Spaceship Could Fly Faster Than Light

[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

I was studying house flies while I had to kill two last week! There is a flaw in their programming! Sitting on a surface, you will never be able to catch them/kill them if you move fast. However, if an object starts out slow, they don't treat it as a threat, allowing you to speed up said object to fast while they only lazily try and get away. This allows one to catch or kill a housefly as needed with nothing more than a piece of paper towel, or even ones hand for that matter! :p

-S

You forgot to mention that flies move backwards a bit when they take off, but your are spot on about moving the object you intend to swat them with slowly.
If one approaches a fly from behind, slowly, and then executes the swatting motion rapidly, they almost never get away. The ones that do are usually young flies that seem to have ADD. I may never have killed an insurgent in Iraq (that I know of) but I killed a hell of a lot of flies. You can even catch one with your eyelid if it lights on it while you're snoozing.

Weren't we talking about gravity or FTL or something?

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

Old news. Zephram Cochran designed the Warp Drive on that very thesis.

Since nothing in this universe can match or exceed c the idea is to slip under the rug of the unverse, so-to-speak, using the warp engines to evelope the ship in a bubble of distorted time-space. The ship is stationary within that bubble, staying below c, while the bubble zips along at faster-than-light speeds.

These guys need to watch Star Trek more often.

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

You forgot to mention that flies move backwards a bit when they take off, but your are spot on about moving the object you intend to swat them with slowly.
If one approaches a fly from behind, slowly, and then executes the swatting motion rapidly, they almost never get away. The ones that do are usually young flies that seem to have ADD. I may never have killed an insurgent in Iraq (that I know of) but I killed a hell of a lot of flies. You can even catch one with your eyelid if it lights on it while you're snoozing.

Weren't we talking about gravity or FTL or something?

Its part of the discussion! Flies brains (Or should I say nervous system) was that part of the topic. I just took this a little further sideways is all! :p

-S

[Blacklight]

What's actually going on in that theory is this... A ship would have to inject MASSIVE ammounts of energy in front of the ship. What this does is compress the space and time in front of the ship. Basically space and time get squeezed up as if a heavy object like a black hole were forming there in front of the ship. The next step is to inject vast ammounts of negative energy (A type of energy we've never observed in the universe, but mathimatically it could exist) behind the ship. What this does is expands the space and time behind the ship. Coordinating the two effects together can allow the ship to travel faster than the speed of light because it's not the spacecraft moving, but the space around it due to the compressing and expansion of space in front and behind it.
(I may have the negative and positive energys reversed. I forgot which one went to the front of the spacecraft but this is basically how it works.)

The universe is a LOT wierder than we take for granted.

[SUBMAN1]

Yes, that is why a micro black hole will solve your problem - It removes the energy from the equation. It is the energy.

-S

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

Yes, that is why a micro black hole will solve your problem - It removes the energy from the equation. It is the energy.

-S

That sounds very zen-like, doesn't it?

"Be the energy."

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by Zayphod

That sounds very zen-like, doesn't it?

"Be the energy."

Yes it does! :p

-S

[SS107.9MHz]

Originally Posted by Platapus

...

Our experiments can demonstrate that whatever the speed of light is, it is a constant in a specified environment. This was documented in the Einstein one-way two-way postulate.

So before we get all excited about speeds faster than light, we might want to work on the technology that will allows us to actually measure the speed of a photon.

So the speed of light is pretty close to 299,792,458 metres per second in a free and perfect vacuum, but how close we still don't really know.

The good news is that for all practical purposes the 299... Million metres per second is good enough....for now.

The bad news is that if we start formulating more and more theories that rely on the speed of light being 299...Million metres per second, they may, just may, be a little off.

Aint that a kick in the head?

Damn sweet post SO if we take the premisseof Lil' old Albert of a specific environment speed of light, and the whole thing about the time bubble effect, would't that brinhg the speed of light barrier to a sound barrier-like frontier, with a sort of "light-Boom"? Before breaking the sound barrier some said that a human who would passit wouldn't be able to hear too, so if one breaks the light barrier. maybe it all turns black except for the bodies travelling at the same speed

[NealT]

Well that one is easy. Just look at

Star Trek - when you break into Warp you get a big flash of light.
Babylon 5 - when you break into hyperspace you get a dark hole surrounded by light and a lot of pretty lights on the other side.
Star Wars - when you break lightspeed you get a lot of swirlie lights.

Problem solved.

[antikristuseke]

Or the Mass Effect version

Originally Posted by Mass Effect wiki

Light travels slower through glass then it does through open air; light also moves slower in conventional space then it does in a high-speed mass effect field. This causes refraction - any light entering at an angle is bent and separated into a spectrum. Objects outside the ship will appear refracted. The greater the difference between the objective (exterior) and subjective (interior) speeds of light, the greater the refraction.

As the subjective speed of lights is raised within the field, objects outside will appear to red-shift, eventually becoming visible only to radio telescope antennae. High-energy electromagnetic sources normally hidden to the eye become visible on the spectrum. As the speed of light continues to be raised, x-ray, gamma ray, and eventfully cosmic ray sources become visible. Stars will be replaced by pulsars, the accretion discs of black holes, quasars, and gamma ray bursts.

To an outside observer, a ship within a mass effect drive envelope appears to blue-shifted. If within a field that allows travel at twice the speed of light, any radiation it emits has twice the energy as normal. If the ship is in a field of about 200 times light speed, it radiates visible light as x-ray and gamma rays, and the infrared heat from the hull is blue-shifted up into the visible spectrum or higher.

Ships moving at FTL are visible at great distances, though their signature will only propagate at the speed of light. According to Engineer Adams, the Normandy's stealth system does not work at FTL speeds because that blue-shifts the ship's emissions into frequencies too high to capture in the hull sinks.

[FIREWALL]

Any fool knows that SUPERMAN can fly faster than light. :p

[Blacklight]

[QUOTEDamn sweet post SO if we take the premisseof Lil' old Albert of a specific environment speed of light, and the whole thing about the time bubble effect, would't that brinhg the speed of light barrier to a sound barrier-like frontier, with a sort of "light-Boom"? Before breaking the sound barrier some said that a human who would passit wouldn't be able to hear too, so if one breaks the light barrier. maybe it all turns black except for the bodies travelling at the same speed][/QUOTE]

The wierd thing about the speed of light is that it's always the same speed nomatter how fast you're going and how you measure it.
Consider this... if you're in a space ship.... and you're racing a photon of light.... it's not like you're racing a car where as you speed up.. the car you're chasing seems to slow down as your speed increases. In the case of the photon... it will seem to increase speed WITH you in the exact same ammount that you accelerated. Now if you come to a standstill suddenly... the photon will also fly past you still seeming the exact same speed that it was when you were racing it.

[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by Blacklight

The wierd thing about the speed of light is that it's always the same speed nomatter how fast you're going and how you measure it.
Consider this... if you're in a space ship.... and you're racing a photon of light.... it's not like you're racing a car where as you speed up.. the car you're chasing seems to slow down as your speed increases. In the case of the photon... it will seem to increase speed WITH you in the exact same ammount that you accelerated. Now if you come to a standstill suddenly... the photon will also fly past you still seeming the exact same speed that it was when you were racing it.

No matter how much it blows my mind I still love this stuff.

I've been told before that time and speed are two sides of the same coin, i.e. If you're moving at the speed of light you do not experience the passage of time at all, whereas if you were completely stopped relative to the universe (how would you do that?) everything ever would seem to happen instantaneously.

I'm sure I got some of that wrong, but if anyone knows anything about it I'd appreciate the input.
Also, what is the ratio of speed to time distortion? Is it directly proportional as you approach the speed of light, or is it more of a j-curve?

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

No matter how much it blows my mind I still love this stuff.

I've been told before that time and speed are two sides of the same coin, i.e. If you're moving at the speed of light you do not experience the passage of time at all, whereas if you were completely stopped relative to the universe (how would you do that?) everything ever would seem to happen instantaneously.

I'm sure I got some of that wrong, but if anyone knows anything about it I'd appreciate the input.
Also, what is the ratio of speed to time distortion? Is it directly proportional as you approach the speed of light, or is it more of a j-curve?

I believe time slows down by a factor of Delta.

BTW, the reason you'd never experience that non-passage of time is because you cannot MATCH the speed of light; you'll always be a hair below it. Star Trek got around this little detail by explaining that as the ship went FTL, it was AT the speed of light for "less than Planck(sp?) time" (that's the smallest unit of time that can be measured currently).

[Rhodes]

Originally Posted by NealT

Well that one is easy. Just look at

Star Trek - when you break into Warp you get a big flash of light.
Babylon 5 - when you break into hyperspace you get a dark hole surrounded by light and a lot of pretty lights on the other side.
Star Wars - when you break lightspeed you get a lot of swirlie lights.

Problem solved.

But in Star Trek, they travel in subspace, and only the TNG (and beyond) and TMP had the flash of light. In TOS, we didn't see any flash, they just warped...
Hyperspace, in other hand, is different from subspace, and the hijack is over...:p