Ok, there's a small chance that I may be working on a project sometime soon that would involve describing some types of FTl travel.

As part of it I would need to describe at least a few different types of FTL travel that worked in notably different ways.

Now, I've heard serious scientists talking about drives that expand space behind a vessel while contracting it in front of the vessel. Where are some sites where I could get more info on this, along with how the people inside the ship might perceive the effect. I would imagine that everything behind them goes black as no light is catching up to them from behind, while the front...Well, with the blue shift and all god only knows what it would look like to look forward while such a drive was going.

I've also heard of the "descriptor drive" that postulates that every particle in the universe can be described mathematically, and that if it were possible to manipulate those descriptors you could instantly change a ship's position in the universe. The processing power required along makes the mind boggle, but are there any sites discussing the issue?

Likewise, there are other postulated forms of FTL travel, can someone direct me to serious sites discussing them and possible side effects? I do NOT want to get into the whole "FTL IS IM/POSSIBLE!!!" mire, OK? I'm just looking for sites that postulate plausible, or at least plausible seeming, FTL possibilities.

Thanks, and god bless.

There is the Alcubierre Warp Drive. It operates on the idea that if you squeeze up the space in front of you, and stretch it out behind you, you get to your destination by bring it closer. Or something like that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

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Thanks.

I'd like to get ideas on several types of FTL, possibly a "warp drive" type, a "hyperdrive" type and a "jump" type that all work differently and have different effects.

A 'warp drive" might be slower but allow the ship to view the outside universe, and perhaps receive messages via some type of comm device (Molecular bifurcation, perhaps?)

A "hyperdrive" might shunt the ship out of the known universe and into a form of hyperspace, then allow it to shunt back into the universe. Perhaps faster than warp, but isolates the ship from all contact with this universe.

A jump drive might be instant, but perhaps risk misjumping if the jump was not perfectly calculated.

Descriptor drive? I'm afraid that's impossible, no matter how much computing power you have. You simply cannot know where all (or any) particles are - the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle makes it impossible.

You may want to take a look at traversable wormholes - in certain circumstances they could theoretically allow "faster than light" travel without breaking any laws of physics. Here's a link you may find useful: Link You need to get a traversable wormhole that doesn't violate causality, or the whole thing comes undone.

I'd also like to put in a good word for torchships. They are not FTL at all, but rather accelerate to the half-way point between the start- and end-points, turn around, and decelerate the rest of the way. This allows a ship with enough thrust to get up to a significant fraction of C. Not only would this be very fast, at relativistic speeds time dilation takes effect and the elapsed time for the travellers will appear shorter than it actually is. Again, no laws of physics are violated.
Link

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

that's why you need a Heisenberg compensator from a transporter.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

I think there was an ST:ENT episode where this engineer had that idea. It turns out it is even impossible in the Star Trek universe. And if it is impossible there, then I doubt it's possible here.

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Impossibility is irrelevant to this thread.

High-speed "relativistic" travel allows little time to pass for the ship, but still means that centuries can go by for the rest of the universe PER TRIP.

If the whole ship could be made to interact with the rest of the world as if it were a single particle or get all of its particles to move in parallel instead of in random directions, that would open up two possibilities: one is moving at very high fractions of c (and possibly having large-scale uncertainty apply), and the other involves the mathematical oddity known as tachions. They're not actual particles as far as we know, but the equations of relativity have solutions that would involve matter moving faster than light and unable to slow down as slow as light speed. (That could be a challenge for navigation if a ship acted that way; the equivalent of normal matter going really slow like we and our rockets do would be instead going so many times faster than light that it's hard to stop at the right time to control where you end up!)

If space is thought of as being made up of pieces of one Planck length and time as passing in units of one Planck time, instead of both being smooth, then you can only move one distance unit per time unit, which is c... but the trick is to figure out which pieces of space are connected to which others (and thus can be moved to in one tick of the clock) and which ones are not. So, although I have no idea how to do this, making one Planck bit of space detach from its neighbor and attach to another somewhere else which seems farther away would make travel at light speed from one point to the other appear to have bypassed other points along the way...

When the ship leaves for Alpha Centauri you put the entire world population in suspended animation and thaw them out when the ship returns. For them it would seem like the trip took no time at all no matter how long it really took. This might seem extreme but it's the only method that will actually work.

NASA funded an initiatve called the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program from 1996 to 2002. It was essentially an extended intellectual exercise in dreaming up a possible faster-than-light means of propulsion.

You may want to read up on what they came up with.

It may be worth it to remember that the travelers have an effective velocity that is FTL. If they reach 98% c, they will arrive at their location in about 1/5 the time (their clocks only), just as if they were travleing about 5x the speed of light.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Actually, it looks to them like the distances got shorter...

Same difference. Of course for long distance travel it can really disconnect you with the rest of humanity. But at 'only' 5x dilation, one could reach some of the nearer stars without to much cultural dislocation, in periods of ship-time similar to the longer sailing voyages.

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Well, there is the drive that calculates the likelihood that you will randomly move from one point to another and manipulate the uncertainty so that the event actually happens.

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Keeper of the Jabberwock

Sounds like the "Infinite Improbability Drive"!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

But there'd have to be something else to it to increase those odds in the first place, because the odds of your mass randomly moving to a point that's too far away are zero anyway.

Make that "effectively zero" and I'll agree with you!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

I'd skip this idea. You need something to hold all that information. If you used every particle in the universe to describe itself you would have enough storage to hold all that information. Conveniently enough, every particle in the universe describes itself quite well. The down side is collection those descriptions when you have nothing left to collect it with.

On the other hand, if you could use energy to store other energy you could decouple yourself from where to store the information and perhaps something like this might even be thinkable. Hmm... maybe even that wouldn't be necessary. If you could completely describe a particle and transmit the information as photons traveling across the universe then you have found a way to "store" them. Now all you have to do is run around and describe each particle, instantaneously, and have all the information transmitted to the same location. If you were able to transmit the information in such a way that all the information arrived at one point forming some kind of three dimensional form then you might grab it and have the state of the universe. Of course all of this would have to take place instantaneously... so I'd really think about going at it from a different angle.

This just made me think of a fun game for interstellar scientists. Each of them sits on their own planet with some kind of laser beam or particle beam and they all have a target somewhere in the universe they have to hit simultaneously. A future instant in time is set and each of them have to transmit at precisely the correct instant to allow their beam to travel to that point to hit at the correct time. Any race failing to hit the target is doomed to be sneered at and suffer the derision of all other races until the end of time.

Interstellar Scientific Olympics might be a fun topic.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

How about the Many Worlds Drive? In some very small percentage of timelines, your ship will quantum jump to your intended destination just by luck, so when you activate the drive your ship's computer checks your location and destroys the ship if you're not where you want to be. Since only the survivors are around to notice where they are, from your point of view the drive always works.

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Life is like a box of chocolates. All of your choices are bad for you.

Noticed Michio Kaku's new book, Physics of the Impossible, yesterday at Barnes & Noble---might be worth a look, as tachyons are discussed in it.

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Effective * and * genocidial. I applaud your initiative