Suppose warp drive is invented. What happens next?

[at Quark's]

^ Thank you. That was indeed my intention with this thread, not a discussion on the physics of how this warp drive would be supposed to work- there have been many threads about that topic already.

My own feeling is that a warp 1 engine still wouldn't really allow for travel to the stars (beyond perhaps a few probes), as that would still take years, but that it would revolutionise intra-solar system travel.

 

[HIjol]

I remain hopeful that, when (not if) it happens, we will use it for Good and Betterment...

…Amen...

 

[Will The Serious]

^ Thank you. That was indeed my intention with this thread, not a discussion on the physics of how this warp drive would be supposed to work- there have been many threads about that topic already.

My own feeling is that a warp 1 engine still wouldn't really allow for travel to the stars (beyond perhaps a few probes), as that would still take years, but that it would revolutionise intra-solar system travel.

I agree, however, we are currently researching the serious consideration of sending a manned probe to Mars, a trip that will essentially take the same amount of time as a warp 1 trip to our nearest neighboring star system. The interesting thing about technology is that advances in technology tend to encourage more advances in technology. If it took five to eight years to get to Mars and a group of scientist astronauts actually left to explore Mars, they would be traveling for a total of ten to fifteen years, spend as much as three to five years on Mars, then exchange places with another group who only took two years to get there and back. The original scientists would return home to Earth to watch the next generation perform their tasks in a quarter of the time or less because as much as twenty years of technology development would have passed them by.

I would think that at the level of technical society where FTL was practical, it wouldn't be long before FTL x n would be right behind. It seems even possible that a star ship that left ten years later might arrive five years earlier than their predecessors. Wouldn't that be something?

Here's an interesting premise for a Sci-Fi story. A ship of scientist set out on a twenty year trip to be the first to reach a neighboring star system and explore a possible life supporting planet only to find they are late arrivals with old, antiquated tech.

-Will

 

[at Quark's]

Based on what I've read about it, travel time to Mars would be measured in months, not years. Nine months for a single trip, so that would be roughly 1.5 years for getting there & back, and the additional time you want to spend on Mars itself (obviously you're not going to stay there for only 72 hours like on the moon). And that's the 'cheapest' but not even the 'fastest' option - it's possible to get there sooner if we'd really wanted to pay the extra costs (more fuel etc).

That's therefore still quite different from 4.26 years at warp 1 only to get to your destination, which would be another factor 5-10 up.

I agree that if FTL would prove possible, the odds probably would be good to enhance the technology further over time. But right now it's still the question whether it'll be possible at all.

Such SF stories as you mention already have been written I believe.

 

[Will The Serious]

But right now it's still the question whether it'll be possible at all.

Not in this thread. We are supposing FTL possible, so what's next. Enhance the tech, but given that is an inevitable future, the now of FTL or warp 1 provides some great options for exploration, mining, experimentation, expansion, and sightseeing. Then there are the extrasolar probes.

The problem with using FTL to go looking for extra terrestrial intelligence is that the probe can't "see" until it drops out of FTL, and neither can it be seen until it drops out of FTL. I'm writing about this phenomenon in my next episode of The Vulcan, right now. What happens when a starship traveling at warp n, encounters a sub-light limited space fleet? If the S-L fleet can only communicate with radio, they can't see, speak, nor hear the FTL ship at all. When the FTL ship drops out of warp, say 30 light minutes away, the S-L fleet won't see the FTL ship for another 30 minutes and then it will appear out of nowhere to the sensors of the S-L ship.

Maybe it would be possible for an FTL probe to drop beacons as it progressed towards its final destination. The beacons would then be sensed by and could sense its surroundings. Navigation would be another issue to address. The destination would have to be preset, the course and time (relative to the ship's frame of reference) would be predetermined, and we would have to be sure of a clear, debris-free path. Even a clear hydrogen gas cloud might pose an obstacle for a ship traveling faster than light. If FTL was achieved by warping space-time, what would the warp field do to matter that passed through the warp field? What would the matter do to the field and to the ship being carried by that field? Might a gas be caught in the field and simply ride along with the ship? Maybe nothing would ever be in the way because the ship would essentially be standing still in space while everything outside the bubble would be "warped" around the bubble and the two would never sense each other.

If the warp field were created by causing a gravity-like well on the leading edge of the spaceship and, maybe even an anti-gravity-like hill on the backside of the field, then possibly, as the ship moved to fall into the well, a deeper well and a bigger hill was created each moment the ship fell deeper into the well. It might even get to a point where if could stop creating the well and the ship would be falling so hard into the well that it continued to accelerate on its own, never able to reverse the warping of space it created.

FTL flight will need new ways of seeing, and unwarping space. If simply turning off the warp generator will collapse the warp field, that means the warping of space-time requires a force to maintain the warp. By extension, gravity needs a force to create the warping of space-time that is gravity. What is that force? Maybe it isn't a force in the classical mechanics sense, but that is another phenomenon to explore and experiment on once FTL was practical. Does matter exert a force on space that if removed, the warping of space would straighten itself out? That too would require a force.

We might be looking at the next level nuclear reaction. Fusion/fission of warping and un-warping space-time. Can we learn, once we've learned to create FTL movement, how to tap the energy in the warping of space-time, and the unwarping of it?

-Will

 

[Spider]

Imagining how to make FTL possible means coming up with some science that doesn't exist yet. If it is possible, and if some alien civilization has already discovered it, I wonder if it's usage leaves a detectable effect in space we could measure. We could have already detected it but just don't know what it is.

I hope they come visit us, we could use a little help right now.

 

[Santaman]

If the design is out there and everyone has access to it then probably a few big commercial entities will be the first to be able to exploit it, competition would be okay but it shouldn't turn out all the way wild west...

 

[Nerys Myk]

Two words: Terran Empire.

 

[publiusr]

Now what I am about to say sounds daft—but I think we would still need rockets.

It might be that FTL is easier to master than systems small shuttles would need to leave Earth.

I can easily see a ringship assembled in orbit with massive Uber-HLLV lofted payloads.

FTL might have more in common with ion drives—useful outside atmosphere only.

Therefore, I think probes are all you would see for awhile….Voyager on steroids.

It may very well be that SSTOs are a tougher nut to crack than warp drive.

 

[Will The Serious]

If a drive, such as the Star Trek warp drive, can push/pull a manned ship at FTL speeds, there is the potential to use that energy for power generation. Maybe there would be no waste, no undesirable fallout radiation. It could revolutionize energy (electricity) production for anything. Combine that with advanced AI robotics and a whole solar system of untapped and easily accessible resources, and we could be looking at free wealth for all. No factory workers, robots do it, no convenient mart/gas station attendants, it's all automated, no miners or refineries that require unionized workers, most of it is done in space by programed machines, low/no environmental impact for human occupied living environments. Government may be the only job people would have to do, and that might not even be that necessary.

Imagine the fighting over power and status when wealth is not the measure. What would the rich and powerful do then? Take government positions, then ration resources under environmental impact rules, maybe. Control all intellectual property, AI or otherwise.

-Will

 

[Jedi Marso]

At Warp 1 we aren't going very far or very fast.

It would open up the solar system, Expanse Style, however. It would also make possible decades-long expeditions to Alpha Centauri, and generational trips (or using suspended animation) tech to places like Eta Cassiopeia (Terra Nova in Enterprise) or 47 Ursa Majoris, which is almost 50 LY away.

 

[XCV330]

hypothetical warp drive is mostly likely incompatible with causality and relativity in the way its understood, now. if it were possible than we'd have to come to terms that our perception of the universe, or our ability to conceptualize it, may not be possible outside of our umwelt. Anthropic principle suggests that to be unlikely, so.. no warp drive. It's a fun mind exercise and good entertainment.

 

[Spider]

The only thing we know for sure is that we don't know everything we need to know about the universe. The earth was considered flat before we found it to be round, and powered human flight was impossible before it was possible.

For our present understanding, FTL is impossible. Which doesn't mean that's the end of the discussion. I'm pretty sure we'll have already found solid evidence of life elsewhere long before FTL is invented.

 

[Will The Serious]

Anthropic principle suggests that to be unlikely, so.. no warp drive.

I'm pretty sure we'll have already found solid evidence of life elsewhere long before FTL is invented.

Yes but, "Suppose warp drive is invented.
What happens next?"

-Will

 

[XCV330]

Yes but, "Suppose warp drive is invented.
What happens next?"

-Will

time travel, unraveling of reality.

 

[Will The Serious]

How would faster than light travel make time travel work? Would it be relative, that is, would the person traveling at FTL move time-wise only relative to objects not moving at FTL, or would the universe move separately and independently from the traveler? Which direction would the traveler be able to move?

It occurs to me that to move forward in time, the universe would already have to have had its future for a traveler to be able to move to it. To get the universe to move into a future it hadn't had yet, so a traveler would have a future to travel into, would require all the energy in the universe to move the universe along its path into the future. Unless the traveler was just in a suspended animation until the target date had been reached.

Wouldn't it look weird if a time traveler, say in a laboratory, were to jump into the new time machine, set the controls to 100 years in the future, and when they hit the button, they just stopped. The machine and the time traveler simply became an unanimated fixture in the middle of the lab for 100 years until the machine started everything in and of the machine back up.

Traveling into the past might prove more difficult, as it needs to reverse the whole universe to get the traveler there. Unless, there where an infinite number of parallel universes that allowed us to pick any moment in each divergent universe to point the traveler to, and time travel into the past is simply jumping across dimensions.

-Will

 

[XCV330]

How would faster than light travel make time travel work? Would it be relative, that is, would the person traveling at FTL move time-wise only relative to objects not moving at FTL, or would the universe move separately and independently from the traveler? Which direction would the traveler be able to move?

It occurs to me that to move forward in time, the universe would already have to have had its future for a traveler to be able to move to it. To get the universe to move into a future it hadn't had yet, so a traveler would have a future to travel into, would require all the energy in the universe to move the universe along its path into the future. Unless the traveler was just in a suspended animation until the target date had been reached.

Wouldn't it look weird if a time traveler, say in a laboratory, were to jump into the new time machine, set the controls to 100 years in the future, and when they hit the button, they just stopped. The machine and the time traveler simply became an unanimated fixture in the middle of the lab for 100 years until the machine started everything in and of the machine back up.

Traveling into the past might prove more difficult, as it needs to reverse the whole universe to get the traveler there. Unless, there where an infinite number of parallel universes that allowed us to pick any moment in each divergent universes to the point the traveler to, and time travel into the past is simply jumping across dimensions.

-Will

Faster than light travel is inherently time travel.

It doesn't matter on shows like Star Trek because they basically use some form of Earth time as a universal frame of reference. I mean fuck, Sol is Sector 000 or something like that. They basically made a flat 2-d universe where time is a constant and warp speed just means giving your space ship the beans. They never really had the FTL thing figured out, which is why we get things like impulse drive occasionally being used to travel what must be light years in short amounts of time, even with the warp drive down.

But there is no universal frame of reference. There is a constant, however, c. Light moves pretty close to c. That's relativity. And it's important because without relativity, FTL/Warp Drive/Hyperspace would be just fine. Even if you're moving really close to a fraction of the speed of light, where time dialation effects start to become obvious, events still happen within that frame of reference of c, the events within that cone of observability, the relativistic frame of reference (again, there is no single frame of reference). If everything within that cone, that frame of reference was moving at the same constant velocity, FTL effects might not be noticeable.

But of course that's not possible when dealing with these distances and velocities. Let's say you fly your FTL ship, somehow from Earth to Mars, and do so twice the speed of light. To another observer who is not in the same velocity, therefore observing spacetime differently, you will have arrived before you left Earth. C is the speed limit of causality. If you get above if, you violate it, and that's time travel.

 

[Will The Serious]

But of course that's not possible when dealing with these distances and velocities. Let's say you fly your FTL ship, somehow from Earth to Mars, and do so twice the speed of light. To another observer who is not in the same velocity, therefore observing spacetime differently, you will have arrived before you left Earth. C is the speed limit of causality. If you get above if, you violate it, and that's time travel.

I don't see how that is time travel in the sense that one jumps aboard an FTL craft and arrives before they leave, because, of course, the FTL ship didn't arrive before it left, it only appeared so to an observer from the destination. To an observer from the origin, it would appear as though the FTL ship was moving at faster than the speed of light and arrived, as per the light travel time from the destination, at twice the speed of light. The image of the receding FTL ship may appear to dim considerably, even nearly disappear as the light intensity and wavelength stretched out over twice the distance as normal.

To the FTL pilot, time travels locally at a normal rate, but having observed the destination at n light years away, time would appear to speed up at their destination as they approached. However, that is just their perspective, because the time at their destination was actually n years ahead of their observations before they took off. They just were catching up.

If there is a time dilation as they approach then exceed C, it is a local slowing of time. They would see time at their origin appear to reverse as they passed the light information from their origin on its way to their destination, while time appears to speed up at their destination. They may feel like it took less time to travel the distance than it actually did because, for them, time slowed down. But time doesn't reverse for the pilot, accept through the rear view window. It isn't a travel to the past they can actually get to. And the travel into the future at a sped up rate of time passage is only them catching up to what had already happened but they could see due to the time it takes light to travel between the two points.

On ST, the reason they don't seem to experience these time dilations and differing frames of reference for the passage of time is because the ST Universe has "subspace communications." Most of the time, they have near instant communications with all points so their speed doesn't affect how they perceive their approaching destination or their receding origin. ST stories suspend or ignore the local compression of time. Perhaps it's because, as they travel, they are, from the local frame of reference, not actually moving relative to local space. They are in a warp field.

For the phenomenon of them traveling multiple light years at impulse speed, I would say the writers are taking artistic liberties. I try not to do that in my own stories, but most of the time, I only do quick rough math in my head to keep some semblance of consistency. I'm definitely not that accurate. I just try to appear so to the average reader.

-Will

 

[XCV330]

I don't see how that is time travel in the sense that one jumps aboard an FTL craft and arrives before they leave, because, of course, the FTL ship didn't arrive before it left, it only appeared so to an observer from the destination.

And you reached the point: This is the point, all else is unimportant. You are handling it as if there is a central point of reference, but there isn't. The only constant is C, which keeps the universe relatively sane. The observer's observing of time travel would be just as valid as the the traveller believing they just moved very quickly. And that's why causation breaks down with FTL.

On ST, the reason they don't seem to experience these time dilations and differing frames of reference for the passage of time is because the ST Universe has "subspace communications."

Subspace communication is also FTL travel, only in this case it is slightly, or significantly faster than warp travel, and, except in cases of long distance teleporation, is normally the movement of energy and information, not mass, though ultimately there's no difference. It also violates causation in the exact same way.

 

[BillJ]

If we invent warp drive at our current level of social development, our alien betters need to come wipe us out before we spread like cockroaches.