Time Travel's back again.

[Alondro]

Mmm-hmm...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070820/sc_livescience/timetravelmachineoutlined

Now, I just read an article in Discover about a new hypothesis that's growing in acceptance very rapidly as all mainstream physics supports it (and which I figured quite a few years ago as the only logical conclusion!):  There is no 'time', it is nothing more than our perception of the passage of kinetic events and entropic progression.  In that case, to travel 'back in time' you must exactly reverse the direction, energy, spin, and waveform of EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE.  Simply put, ain't no way in hell it can ever happen.  Even trying that on a small scale (ie, planet Earth) to go back in time one second would require pretty much the entire mass of the Sun converted to energy and then have every action of that energy absolutely controlled at the quantum level (or maybe below that, string level anyone?) to direct the reversal of all the atomic particles, reactions, and energy states.

Not to mention, that completely violates the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. 

So, this article is nothing but hype from some way-out physics.  A mathematical quirk and nothing more, like so many other 'time travel theories' before it.

[xHaZxMaTx]

Sounds like fun.

On a similar note, I thought of a way to look into the past, without actually having to be there.  Not sure if it works, but it makes sense in my head (though I doubt the technology is currently available, as you'd need an impossibly powerful telescope).  We all know light does not travel instantaneously, just very very fast, but even through the incomprehensible vastness of space, it takes millions, billions, trillions, etc. of years to travel from one point to another, say, a distant star to Earth.  Also, light does not always travel in a straight line; it can be curved and distorted due to large masses (planets, stars, black holes, blah blah blah).  Light from Earth from millions, billions, trillions and so on years ago is still traveling through space.  It seems possible that that light could be distorted and curved enough to actually make a U-turn.  I don't know how many masses you'd need or how large they'd have to be for this to work, but I'm sure there are enough in the universe.

Just my crack-pot theory, feel free to shoot huge, gaping holes in it.

[ITOS]

Just my crack-pot theory, feel free to shoot huge, gaping holes in it.

A u-turn? So you've invented a lagging mirror?

The problem with looking back in time that way is that you're not really looking at the past. You might as well just look at a photograph or a video.

[Darkmoon]

The science behind it wasn't at all suprising. I sorta thought this theory existed before. Reading about it now makes me sad I didn't get a physics degree so I could've written something similar years back.

Damn you art degree!

[Alondro]

Actually, we are looking back in time all the time!  The light we see from even the closest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 years old!  In other words, in the night sky we see the stars and galaxies how they looked tens, hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old!

Bring out a telescope and now your seeing millions of years back. 

Now, as goofy as this time travel theory is, looking it ovevr carefully I do think that the ability to isolate a patch of space would instead be incredibly valuable for a hypothetical warp drive!  Instead of time travel, this theory might provide one of the pieces of the puzzle to FTL transport!  The problem is whether this whole thing is just a quirk of the equation, or if it represents an actual phenomenon.

[xHaZxMaTx]

Actually, we are looking back in time all the time!  The light we see from even the closest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 years old!  In other words, in the night sky we see the stars and galaxies how they looked tens, hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old!

Bring out a telescope and now your seeing millions of years back. 

Oh sure, I already knew that, that's where I got the idea.

[techmaster-glitch]

Speaking of FTL travel, there are many, many different theoretical and fictional ways of doing it. Of Star Trek, one of the things I've always disliked is that nearly every race has to use the standard "Warp Drive", where you wrap yourself in a space-warping bubble to drop yourself out of the normal laws of physics. In the ST: TNG episode 'First Contact", they were monitoring a new race that was near initiating it's warp drive. There was another episode where the Enterprise was to watch the testing of an atually new way of FTL travel, something about "riding" an artificial energy wave. LaForge even said, "Think about it! Warp travel without a Warp Drive! This is huge!" I hated that. I don't like the mind-set that ST has, about the only possible way of FTL travel is the standard, cliche warp drive (Though I know that one or two other ways of FTL have appeared in ST, they focus almost exclusively about the warp drive)

Holy Crap, did I really just type that much of a rant about how over-used the Warp Dive is? I'm sheeshing myslef

Okay, apologies and enough beating around the bush on one single little subject that I typed way too much about.
My point is, if there really are multitudes of whole star-spanning extraterrestrial civillizations out there, I can't possibly imagine any of them having the same exact kind of FTL Travel. There are all kinds of things that have been thought up.

I personally like the version called StutterWarp (you will only get that if you've played Sword of the Stars. Liir Forever!)

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

The thing about the Warp drive, tech, is that it's based on the idea that the laws of Physics are identical, no matter where in the universe you are.

If that's the case, then the Warp Drive will, of necessity, -also- be identical, no matter where in the universe you are.

Sure, there'll be local changes, where someone builds it slightly differently, but on the whole, everyone builds a boat the same way, more or less. In the same fashion, everyone will build a Warp Drive the same way, more or less.


More complex universe theories involve laws changing depending on where you are. In which case a War Drive built here works here. But stops once you get outside the local area. Good way, it stops when you reach your destination. Bad way, you get out into interstellar space and -then- stop.

I think one of my favourite little stories about this involved someone attempting to put together a satellite dish in a place where one plus one equalled one point seven or so. So a two-meter bar, and two one-meter bars bolted together , ended up at different lengths. This had extremely bad consequences for the plans... I forget how they solved it, but I think they bodged it together by using bits for anything but what they were originally designed for.

[Darkmoon]

llearch is right. Warp Driev is the way it is for everyone because it's thought of as a base law of Physics in the ST Univ. That said, the few races that did come up with something different were able to own the shit out of Federation vessels, at least for a little while.

My bigger beef is that everything became "Quantum" this of "Quantum" that in the later stories. As bland and boring as the all purpose Warp Drive, if you ask me.

[techmaster-glitch]

See? That's the problem I'm talking about; that "absolute mindset". It really bothers me. ST, at least, failed to take into account just how trumping very-distant-future technology/science can be. My stance is that, given enough time, (even if it's thousands, even millions of years) technology can find ways around anything. It has already proved to do that countless times in the history of humanity. Many times, there were things that nearly every single human being thought to be absolute "fact". The someone came along who questioned what he saw, and began actively observing it. From there, everything changes dramatically.
One of the biggies that comes to mind is that the Earth was the Center Of The Universe. Seriously, if you lived in that time, you would have believed, with all your heart and soul, that that was true. Look at how that turned out
Likewise, I'm not so sure that light is the absolutely unbeatable barrier it's made out to be. Not to mention that it has already been proven; there is a way to make something go faster than light. I just checked it, some German scientists a while back used something called "quantum tunneling" and made some kind of energy beam travel faster than light would have. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTL_Travel#FTL_Possibility_Demonstrated
Even if you can't actually make mass go faster than light, there are still many other theoretical ways of travel that are, in a way, FTL. The first is a Warp Gate/Stargate. There you go. Yo have to travel at sublight speeds when going somewhere new, but once there, set up a gate and boom bam baby, you got instantaneous travel.

But a system that I particularly like is a system called StutterWarp. In the game Sword of the Stars, there is a race of aquatic dolphin-looking aliens called the Liir. Because of their nature, their ships must be filled with a liquid-oxygen medium. Obviously, this increases the mass of their ships exponentially, giving them a massive inertia problem. Literally. If they were to somehow get their hands on the Human's Node Drive or the Tarkas' Warp Drive, it wouldn't work for the Liir. Their ships would take forever to get up to speed, and once done so, they would be damn near impossible to slow down. So, they invented StutterWarp. Basically, what this does is it teleports their ships, but in tiny spatial increments of about a milimeter, but millions/billions of times per second. This sytem has the advantage of giving the Liir ships unparalleled "speed" in open space, but if they even get close to a gravity well (star/planet/blackhole) their ships slow down dramatically as the calculations for the "stuttering" get trickier for the computers that control the system. What's funny about all this is that, technically, a Liir ship never "moves". At least, not in the traditional sense. No propultion whatsoever, they just change their space-time coordinates. This makes their inertia problem moot. This is also what lets them travel "faster" than light; the ship never actually propels itself.

[superluser]

I just checked it, some German scientists a while back used something called "quantum tunneling" and made some kind of energy beam travel faster than light would have. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTL_Travel#FTL_Possibility_Demonstrated

I'm pretty sure we've seen tunnelling for decades.  It's a consequence of the Schrödinger equation.  A quick check of Wikipedia says that we've had Scanning Tunnelling Microscopes since 1972.  Enders and Nimtz sent superliminal microwaves without phase shifting in 1992.

It's been a while since I looked at this, and I'm trying to remember if this applies to individual photons or just to pulses.  We've sent pulses faster than light, but the wave front still moves at the speed of light.  It's like walking from the back of the bus to the front of the bus and then declaring that you've travelled faster than the bus.  It's certainly true, but you'll never get there before the front of the bus.

[techmaster-glitch]

Maybe not, but at least it's a step in the right direction of beating that so-called 'barrier'.

[Alondro]

It's been a while since I looked at this, and I'm trying to remember if this applies to individual photons or just to pulses.  We've sent pulses faster than light, but the wave front still moves at the speed of light.  It's like walking from the back of the bus to the front of the bus and then declaring that you've travelled faster than the bus.  It's certainly true, but you'll never get there before the front of the bus.

Hmm, but that in itself does provide a way to travel between two points connected by a constantly generated wave front.  It'd be akin to the gates on Cowboy Bebop, in some ways, in which they seemed to be riding in a tunnel of continuously flowing energy (or hyperspace, whatever you choose to call it).  Or actually, the "Contact" gate network would be more like it, where once you enter a gate, you will always come out the other side because you can't leave the 'tube' of energy any other way. 

Quantum tunelling is an odd little thing.  I don't know if physicists actually understand it beyond a few varying theories, many of which require string theory or a variant of it to be correct for them to work.  It's not the same 'tunneling' as in electron microscopes; that terminology applies to something totally different.  It's funny because "Buckaroo Banzai" used the same sort of phenomenon with the overthruster!   

[Darkmoon]

You've gotta love a thread that mentions hard science and Buckaroo Bonzai.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

.. in the same post.

[Azlan]

Hey, I liked Buckaroo Banzai... I had a whole team of technomages in a Mage the Ascension game based off of this campy stuff.

Personally, I believe quantum mechanics will lead to the insight that will allow us to break the constraints of classical field theory.

[Fuyudenki]

Stutterwarp sounds a lot like the Enchanach drive from "Empire from the Ashes"(I'll get author and publishing info later.  The book's at home, I am not), which allowed FTL travel as a form of very fast, chained teleport.  Because of how it was done, though(massive gravitational forces across the surface of the ship), it couldn't be done within the vicinity of stars or planets, and it wasn't as fast as that universe's Hyperdrive technology.  At one point in the story, they take a trio of ships, activate the Enchanach drives, and make a star go nova to destroy a fleet of enemy craft.

I actually discussed varying possibilities for FTL traval on another message board where we were designing a sci-fi universe for a community comic.  I believe the suggestions I put forth included Enchanach, Hyperspace, warp-space, gravitational, and hyperbubble.(theoretical based on actual science, wherein you accellerate a mass to very near C, then activate a field which pulls you out of usual laws of physics and allows you to blast away at speeds exceeding 300C)

I think my favorite method, though, is space folding: bend the curvature of space to make an artificial wormhole, hop through, and then close the wormhole.  I believe Heinlien did this in more than one of his books.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Heinlein tended to mix his universes into one big melting pot, by the end.

Of course, he had other flaws, too...


The author you're looking for is David Weber, for Empire From The Ashes - which is actually three books - Mutineers Moon, The Armageddon Inheritance, and Heirs Of Empire - fairly short ones, all in all, but still reasonable. Certainly well away from his usual oeuvre of Honor Harrington's universe, though. And he's had some other interesting ideas in the Hells Gate series, or the Assiti Shards series, albeit in slightly different ways...

... in In Fury Born, he kinda glosses over that entirely, actually. Although it's fairly central to the story, he manages to not provide any details whatsoever, other than the usual "can't use it near a star" limitation, which, to be fair, is a reasonable limitation to provide - it makes for other interesting effects, and allows tactical as well as strategic moves.

Oh, and the trio of ships thing? As I recall it, it's actually a series of them, and they use them to generate an artificial gravity well, on the order of a star, thereby making it so the bad guys can't run away...

*cough*

And that's probably more than enough of that. Although I can probably keep going with some other authors, if you're interested...

[Fuyudenki]

yeah... I dug up Empire from the Ashes just a couple of hours ago.  Now, then, should I read that, or should I work on the comic I was supposed to upload last night, or should I do my Creative Writing homework?

decisions, decisions...

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Homework, then comic, then read. After all, it's not like the book is going anywhere, is it?

And if you do your homework first, then you can feel all smug while reading :-]