[PublicAnimalNo9]

What if UFOs landed and Mexicans came out? That would be funny, alien aliens.

Personally, I just don't see any reason why anyone would be coming here. We're in a backwater of the galaxy so if anyone did find us, it was either purely by accident or they were the ones that planted life here in the first place.
They also wouldn't really need our resources as there's no shortage of planets and moons and asteroids with shit-loads of the stuff.

I still think the money can be better spent on our own planet. 75% of our world is water and we've only explored about 5% of that. In other words, we've barely explored our own world yet.
Many of the same technologies used for space exploration would apply as well so it's not like some eggheads(and I use that term with the utmost respect) would be getting screwed for jobs.

By the way, if they need Jupiter type mass, I can clue 'em in on where my ex-wife lives

One last thing though, does relativity still come into play here? I mean it's well and good to be able to travel to Alphi Centauri in a couple of weeks, but wouldn't it essentially be a one-way trip? I guess what I'm asking is, will time pass at the same rate on that ship as it does for us on Earth?

[1Peg]

DonnaWho DonnaWho:

I really really hope I get to live long enough to see lots of cool spacey star trekish stuff happen!

Me too!

[jambo101]

Heres 10 things that came true..

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/10-star-trek-technologies1.htm

[saturn_656]

PublicAnimalNo9 PublicAnimalNo9:

One last thing though, does relativity still come into play here? I mean it's well and good to be able to travel to Alphi Centauri in a couple of weeks, but wouldn't it essentially be a one-way trip? I guess what I'm asking is, will time pass at the same rate on that ship as it does for us on Earth?

AFAIK time dialation doesn't occur with an Alcubierre drive. There is no reason for it to be a one way trip.

[Canadian_Mind]

saturn_656 saturn_656:

PublicAnimalNo9 PublicAnimalNo9:

One last thing though, does relativity still come into play here? I mean it's well and good to be able to travel to Alphi Centauri in a couple of weeks, but wouldn't it essentially be a one-way trip? I guess what I'm asking is, will time pass at the same rate on that ship as it does for us on Earth?

AFAIK time dialation doesn't occur with an Alcubierre drive. There is no reason for it to be a one way trip.

With the Alcubierre drive, are you theoretically not moving at all inside the bubble? Because if that's the case, wouldn't time in the universe, where everything is in motion, pass by slower?

[BartSimpson]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

And *that* is why funding a space program, and NASA in general, is not a waste of money.

Exactly.

[Zipperfish]

$1:

He points out that Casimir cavities, physical forces that arise from a quantized field, may represent a viable approach.

Zero point energy!

[Zipperfish]

Canadian_Mind Canadian_Mind:

saturn_656 saturn_656:

PublicAnimalNo9 PublicAnimalNo9:

One last thing though, does relativity still come into play here? I mean it's well and good to be able to travel to Alphi Centauri in a couple of weeks, but wouldn't it essentially be a one-way trip? I guess what I'm asking is, will time pass at the same rate on that ship as it does for us on Earth?

AFAIK time dialation doesn't occur with an Alcubierre drive. There is no reason for it to be a one way trip.

With the Alcubierre drive, are you theoretically not moving at all inside the bubble? Because if that's the case, wouldn't time in the universe, where everything is in motion, pass by slower?

You'd be in freefalll inside the bubble. I don't think there'd be any time dilation efffects. If it took a week to get to Alpha Centauri (for a person on the spaceship) then it would take a week in the time frames of observers on Earth and Alpha Centauri. I think.

[DrCaleb]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

Canadian_Mind Canadian_Mind:

saturn_656 saturn_656:

AFAIK time dialation doesn't occur with an Alcubierre drive. There is no reason for it to be a one way trip.

With the Alcubierre drive, are you theoretically not moving at all inside the bubble? Because if that's the case, wouldn't time in the universe, where everything is in motion, pass by slower?

You'd be in freefalll inside the bubble. I don't think there'd be any time dilation efffects. If it took a week to get to Alpha Centauri (for a person on the spaceship) then it would take a week in the time frames of observers on Earth and Alpha Centauri. I think.

I believe you are correct. That's why Einstien called it 'Space Time', because the two aren't separable. Space does expand faster then the speed of light, and it's not against General or Special Relativity because it's not mass that is exceeding the speed of light. It's space, which is allowed.

Time dialtion only occurs to a mass as it approaches the speed of light, not to space itself. Think about the Universe, at the point of the big bang, all matter was very close. Now we peer out into the Universe and see backwards in time 13.4 Billion years.

[Thanos]

Sounds like all the options are completely awful. Travel even a fraction of light speed and you end up getting crushed by the acceleration against a bulkhead into a pile of goo no more than a nanometer thick. Mess around with these warp bubbles and you probably come out of it at the end with your guts turned inside out like Dr. Manhattan just did a number on you. All this time dilation stuff means that a year passes for you but a thousand passes back home, and you get to come back to a home planet that's been entirely converted to Al Qaeda cavemanism, choked to death on it's own garbage, or finally nuked itself into a lifeless cinder. It's all starting to make the demons from Event Horizon look pleasant by comparison.

[Zipperfish]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

I believe you are correct. That's why Einstien called it 'Space Time', because the two aren't separable. Space does expand faster then the speed of light, and it's not against General or Special Relativity because it's not mass that is exceeding the speed of light. It's space, which is allowed.

Time dialtion only occurs to a mass as it approaches the speed of light, not to space itself. Think about the Universe, at the point of the big bang, all matter was very close. Now we peer out into the Universe and see backwards in time 13.4 Billion years.

My line of thining exactly. Nothing can moe faster than light in space-time, but space-time itself is not bound by that rule. This is dramatically shown in the inflationary expansion of teh early universe. The universe went from the size of an egg to around billions of light years across in far less than a fraction of a second.

[saturn_656]

Thanos Thanos:

Sounds like all the options are completely awful. Travel even a fraction of light speed and you end up getting crushed by the acceleration against a bulkhead into a pile of goo no more than a nanometer thick. Mess around with these warp bubbles and you probably come out of it at the end with your guts turned inside out like Dr. Manhattan just did a number on you. All this time dilation stuff means that a year passes for you but a thousand passes back home, and you get to come back to a home planet that's been entirely converted to Al Qaeda cavemanism, choked to death on it's own garbage, or finally nuked itself into a lifeless cinder. It's all starting to make the demons from Event Horizon look pleasant by comparison.

Actually the Alcubierre Drive is the best idea we have for travelling faster than light, no time dialation, no nasty effects from acceleration, and according to the egg heads the science is sound. Biggest problem is the amount of energy required, and this is what researchers are working on (ways to lower the energy requirements).

Still we'd probably need fusion and/or antimatter reactors.

[putz]

Didn't the plot of Event Horizon revolve around an idea like this??? Hopefully it ends better!

[Zipperfish]

saturn_656 saturn_656:

Actually the Alcubierre Drive is the best idea we have for travelling faster than light, no time dialation, no nasty effects from acceleration, and according to the egg heads the science is sound. Biggest problem is the amount of energy required, and this is what researchers are working on (ways to lower the energy requirements).

Still we'd probably need fusion and/or antimatter reactors.

You need exotic particles, I gather--negative energy density. For negative energy density particles, gravity is repulsive, not attractive. I think that the researchers are trying to get around this by exploiting the Casimir Effect (zero point energy).

Also, there's the problem of being fried alive by Hawking radiation.

[bootlegga]

Thanos Thanos:

I'm not. The way that Nat Geo and the Discovery channels keep saying that aliens are likely to be machine intelligences that are probably coming to loot the planet and kill us all has got me kind of worried.

You probably don't want to read The Killing Star by Charles Pellegrino & George Zebrowski then;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star