BF2S Forums Neutrinos, Cosmos, Matter and Antimatter

Lol^^^^^^

Kaosdad008 wrote:

When talking about space travel, folks always focus on propulsion.  There is another, equally important problem:  space junk.  Not only "human debris" but just small chunks of rock floating out there naturally.  Ever wonder what that big dish was on the Enterprise?  It was a shield emitter that cleared crap out of the way of the ship.  As Roddenberry put it; "At warp speed, something the size of a pebble would rip a hole in the Entrprise saucer big enough to drive a truck through."

Roddenberry didn't need that big dish if he truly understood how a warp drive worked.  A warp drive works by warping space (WOW!) In Front and in back of the ship (at least in simple terms).  Basically the goal is to contract space in fron of the ship, and expand space behind the ship.  Because your messing with the fabric of space time, you can travel faster than the speed of light... at least compaired to things outside your area of warped space.  Inside your little bubble you aren't really moving much at all, so you don't run into that little problem of time dilation that you get with traveling near the speed of light with normal means of propulsion.  And to slowly get to my point, if you have the ability to warp space, you could probably plow through a planet with your warp bubble if you had enough energy to keep the field maintained, so those little rocks aren't an issue.

The problem with warp drive (or any other FTL engines) is that they take an enourmous ammount of energy.  More than the every power station on the planet produces in one year.  Even antimatter wouldn't be able to produce enough energy.  Most theorists believe it would take vacuum energy(sometimes called zero point energy), which is way to complicated for me to try and explain here, but it's essentially a limitless source of clean power.  And there are a few theories on how to use vacuum energy, but most of them require nano technology that we don't have yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if I saw expirements in 15 years trying to capture vacuum energy.  Would love to see it happen, it's the ultimate alternative energy source.


I firmly believe that humanity need to get out into the cosmo's, and I don't just mean our own solar system.  Right now we've got all our eggs in one basket.  If a star were to go supernova near our solar system (by near, I mean under 500 light years, or therabouts) we could pretty much kiss our solar system good bye.  getting off earth is a good start, but getting spread out trough the galaxy, or better yet, the universe is the surest way to protect humanity.

I give ya some karma back, but I don't have enough posts yet, I'll try to remember once I've got enough.