Has anyone ever thought about space travel or life in space?

[SebastianHolt]

The reasons are irrelevant. We'll head out there for exploration before anything else.

We'll need a warp drive, or some kind of wormhole generator to get anywhere meaningful.

Even if we could hit light speed, it's slow on a cosmic scale. Airliners fly 500mph and takes 6 hours to cross the country.

The nearest star system with a habitable zone planet is 4.2 light years out, with the next candidates 11.4 and 12.2 light-years away. There are more than 2000 planets within 50 light years of Earth. We'll spend a hundred years looking for another planet. We can't indefinitely wander around the cosmos and survive. If we don't run out of resources, we'll run out of genetic diversity in 4 generations.

Not trying to be a smart ass, but hear me out.

How does light travel? Most people would argue that light only moves in a straight line. However, this isn't true. Gravity can bend light ... this is a new idea and something to think about. If life can bend...if we figure out how to bend light(or the derivative) time we can move from here to Mars in a second. by that I mean a true second both on the ship and earth.

by bending time, you can jump to any place and point with no time lost for that travel. some might say this sounds like a warp drive and maybe it is

 

[Husky_Embrace]

Not trying to be a smart ass, but hear me out.

How does light travel? Most people would argue that light only moves in a straight line. However, this isn't true. Gravity can bend light ... this is a new idea and something to think about. If life can bend...if we figure out how to bend light(or the derivative) time we can move from here to Mars in a second. by that I mean a true second both on the ship and earth.

by bending time, you can jump to any place and point with no time lost for that travel. some might say this sounds like a warp drive and maybe it is

But time and space are linked. Bending time also bends space. You'll still need to move that distance over the bent space if you bend time.

It is also relative. The person standing still experiences something different than the one in a gravity well/at high speeds. At higher speeds time slows down, and at light speed it stops, making you experience no time from your reference point, but others do. So only at a singularity or at the speed of light you'll be able to stand still in time, giving the appearance of instantaneous travel to you.

Maybe if you travel close to a black hole at the speed of light? I don't know. Ask Einstein. If he's not bend in his grave, experiencing the big bang.

 

[SebastianHolt]

But time and space are linked. Bending time also bends space. You'll still need to move that distance over the bent space if you bend time.

It is also relative. The person standing still experiences something different than the one in a gravity well/at high speeds. At higher speeds time slows down, and at light speed it stops, making you experience no time from your reference point, but others do. So only at a singularity or at the speed of light you'll be able to stand still in time, giving the appearance of instantaneous travel to you.

Maybe if you travel close to a black hole at the speed of light? I don't know. Ask Einstein. If he's not bend in his grave, experiencing the big bang.

Time to think outside of the box...
think about this ... time/space is like a sheet of paper. Grab a piece of paper and hold it in front of you.

At the bottom of the paper, poke a hole in the top of the page and a second hole centered at the bottom of the page. The distance is the length of the paper.

Now comes the hard part: how to explain this, and I hope to do so clearly. You are holding a piece of paper with two holes. one at the top of the page and one at the bottom ("Centered").

Imagine you enter the first hole, or in this case, the entrance for a 'wormhole', or the starting place for your spaceship. The destination is the 2nd hole you created. Normally, one would draw a line from one hole to the second, but what if you bend the paper (fold it)? Now the distance from hole 1 to hole 2 is cut in half. time for the ship, you in this ship, and people on earth all move at the same time. Now unfold the paper, and you are at your destination. You avoided the conundrum of traveling at the speed of light.

 

[anthrodisiac]

Time to think outside of the box...
think about this ... time/space is like a sheet of paper. Grab a piece of paper and hold it in front of you.

At the bottom of the paper, poke a hole in the top of the page and a second hole centered at the bottom of the page. The distance is the length of the paper.

Now comes the hard part: how to explain this, and I hope to do so clearly. You are holding a piece of paper with two holes. one at the top of the page and one at the bottom ("Centered").

Imagine you enter the first hole, or in this case, the entrance for a 'wormhole', or the starting place for your spaceship. The destination is the 2nd hole you created. Normally, one would draw a line from one hole to the second, but what if you bend the paper (fold it)? Now the distance from hole 1 to hole 2 is cut in half. time for the ship, you in this ship, and people on earth all move at the same time. Now unfold the paper, and you are at your destination. You avoided the conundrum of traveling at the speed of light.

Wormholes are one of two of the best handwavy "Don't worry about time dialation effects" solutions. They're cool, but I really dig Alcubierre drives. This is something like a warp or bubble drive, when you compress the space in front of you and expand the space behind you, so your little bubble of space is never time-dialated, but the space AROUND you is.

Your ship is never traveling faster than light, hell, your ship might not really need chemical engines at all, just something to power the warp (negative energy handwavy nonsense), so you're not experiencing time dialation as the result of approaching light speed. Time for you and people you left behind is more or less the same.*

You want to move faster? Compress and expand spacetime around you more. Hilarity ensues when you accidental bowl your way through a planet, tidally shredding it while you were off banging your clone. "What was that?" "Shut up and keeping licking me, Ashley-4."

*There are a lot of wonky spacetime geometries that can actually make this untrue (including negative time differences in certain scenarios), but for soft-to-medium sci-fi purposes, an Alcubierre-style warp drive is best for not dealing with wonky time effects.

 

[ZfrkS62]

This is not the thread to be replying to on a phone. My hands are going to cramp up typing these dissertations.

Not trying to be a smart ass, but hear me out.

How does light travel? Most people would argue that light only moves in a straight line. However, this isn't true. Gravity can bend light ... this is a new idea and something to think about. If life can bend...if we figure out how to bend light(or the derivative) time we can move from here to Mars in a second. by that I mean a true second both on the ship and earth.

by bending time, you can jump to any place and point with no time lost for that travel. some might say this sounds like a warp drive and maybe it is

The piece of paper model has been the standard layman demonstration for decades.

Think about the energy it would take for a spaceship to bend space-time like that. It would probably be expressed in factorial exponents.

Think about the reason the accretion disc around a black hole looks like it goes up and over the top of the black hole. It's because the gravity of the black hole itself is bending the light from the backside of the hole (snicker) to mage it look like it's going over the top. And we're supposed to somehow do something like that on a much bigger scale to pull something thousands of light years away, closer to us, with a drive contained in a space craft? The Tsar Bomba is a pop-it compared to the power source we need to run that.



Now, in regards to the accelerated evolution that was brought up on the other page, I suppose it could be possible to force our adaptation along if we had artifical gravity, and knew the gravity of the planet we were heading to. We could dial up the artifical gravity slightly until we got to what the planet was and each generation would have an easier time with it than the one before. Same with the air composition.

Sure it would be uncomfortable for the OGs, but if it accelerated our acclimatation in the long run, I'm sure it would be worth it.

 

[Shaglus_Ziegler]

Clearly, humanity can reach space, but we are not very efficient. As I type this...my mind spins in a million directions ... where to start the story? Start off like Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek(everything for space is there and solved), spaceships (what about life without gravity, what about propulsion) ... Or start off where we just completed our first space elevator....

Already there!