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Wednesday, June 19, 2013

I want my warp drive

Posted Monday, December 10, 2012, at 2:54 PM

I remember as a little kid watching Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who and many other sci-fi shows as a child and I remember the technology they were using always fascinating me. They had touch screens, and mobile communication devices, and they could travel the cosmos in hour long increments.

Today I have a touch screen computer, a mobile communication device, but I still can't travel the cosmos and be back in time to have lunch with my boss. Hmmm...where is my warp drive?

With Apple spewing out new way for us to listen to music or a newer model of a tablet every six months, why don't we have a faster way of exploring the biggest thing we see every day... our universe?

An article recently done by Emi Kolawole for the Washington Post, brought up the priorities of NASA aren't quite clear as we were lead to believe. President Obama had brought up that we would have a manned mission to an asteroid by 2025, but due to some significant cutbacks in budgets it seems that our progress to the stars might be cut short.

NASA though has given us the exploration of MARS and the discovery of planets very similar to our Earth. It's not manned missions to the outer cosmos, but its still better then nothing.

Even though we might be not making it to the stars as quickly as we might like to. I myself will still dream of a day were traveling the stars on any given day isn't just science fiction.


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Harold White of NASA and group of scientists are actually working on this right now. You can look up his paper, it's title is "The Alcubierre Warp Drive in Higher Dimensional Spacetime". But, if you'd like something less technical, there's an article on io9 about it entitled "How NASA might build its very first warp drive" by George Dvorsky.

Basically, Harold White took what is know as the Alcubierre Drive and made the theory practically feasible. The Alcubierre Drive essentially works by contracting space-time in front of the spacecraft and expanding space-time behind the spacecraft in a ring-like fashion such that the vehicle doesn't locally move, but appears to move FTL to observers because spacetime "pushes" the vehicle. The problem with this theory is that it required immense amounts of energy, making it impractical, and there was what was known as the symmetry/asymmetry paradox. The paradox was the simple fact that if energy density is symmetric perpendicular to it's direction of travel, then how does space-time know which way to warp asymmetrically? Do you go forward or backward? Howard White solved these problems. For the first problem, he considered the geometry. Instead of the ring-like geometry, he made the walls thicker and more toroid shaped. The downside to this is that the local space volume, where the spacecraft resides, is smaller. However, the calculations indicate that even a small decrease in volume has significant impact on the amount of energy required. The 2nd problem was solved by putting the Alcubierre warp drive metric into its canonical form using Rindler's method. Then, using the canonical form, one can extract the potential (phi) and then deduce the space-time expansion boost (gamma). Then gamma can simply be thought of as a scalar of the initial velocity. Think of it like the pressure gradients around a sphere moving through a fluid. So, the space-time warping is actually a secondary effect. If you have zero velocity, you'll have expansion boost (gamma) but no York Extrinsic Time (theta, aka space-time warping). So unlike the original Alcubierre drive in which no initial velocity was posited, this new rethink does require an initial velocity.

-- Posted by saturnianalien on Wed, Dec 12, 2012, at 5:03 AM


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Every morning I start my day with a cup of coffee, catching up on the news, and trying not to hurt myself before 10 am (I'm a klutz and usually end up stubbing my toe or something of the sorts in the morning...or really anytime of the day). Hence the new blog coffee notes. Well, I should probably start with a little background on myself.

Name: Joyce Orlando

From: West Virginia

Education: Shepherd University, B.S. Mass Communication

Job: Reporter

Interesting Facts: Coffee snob, reader, writer, enjoy good music, and somewhat of a workaholic. Oh, and I also like to think I'm funny.

What I try to do with my more casual writing is to insert witty comments into things that are happening into today's society. Sometimes I'm funny, most times just some really bad jokes that make people shake their head.

I look forward to providing Putnam County with news and my own brand of humor in the future. Keep an eye out, I'll keep posting.

"Not all those who wander are lost." JRR Tolkien
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