those in-active citizens will weigh down the system. Enterprize will have to make a stop and unload a few in order to keep up that 'warp drive mode'.
Capitalism got us to the moon before communism or socialism. However, I would rather see cooperation than competition. If we spent the equivalent dollars of both the USA and the USSR I am sure we could send craft to the stars within ten years, at as I said before a significant percentage of light speed. Using the same technology (nuclear pulse) the solar system would be accessible in weeks instead of years or decades. reva
Competition is the driving force behind progress. Why can't socialists get that I wonder? Give two men a shovel each and tell one that he is to dig some holes for the common good, tell the other that he'll get a buck for every hole he digs. Who do suppose will work harder and faster?
You are correct fresh air. Within the confines of an inter-stellar ship the size of what was depicted in Star Trek, entire families were born, lived, worked and died on board. Jobs were with Star Fleet and what was the compensation? There were no private entities on board selling flowers an apples on the corner of B Deck and Shuttle Bay Row. What did the family members do to pass the time, large amounts of time that is. If man is to travel through the universe at will, even speed of light travel is at snail speed compared to the depths of the universe. Socialism will have to be the answer to keeping everything running smoothly.
Eh ... if we think that on the Enterprise Captain Kirk and his crew used a personal communicators which looked really poor and antiquate in comparison with a smartphone, we can say that if we have surpassed them in communication tech, we can expect we will surpass them also about propulsion. By the way: is there someone who can explain me why on a space ship of the 23rd century there are no seat belts???
The WARP system has been discussed many times and it's clear that it's a theoretical "solution" only if we imagine we will be able to create portable black holes or even toroidal masses of exotic matter with negative energy surrounding a spacecraft [! nothing more simple than this!]. So, no, or in the next future a new Einstein will pop up to explain to us how to do that ... or we will go on exploring our solar system with our very slow chemical rockets ...
Yeah the silicon chip which as we know can have thousands of transistors on each chip which solved size problem and allowed the cell phone to be born. Why no seat belt ? Well my fellow Trekkies I think the "inertial dampeners" might sub for seat belts. If not for those everything alive would explode into red mist as the enterprise goes from a few mph to aupersec (au per second) then warp. ...so I suppose the Inertial dampeners work as seat belts too? reva
Absolutely, with a quantum system of artificial gravity control ... but it didn't work properly [well, it won't ...]: during some actions in Star Trek series we can see Kirk and his crews being tossed around ...
Why do the same trolls always have to interject their ignorant political rants into threads like this?
Star Trek ships were able to do what they did because the writers of the show just made up fictional anti matter and dilithium crystals to account for the fuel required to warp space like that. We believe that warping space the way they did might actually be possible we just don't know how to do it. I believe it was stated that the Alcubierre drive would require a fuel system equal to the mass of the entire Sun or something. Then I believe they were able to cut it down to the size of Jupiter. Then they were able to cut it down to the size of a small satellite but that required some fictional matter that didn't exist. So yeah as of right now we could in theory build things that can go close to the speed of light or possibly even warp space. But without some fictional matter to help power it we are stuck needing a fuel tank big enough to cram something the size of the Sun or Jupiter in it. The the question is where the hell do we find that much fuel and energy it's not like we can throw a rope around the Sun and drag it behind our Solar System sized space ship to use it for power. In order for Star Trek to be real then we either have to discover some sort of anti matter to power the spaceships like they did or figure out how to create wormholes in space. Both would require matter that currently does not exist. Sadly I don't think either will happen. I believe our real life Star Trek will involve generation ships that we send out to other star systems which is nowhere near as cool or exciting as battling the Borg in Sector 001.
What I would like to know is in what possible universe would pockets become obsolete? Seriously, either they must beam any bauble they find interesting into some subspace locker or they just disintegrate everything with their phasers.
