Exactly.
“How does the Jump Drive work?”
“Well, I press this here button, and it makes some noises, and then I’m somewhere else.”
What we need is an end-all phrase that explains every aspect of the game.
For instance, in PS2 if something doesn’t make sense and somebody posts about it on the forums, the response is ‘because nanites’.
How about ‘because technology’?
Space wizards.
I will most likely be one of those hardcore PvP guys but I’m also a physicist and will argue for as realistic as possible game mechanics. That being said, Kichae you have been and probably always will be more vocal than I which is no bad thing. I tend to agree with most of your proposals on certain mechanics whenever I read them. If your proposals continue to make sense for both gameplay and realistic(of which I have little doubt) reasons then I will back them as well.
Technomages?
Maybe a variant : scientists are not yet quite sure how or why it works. They are pretty consistently certain that it shouldn’t.
Or, at least, those who don’t die of acute dementia, gurgling about dormant light and frightened stars in languages no human tongue was meant to pronounce nor human ear to understand, clawing through space and time with broken nails and missing hands. But what have you, as long as it works…
Or, it works, but believe us, the theory behind it is far, far too complicated anyway.
Or, imagine that space is an ocean. Now, imagine that imagine that the drive is able to cause wind to blow and create waves. Well, it doesn’t work that way but you can think so if it helps you.
Or, it change local physical propreties of space. Sort of. Actually, that’s like saying that the boat moves because it’s afraid of the sail. Better than nothing, I guess.
Or, well, we kind of cheat - we’re using a DDOS attack against spacetime, and then we cheat when the Universe is looking the other way.
But I’d argue that with Clarke’s third law, we are already becoming technomages.
That’s actually a setting I’d like to see being explored : a mild post-singularity future, wild and unequal for stoytelling purposes, where technology is pretty much functionally treated as magic. People know well that it’s technology and not some mystical force (though some will treat technology as such - some already do), that it can be explained. But when you can call heavenly fire, you can call heavenly fire - be it by invoking eldritch forces from outer dimensions or by hacking into a network of military satellites - and in both cases, you are taking similar risks : attracting the wrathful attention of something far, far bigger than you.
Maybe not with the Infinity universe, though.
2 Likes
Folding space to get from point A to point B in short time relative to those ‘on board’ craft.
… as per this link: http://gizmodo.com/5942634/nasa-starts-development-of-real-life-star-trek-warp-drive
The drive that Nasa is doing theoretical work on is called the alcubierre drive. It doesn’t work by folding spacetime but by manipulating spacetime itself and by riding it like it a wave. This gets around the speed of light limitation by riding spacetime itself instead of riding through space time. It would be the analog of standing on a carpet while the carpet moves instead of you walking along the carpet. It’s a rough analogy but it works
Skyentist I think there is a link on the science page.
Note that it also doesn’t work at all unless someone figures out a way to obtain matter with a negative mass, something which, last I checked, had never been observed in the actual physical universe.
That, and all the other small problems if we somehow got our hands on negative matter.
Including how to prevent other people from using their warp drives to flash-gamma-fry your planet as a makeshift interstellar missile.
Kind of ’ Surfing with the Alien’ then? ( Joe Satriani )
I was under the impression that negative mass is already accepted in priciple - forming the majority of the known universe. Is that not what Dark Matter refers to? ( I might be off base ) … My understanding is that dark matter / negative mass is the holy grail of ‘new energy’ being touted as just around the proverbial corner, for us on earth.
Is it possible that dark matter holds the key ( or one of the keys ) to ‘riding the carpet’ across space and time?
thanks to artist Mark Rademaker, we now know what one could look like. The result is the IXS Enterprise, a ship that shares similarities with both its science fiction Star Trek namesake, and NASA’s real-world space shuttle.
Rademaker worked together with NASA’s Dr. Harold White to produce visual concepts for the craft. White and his team at NASA are hoping to make “faster-than-light” travel possible with Alcubierre drives. The drives, named for physicist Miguel Alcubierre, theoretically work by distorting space-time. By expanding the space behind a ship and contracting the space in front of it, the IXS Enterprise could drastically speed up our space travel potential, making the 4.3 light-year journey to Alpha Centauri in around two weeks.
Until NASA announces a breakthrough in its research of Alcubierre drives and “faster-than-light” travel technology, Rademaker’s concepts will remain only concepts. But his visualization of the IXS Enterprise still gives us a glimpse of the kinds of vehicles we’ll hopefully one day be able to use to travel to strange new worlds, to seek out new life, and new civilizations.
Dark Matter is not, or rather does not have negative mass. Dark Matter has regular mass.
Dark Matter is matter that has not yet been observed directly, nor does it look like being affected by EM waves in any way. Hence the “Dark”. The theory of Dark Matter comes from inconsistencies in observations of dinstant galaxies. Normally they should behave differently.
Factoring in invisible matter to regions of a galaxy corrects the results of calculations more to what is observed.
I may also be off-base, but you may be thinking of Dark Energy, which I think (it’s too early in the morning for me to be bothered to check) is what scientists have labelled the ‘force’ that seems to be causing the increasing speed of expansion of our universe.
This concept is nothing more than that, a concept. Mark Rademaker wanted to create a Star Trek NASA prototype, so he apparently ask NASA for tips. It doesn’t mean that NASA plan to, or even think they can build such starship.
It also doesn’t mean that this ship makes sense - we’re talking about a Star Trek ship after all. For example, the boat-like horizontal cockpit makes no sense, but is a Star Trek standard. This ship is meant to (and does) look cool, not be a realistic design.
But for some reason, many media seem to not care and prefer to title “NASA WORKING ON WARP DRIVE!”, the same way they will title “NASA FINDS HABITABLE PLANET!” or “NASA SAYS ANCIENT CARVED STONE MADE BY ALIENS!” or “NASA FINDS LIFE ON MARS!”.
Or gah “SUPERCOMPUTER PASS TURING TEST!”.
AFAICT, Harold White has a sulfurous reputation, and the fact that he is working on theoretical elements of a warp drive shouldn’t be taken as a sigh that NASA or the scientific community at large really expects it to work.
He is also working on a fuel-less drive using virtual particles as propellant (named quantum vacuum plasma thruster), probably because the Chinese announced working on a similar one (named EM-drive) some years ago. I have yet to find someone who could tell me how would conservation of momentum work on those, so I’m a bit skeptical there as well.
Finally, negative matter is often confused with other things. Here is what it is not :
-
Dark matter : this is normal matter we happen to not be able to observe directly, but see its gravitational effects.
It could be planets or otherwise normal matter floating in deep space, far from the stars and thus too dark to be seen. It could be, in varied proportions, some exotic particles that happens to not interact with us otherwise than with gravity, similarly to sterile neutrinos. It could be something else we didn’t think about yet.
Whatever it is, it is normal, positive matter. Negative matter has negative gravity, and that’s precisely not what we’re observing. -
Antimatter : antimatter is normal, positive matter, but with a sign inverted somewhere. So electrons have a positive charge (and called positrons). Protons have a negative charge, and so on. And there is this side effect where two opposed particles turn into (familiar, positive) energy when colliding.
Apart from those little things, antimatter is fairly normal for us - and has positive, familiar gravity. There are many phenomena that produce it, like some nuclear fissions, and we know how to produce and stock it to a limited extent.
The problem we have is that all known phenomena to produce it generate both opposite particles, matter and antimatter, so some wonder why there is such an excess of matter in the observable Universe. Some say that there may be a subtle unbalance we don’t know of yet. Other say that it may be because from time to time, two matter, or two antimatter particles are formed instead of one of each, and the Universe is simply filled with a random leftover excess that happened in one direction.
Interestingly, negative energy would allow for the creation of negative matter an negative antimatter, the same way positive, familiar energy allow for creation of positive, familiar matter and positive, familiar antimatter.
It is also not dark matter - it wouldn’t be “dark”, and the sky would be a tad brighter in the gamma range, what will all the interactions with matter. That, and it wouldn’t have no particular reason to be darker than matter to begin with. -
Dark energy : dark energy is a force, hypothetized to explain why the expension of the Universe is accelerating (it should be decelerating due to the gravitational attraction of everything inside). We have no idea what it is, but it seems to be fairly distributed, which would be incompatible with chunks of negative matter lying around. It may have something to do with negative energy uniformly scattered across the universe, but as we actually don’t have a clue, well, it would be a stretch to jump on that.
Negative energy, and thus negative matter, is not forbidden by our current understanding of the laws of physics. There is places in the equations where we can tell : yep, if there is negative energy around, here’s how it would work.
It doesn’t mean that it exist, nor that there is any phenomenon in the Universe that could make it exist.
And as I linked above, there would still be the problems with the energy requirements bigger than the observable Universe, the bubble instantly filling with deadly radiations, the fact that you can’t stop it from the inside, the problem that you collect anything you pass through and realase it in the form of planet-frying gamma flash when stopping, the fact that unless unknown physics, FTL = time travel…
2 Likes
Yes, that’s it. ty - was a faux on my part. Dark Energy is what I was thinking of. There’s a lot of high grade smarts in this forum. Refreshing, for sure. Thanks for the time to write all the above ThornEel. Awesome stuff. Made my day.
I am still enamored with the idea of ‘surfing the magic carpet’ edge of time/space. I’m wondering if the engine could simulate that, somehow, to facilitate distance travels in much shorter periods ingame. Kind of i-NovaeWave travel. " Join i-Novae - Ride the Wave " 
( … or beyond the call - accidentally coming up with a real solution for time/space travel designing in i-Novae’s game engine … now that would be stellar )
To be fair, all those problems really aren’t that big a deal compared to the whole getting hold of something that doesn’t seem to exist. I mean, getting more energy than is available in the observable universe all gathered in one spot would be difficult, certainly, but not actually impossible (you’d just have to be able to go faster than the speed of light first).
Deadly radiation, stopping it from the inside, gamma flashes, and time travel is really not that big a deal, comparatively speaking. I mean… we’re talking about using more energy than is available in the observable universe to get this thing going, don’t think you really need to worry about what happens to a single planet or two when it stops (even if that happens before it started).
Well to put it in perspective if we’re still talking about the alcubierre drive(under the assumption we can produce and control negative energy) the speed would be controlled by the amount of energy input into the drive. For humanity, even an alcubierre drive at sublight speeds using only positive energy would revolutionize travel inside our own system.
ThornEel did a nice explanation of the various other subjects you mentioned as well. In response to his first remark, the reason the ship looks like a trek ship is because the artist is an artist from star trek. It is stated in the article what the ship could looks like. We know obviously that no spacecraft will look like that in the near future. That being said, NASA has White and others working on the concept because in theory it’s possible and worth researching. I think we all are reasonable enough to ignore media headlines and read between the lines.
This is a little bit of a ramble, but I tried to avoid math and limit jargon as much as possible, and it’s waaaaay too late in the evening to pull that off without walking down a crooked path.
The thing about dark energy is that it still has a positive energy density, which means it still represents a positive mass-energy. If, in fact, there are a significant number of negative massed particles out there in the universe that currently evade detection, it would actually throw off our current CDMΛ cosmology models.
In the most basic sense, our current cosmological framework goes all of the way back to Einstein and his theory of General Relativity. Einstein used relativity theory to show a couple of things, most famously that mass and energy are two different manifestations of the same thing, and less well known that energy also has a gravitational ‘field’. This means that, in GR anyway, energy doesn’t have to be in the form of massive matter in order to gravitationally attract objects. GR, and modern cosmological models, are agnostic as to how that energy manifests itself.
Now, the thing of it is that energy doesn’t actually have mass, and in GR we don’t actually talk about mass at all. We talk about mass density, for massive matter, and pressure for energy. Positive energy has a positive gravitational pressure, and has the same kind of overall effect on the expansion or contraction of the universe as positive mass density does: It slow expansions and accelerates contractions. Negative mass density and negative energy pressure have the opposite effect.
But dark energy, as far as we can tell, is different. Dark energy has a positive energy density, and a negative pressure. It is also, depending on what the dark energy actually is, quite possibly inherently unusable. Take, for instance, the cosmological constant (which just so happens to be the leading candidate for dark energy). By its nature, the cosmological constant represents a constant energy density through all space and for all time. This means that as the universe has expanded, the total amount of “cosmological constant energy” has increased. It seems like it should be a never-ending gold mine! But energy is a funny thing. Energy is only useful when you have high concentrations of it in one place, and low concentrations of it in another. Energy will not flow if the energy density is constant! So, this energy can generate a pressure that pushes space-time to expand, but it cannot be harvested. It is, for all intents and purposes, a property of empty space itself.
One of the underlying explanations for this is that the cosmological constant represents the so-called Zero Point energy. While people with books and crystals to sell push ZPE as some sort of magic free energy well, it’s not. ZPE is kind of the space-time energy equivalent of ground state energy in chemistry or nuclear physics. It basically represents the theoretical basement as far as energy density is concerned. Just as the energy of an electron in its ground state is unharvestable due to the laws of quantum mechanics (the Pauli exclusion principle prevents you from forcing that electron any closer to the atomic nucleus, and so its energy is trapped), the ZPE is fundamentally inaccessible. It can’t be tapped or stored or transported or stockpiled, which is exactly what we’d need to do in order to utilize its negative pressure to form an Alcubierre space-time geometry.
The cosmological constant/ZPE/dark energy may be generating a negative pressure on the universe, causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate, but that’s not useful for us. Instead, it simply defines our baseline. It’s like sea level. If you think of the Alcubierre warp drive like surfing that wave that @Skyentist mentioned, you need the wave to actually rise above sea level in order to ride it. If the wave sits at sea level, you won’t even notice it. That’s exactly what negative energy does: It creates a negative pressure, which is like a wave peak sticking out of space-time. We only get that peak, however, when we can find a source of negative pressure that is greater than the “ocean” that is dark energy.
2 Likes