Matter/antimatter mix is the way to go.

Who needs Venus? Out with the old and in with the new!

The only problem with removing a planet is it will screw with other planets as their gravitational pull is no longer there.

Minor details!

The possibilities of fusion reactors aren't hugely different from fission reactors, it's just that they'd potentially be cheaper, safer, and more sustainable (plutonium is a bit rarer than hydrogen). So, yeah, it'd just be a different way to get power for whatever we're trying to do.

Fusion has nothing to do with 'warping time'.

Another progress theory suggests that once we are able to harness the next big energy production source, it becomes a stepping stone to the next one.


As someone else mentioned, matter-antimatter conversion is something to consider. Once unlocking fusion power with it being in abundance, we could use the excess to figure out to get to the next step. For example, one current start-up plan for fusion reactors is to start them up with a fission reaction to get the energy buildup required to fuse atoms to start the fusion process.


So use fusion power to research/start-up next energy source, ?????, profit.


That next thing would be the one that potentially could warp spacetime.

Sure, but wouldn't the potential for greater energy output be possible?




I was thinking if we got to the level of forming a "mini-star". But I suppose I'm going into science fiction.

That would take a lot more energy and a much much much bigger facility than a typical reactor.


And fusion reactors could output more power, it's the simple nature of the actual fusion process. Essentially reactors would be built in a manner so that you provide enough power to an area. While we have gotten better at making machines efficiently to turn the wheel (after all, all forms of thermal power use water steam to turn a turbine), we are kind of stuck at the maximun distance we can transmit power over the grid from source to end user. I forget what exactly the peak range is, but I think it's approximately 250 miles.


Fusion reactors would defintely end up with higher outputs, but within reason to area demand currently and forecasted for the next....50 years. The main goal of fusion is cleaner energy and much less dangerous waste.

That's right! Minor details!

Who is with me??? Tear down Venus and start that Dyson Sphere!

Are you saying warp space time as in the warp drive engine thing we have now that's in testing phases? Or warp time forward or backward like time traveling?

How about we just mine the whole solar system and maybe the next few solar systems and manufacture a spaceship as big as our own solar system? Complete with huge lush green forests and snowy mountains that are not possible on Earth.

Moving through spacetime for travel through space while being affected very little, if at all, by time and any dilation affects.


Time travel is not entirely different, just moving along a different but thus far unnavigatable path. We know how to move through space, we know it can be warped. When you do both of these things, you also affect your movement through time.


The goal of warp engine tech, which we are no where close to doing like Star Trek level, is to not be moving through time at the proportion we would through space. In fact, technically we wouldnt be moving, but rather bending space around us which solves the idea of not moving through time. This is why lightspeed and FTL are bad ideas, because at the speed of light you dont move through time at all but everything around you does.


This is also why time travelling would be bad because even if we could go through time, we would most likely only know how to move forward in time, not backwards.

Omg. My very own Skyrim. Let's go!

The problem with antimatter is getting it; you have to either find and get to a region where it exists in commercially useful quantities*, both of which are far from trivial, or make it ourselves, which is expensive both in terms of money (I believe the estimate is billions of dollars per gram at this point) and energy. Now, if we managed to get the price down and efficiency up, it might be handy as a light-weight, high-power fuel, but it'd be a bit like using hydrogen fuel cells -- a useful way to store it, but ultimately a net loss of energy.

Again, though, I'm happy to be corrected by anyone better informed than I am.

*As opposed to, say, the milligrams that can be scrounged up around Saturn, which may be very useful for researchers.

If we ever figure out straight up teleportation (i.e. changing matter's dimensional location in a non-linear way), I would be unsurprised if we discovered spatial coordinates are all we can mess with, given that time is just like the other dimensions (only crunchy different).

I may be rambling, but.

Yes, I'm aware of the scarcity of antimatter and how insanely costly it is to produce. That is for the time being. We do not know what the future will hold for us, so the best we can do is just try to take the next step and not worry about the one after that until we are ready and capable of taking it.




The problem with teleportation is that as we know it, you dont actually transport the actual matter. More so you destroy it while recording it's data and almost simutaneously rebuilding it another location.

Are people not excited by this warp drive discovery we have right now? I mean the next 40 years to 50 years advancements in the technology for warp engines are going to be absolutely amazing.

This is a huge achievement for us human beings as a species.

Once we have advanced the warp engines enough for spaceships, then we should look forward to technology advancements for antimatter engines and dark matter engines.

I have a master's degree in mechanical engineering, and took several courses related to space travel including astrodynamics and rocket propulsion, and here's my two cents on this.

I do not know if EmDrive will be a revolutionary breakthrough or not, but it is not intended to go faster than the speed of light. It won't even go at remotely relativistic speeds- the rumors I've caught are that it'd supposedly be able to deliver astronauts to Mars in 10 weeks, which while a massive improvement on the current typical time to reach the Red Planet, isn't exactly what one would call warp speed. That's not to say that it wouldn't revolutionize space travel if it lived up to its hype- fuel weight is one of the biggest limitations when dealing with chemical rockets (there's a reason that only a small part of what you see on a launch pad actually makes it into orbit). At the same time, fuel efficiency or pure thrust isn't everything. How much power does it require to operate? What is the thrust/weight ratio of the thruster?

Ion thrusters are interesting technology. The problem with them is that while they are enormously efficient in terms of propellant mass, they can only produce minuscule thrust due to the equally minuscule rate at which the propellant mass is expelled. This makes them useless for quick maneuvers or launching a spacecraft off the ground, but they can move a satellite from one orbit to another much more efficiently fuel-wise, although it'll take a long, long time to do so.

Well it seems the EmDrive passed some peer review tests showing it has some promising results to warp space at NASA's Eaglelabs.

So that has to be something.

Indeed.

In terms of effectively similar stuff that we could conceivably achieve with technology that's near our fingertips, sure. But even that is hardly around the corner, and still isn't 'real' teleportation.

It is not a warp drive. It is -according to its proponents- a revolutionary new propulsion technology, and that's cool an' all, but it ain't no warp drive.

I've heard a lot about these kinds of ideas and rumours for decades. Whilst I genuinely hope for Star Trek to be reality, I highly doubt that will come to fruition any time in the near future. It's a long way away, if at all.

Regarding warp drives, the theories have been solid for well over a decade, the primary issue being materials that could withstand travelling at such a velocity without complete structural collapse. Of course, if it were only so simple as being a question of finding a tough enough material or alloy, we also have to consider the concept of kinetic and inertia dampening fields, for which the science behind the idea has not yet yielded a satisfactory theory, let alone a practical method of implementation.

Then there's the actual question of "warp" speed, and whether that is truly sufficient to explore outside of the system. Even within the Solar System, lightspeed isn't as fast as you'd probably think it is.

I believe I recall the tests involving passing a laser through a tube filled with bromine gas which increased the speed that the laser travelled at by a factor of 5.6(?). Creating an engine that could harness that and convert it into effective propulsion is yet again, quite a challenge, and one that we are unlikely to see accomplished within our lifetimes.

Regarding the construction of lightspeed engines, I believe the theories that are plausible are derived from the same concept behind things like optical computing and photonic logic.

To build something out of light removes a lot of matter from the equation, but again, we hit the hurdle of the matter of the vessel itself and anyone within slowing everything down, which is why we need a ship-wide field that can be generated and sustained. Yes, it relies on quantum mechanics to essentially create a bubble for the ship to travel in, but I believe it's feasible. Arguably unsafe for people until extensively tested, but still, the scientific community may need to bite the proverbial bullet with that issue and find some willing volunteers.

Anyway, all very fascinating, but don't get your hopes up. For now, molecular science and the study of things like dark matter are what will see us come to a greater understanding of quantum mechanics and how our own reality exists. Perhaps then we will understand "energy" better as a concept and as a thing in our universe.

IT'S NOT A [censored] WARP DRIVE!!!

The Em drive is at best a reactionless drive that some parties (not NASA Eagleworks IIRC) have said to have detected space warping inside the drive's operational core, somewhere where it is useless as far as a usable warp drive goes. An Alcubierre drive requires a warp bubble around the craft, a bubble that must be formed outside the craft as the boundary of the bubble will tear matter apart at the subatomic level.

Far as anti matter goes, it will always require some other source of power to generate the antimatter and unless we utterly break the conservation of energy, we'll always use more power to make antimatter than we can get from using it. We might, might, find a cost effective way of harvesting the stuff from the Van Allen belts of Earth or the gas giants.

Dark matter has no known use in spaceflight far as I know, it's just stuff that doesn't interact electromagnetically and makes up a majority of the mass of galaxies. Because it doesn't interact electromagnetically means it's a [censored] and a half to work with as pretty much all of our technology is dependent on electromagnetic interaction between things.

Based on past observation, the chance of him catching on are somewhere around 50/50. So don't bang your head against the wall if he doesn't, just be satisfied that you've made the truth clear for any uninformed thread-readers.

All this science and yet still no practical commercial hoverboards way to go humans and also battery technologiy hasnt really seen any big advancements yet so im waiting on that for way longer battery life for phones so i have something to look at when the whole "space" scenerey gets boring to look at....also we're gonna need on hand cameras once we find out hp lovecraft got his inspiration from real creatures.....

I did catch on to what Didact said.

There's one thing people are missing that they seem to not of read from my topic when I made it.

After 2018 when NASA launches their SLS spacecraft, they will move on to Research and Development (R&D) of warp drive engines. They have a budget for this to be funded until 2050.

Here's a rendering for the 2018 launch of the SLS spacecraft.

http://i.imgur.com/yzb2lRk.jpg

This EmDrive and the peer reviews that passed at NASA's Eaglelabs has them convinced. Otherwise they wouldn't be funding this Rea search and Development (R&D) for it until 2050 for no reason.

They want to advance the technology so we can achieve a real warp drive engine in 2050.

Or is NASA wasting taxpayers money by setting this budget for Research and Development (R&D) for warp drives to be achievable by 2050.

Do you guys think it's a waste of tax payers money?

The issue with teleportation, as mentioned, is that the matter is not actually transported. Object is deconstructed at the atomic level at point A and the data is stored and transfered to point B where a copy of the object is reconstructed at the atomic level.


If the object is alive, like a person, you are literally watching them die as they are ripped appart. Then at point B you are seeing a reconstructed copy of that person being made.


Then we have to go a step further and wonder something that borders the line of metaphysics. Would the copy be alive or would it crumple to the floor like a meat sack? And if not is he the same person that you just watch die? Do memories transfer? It's definitely not as easy as "Beam me up Scotty."