There's one problem with saying that the speed of light is impossible.

There was a explanation that the things we are figuring out about physics now more than ever that what we know we don't know.

The theories of universes existing in black holes might be proven true one day whenever we get to them and whoever is brave to go into them.

Black holes may not actually rip stuff to shreds.

So if we figure out one day how the universes physics work we might be able to bend them to our own ways.

Yeah I know it sounds weird what I'm saying, but as of reading this article today I'm beginning as to wonder as we get more and more advanced technology every year we will figure out more and more about the universes physics how they work.

I'm hoping more than one universes exists.

It's not impossible, for energy. Matter cannot travel at 100% the speed of light. The amount of energy it would take calculates to infinity. Like in the video I posted though you could get to a theoretical 99.99% but getting to that point would take a very, very long time.


And that's true but there has been nothing to suggest that Einstein's Theory of Relativity is flawed. Everything we have discovered in the known universe, aside from quantum mechanics, works as it should with that theory. Quantum mechanics however is something we barely understand but does not mean it would correlate with proving relativity wrong.


That is a popular hypothesis but besides some well educated guesses and a bit of number crunching there's not much to really back it up at the moment. It is believed though that this is a field where knowledge in quantum mechanics will pay off.


Yes, they do. The amount of gravitational pull is so strong that it bends light! It literally warps time around it and does crazy things with light. Any thing containing matter that breaks the event horizon would most certainly be destroyed.


And that may one day be possible. But we cannot outright break the laws of physics. We can find shortcuts and find workarounds but we cannot undo something that binds the universe together.
A multiverse is extremely likely but again many believe this is where quantum physics is going to the most important to grasp.

So are you saying it's impossible that we could actually be living a real life simulation like in the The Matrix movies?

Or that there might not be more physics in this universe that we have not discovered yet?

Anything is possible, nothing is certain. We could very be a computer simulation but there has been literally no evidence to support it.

There probably is, but those fields of study will most likely not contribute anything that would alter what we know is a certainty. Bypass? Yes, but not disprove it.

True, there is no evidence yet that we are living in a computer simulation developed by someone else, but NASA did launch I don't I think this year some type of probe to detect if possibilities of us living in a simulation or simulations exist.

I have no idea how this probe will detect that stuff, but I guess NASA has figured out what infrared, thermal, radio waves or whatever to use to study this stuff?

I have been watching quite a few German let's players and most of them are complaining that it is really hot in Germany.

Must... not... crack... joke...

Oh, well, then it'll only make travel faster within the solar system. For whatever good that does. Well, travel to Mars faster, for whatever good that does

Nah, it'd still mean faster interstellar travel... after all, decades is less time than centuries .

EDIT: Seriously, though, if asteroid mining were commercially viable it make a huge difference to all space-related activities, in addition to impact it would have on terrestrial economies, etc.; one of the biggest chokepoints for us at the moment is getting crud into orbit, which places severe limits on any space craft or stations we want to build. If we can pull water and other resources out of space in copious quantities, it becomes possible that we could process and construct in space*, which would mean all** we have to worry about is getting humans to the crud.

*I am including the moon and other naturally occurring satellites.
**If I may gloss over a ton of stuff .

Yes, getting to space is the problem, difficult and expensive. After that it's easy, you just need to deal with the insta-kill
An orbital elevator would make all space stuff much cheaper, and asteroid mining might just be a good motivation for that.
Well, that, or finding little green men to exploit, enslave and exterminate

NASA is also doing Research & Development (R&D) to see if it's possible to put human beings in suspended animations.

NASA thinks of everything.

I don't think putting human beings in suspended animations can work. How do you make the brain sleep without the human being dying? Would you inject IV tubes in them to get their food and nutrients?

How would you cryogenically freeze a human being and not have them not be dead when you thaw them?

You could convert a large asteroid as a Colony Ship.

I just hope this doesn't interfere with building the Dyson Sphere. It would put us on the map as a nice galactic tourist attraction.

Space elevators would be extremely difficult to pull off.

https://youtu.be/GJ4Qp2xeRds

Probably would have to, giant ships like that might be unfeasible to build traditionally.


Not to mention structures like that. Is there even enough material in the entire solar system for that?


No doubt, might be impossible with current technologies and materials, and the initial cost for starting such project is a huge barrier, but you gotta have goals

The whole point of trying to reach out into the solar system would essentially be to harvest resources and send them back to Earth, or to wherever they can be processed to extract raw materials for further processing elsewhere (essentially, you extract ore, transport it to process center to obtain raw materials, than transport again to places that use raw materials to make a finished product). Actually, it might be even cheaper to setup a processing facility at the point of extraction, since transporting material is all about the energy required to move it. You don't really want to move the unwanted material unless you have to. So mine the ore, process it on site, separate it into raw materials, and then send those to Earth (or Moon!). Mars for example simply could be a huge iron deposit. We already know the soil is rich with iron because the entire surface is essentially iron oxide dust (rust). However, other places in the solar system might be able to provide huge deposits of those "rare earth" minerals, another big goal for us to be able to obtain them. This whole thing about harvesting the solar system is pretty much a step to take us out of the solar system. The EMDrives are theorhetically good for moving us around the solar system. Essentially you want to make travel around the solar system to be like what travelling the Earth was back before we had engine-powered cargo ships (where a large transport galleon was the way to move materials between continents). If you could reduce the travel time between say Earth and the Asteroid belt to say 6 months to a year (having multiple shipments travelling for deliveries once-a-month), imagine what we could harvest from there. Taking the solutions we could find in the propulsion, we then have to figure out the logistics (a balance between how much we can move and how fast we can move it).

As for fusion power: There have been two historical problems, ones that we can actually solve (well the second one, we sort-of solved) on their own, but putting them together at the same time is the ultimate problem and goal.


1. Sustaining a fusion process (which is what was accomplished in Germany at the MP Institute).

2. Getting a net power gain out of the process

Then after those two are solved, you then have the third one to solve for true applicability to benefit civilization: refining the process that solves both of these problem simultaneously so that you then have a cost efficient self-sustaining net power gain. Think of it this way (please note that the numbers here are arbitrary and for demonstration only): a traditional nuclear fission power plant using fission uses X amount of energy to sustain it's process, and then in return puts out 100X amount of energy. We can do this because it makes sense to use that energy and distribute it to those who need/want it. It will essentially pay for itself. A futuristic nuclear fusion plant needs to accomplish the same thing, but right now we can only solve the problems individually as we have hit the "break-even" point for the fuel (accomplished by the NIF) but not the process, and a sustainable process to create, contain, and maintain a plasma (by MPI). So say we accomplish all of that: a sustainable process which uses less energy to perform and the fuel contains than it outputs; we then need to refine all of it so that you hit a point where you produce energy at a cost efficient level. So say the total amount of energy you put into the process is X, and what you get out of it is say 1.2X or even 2X...it would be a LONG LONG LONG LONG time before we see a true ROI.

We are making baby steps to it. There is a long running joke in the research for fusion power: we've been 30 years away from achieving it for the past 30 years. It reminds me of this joke from the movie Snatch:



We are closer to it than ever before, but we still have some very big problems to solve. Slowly chipping away at it though. If we can make the breakthrough though, it would solve A LOT of problems in this world. Energy to do anything is a huge deal, and fusion power is a HUGE world investment to providing energy in ways that would literally transform our planet for the good of everything...to humans and the environment. For example: water resource is a huge problem, but of all the water on Earth...only 3.5% is freshwater, the rest is saltwater. We have a process to change saltwater into freshwater, but it is energy intensive and takes quite a bit of time: desalination. If we could achieve fusion power though, the concern for energy would be almost non-existance for these operation of these plants. It would actually be beneficial to build them relatively close to each other. The process to clean soiled water (gray and black) is less energy intensive than desalination. By harnessing Fusion power, with the simple fuels it would require in theory, it would provide energy to essentially provide almost limitless fresh water around the globe. All while not consuming fossil fuels, or at the very least consuming them at a level that is so far reduced that it wouldn't matter.


I could go on and on about what fusion energy would be able to do for civilization. For sustaining fresh water to being able to provide a means for Solar System resource extraction (see above), it is literally the biggest goal our civilzation to truly elevate us to the next level. I don't mean that in a cliche sense either, I mean it in the the truest sense you could possibly mean. We still have a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG way to go.

Actually, we did it in 1938. 1945 was only the year it was successfully tested as a weapon.

Bah. Just take the scrap from a couple of junk yards and you're good to go!

If we ever did harness fussion as a viable energy source what would the potential for space travel be? What are the possibilities when you have a bottled star thrusting you through space or even warping time around you?

Yes there should be enough silica in our solar system to manufacture the huge solar panels to cover our sun with a Dyson Sphere.

Solar panels are mostly made of silica crystals thinly. Mostly from sand.

There's billions of tons of sand on the Earth, the Moon has a bunch of Basalt and some sand, Mars has sandy dunes, Mercury has sandy dunes.

Only the gas giant planets don't really have rocks or sand.

Also once we manufacture this warp drive we should be manufacturing factories in space.

NASA says this will be better and cheaper even private space companies want this.

Manufacturing factories in space to manufacture spaceships will be cheaper and faster if we mine the asteroids.

Then we won't probably even need fuel stations on the Moon and Mars at all.

Because we are using a chemical propellant liquid fuel less propulsion engine.

Ion engines, nuclear powered engines and a combination of elctromagnetisism and microwave propelled engines is what we are using and will have to use to go farther and farther into space.

Nothing wrong with dooming the earth to freeze to death.

If alien civilizations built a Dyson Sphere to harness their star's energy I think they would also have huge spaceships and space stations that they brought in animal and plant life to live in?

I remember in a episode of Stargate Universe they had a huge green house on their spaceship.

https://youtu.be/s4Y3dlTDAxw


Here's a good video that actually answers some of those questions.... with building the Death Star.

Covering the sun with solar collectors would be a Dyson Bubble, it would still let sunlight trough it. A Dyson Sphere is a solid construction with radius of 1 AU around the sun, with people living on it's inner surface.

Like in Freelancer's final mission: https://youtu.be/1AZ5V2OpJxo?t=699

To produce a continuous 2mm thick sphere with a radius of 1 AU would take an amount of material ~1/2 the volume of the earth. To build a Dyson sphere we would have to completely deconstruct at least one of the rocky planets (Venus) or several of the smaller ones or the moons of the gas giants.