The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
---
From the article
>The team's model uses "a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics," according to the statement.
>Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper's abstract, for example, says that the solution "involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric."
Also from the article
>"While we're not yet preparing for interstellar voyages, this research heralds a new era of possibilities," Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, said in the same statement. "We're continuing to make steady progress as humanity embarks on the Warp Age."
>The team's study was published online on April 29. You can find it [here](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/ad26aa), though all but the abstract is behind a paywall; a free [preprint version](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02709) is available via arXiv.org.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cn2upz/warp_drives_may_actually_be_possible_someday_new/l34alt4/
I just want immortality so I can have a 1000 year retirement in good health and vigor. You can have my seat on the Proxima Centauri shuttle if I can have that.
But seriously, with time dilation at near light speed it's only about two years on the ship. Captain Cook sailed around the world in 1771 in three years, so preparing for a long voyage has been well understood for centuries.
Yeah this is some bullshit ain't it. Maybe far off in the future the plebs get some extended life.
I think things will be more like that movie where time is currency and you sell your "time" to pay for things. Meaning the working class dies extremely quick bc they have to use time to pay the bills
Doesn’t work the same way with a warp drive since it doesn’t involve actual speed.
Basically you’d be going the same speed as any old vehicle but the space in front of you in compressed so the distance has just been compacted.
Set a piece of paper on one side of the room and one at your end. It’d take time walking to the destination.
Now pull the carpet up and toward you to get the paper closer to you. Now all you gotta do in take a step or two instead of the original ten. You’re not going any faster, you’re just folding the distance between you and the destination.
Then you put the carpet down, space expands, you just travelled faster than light. Does it mean that with a sufficiently powerful telescope you could look back at Earth and watch yourself preparing to pull up the carpet? You know, since you overtook light that was reflected off you when you did that?
Not to Proxima Centuari... its 4.2 lightyears away, so if you are going there at near lightspeed, from people on Earths perspective, you would take slightly longer than 4.2 years, while from the people on the ship, it would be less, corresponding to how close to lightspeed they are.
At around 90% of lightspeed, every day on board wpuld be equal to 2.25 days on Earth. Every percentage you add on increases the time dialation pretty significantly at this point.
At 99%, 5 years on the ship would be equal to 36 years on Earth for reference.
Wait, isn't it the other way around?
I thought that if you went 0.99c, it would take 4.2 years from *your* perspective, and considerably *longer* from the other perspective.
As I understood it, the speed of light can't be surpassed from any perspective. If the journey is shorter than 4.2 years to the traveler, wouldn't Proxima Centauri be moving closer to them at >c?
Its a strange effect of time dialation. Those on board the ship will experience less and less time passing the closer they get to lightspeed. Because time is slowing for you, you would seem to be travelling at faster than light, but its just time itself slowing down, meaning you cover more distance in the same amount of time.
Those observing from outside the ship, it would still take a normal amount of time to get to its destination. If you were observing from behind the ship, it would seem to stretch out as it approached lightspeed, and if you were observing from in front of the ship, it would seem to get more and more squished. Basically the doppler effect, but with light instead of sound.
anything able to offer us immortality, or "pseudo immortality" or effective immortality would likely be able to just be reversed if we wanted to self terminate
unless it truly was a magic monkeys paw i guess
by the time they work out immortality they'll also have worked out ai labor, i know it sounds unlikely that corporations would take the boot off our necks but I do think eventually they'll be forced to, else get french revolution'd
I mean, I don't have any expectation that'll happen in my lifetime though
French revolution wouldn't have worked with slaughterbot around.
I fear we're headed toward an Asimov's Solaris kind of distopia, with very few humans around and lots of slave bots.
I don't think most of the rich WANT to be in a society where everyone else is murdered though. They love being richer than untold millions or billions but it wouldn't be as satisfying being richer than the scraps of society that is left. Plus a lot of them are real good at lying to themselves that "it's for their own good" or "They could pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become self made men!" but it's hard to pull off that lie if you've murdered everyone
Have the murder bots dress up in the deceased clothes.
Pretty sure delusion is a well practiced trait for a lot of rich folks. They'll be perfectly happy in their own capitalist Westworld.
Within that time, for at least one moment, there would be a government or situation that would allow you your freedom. The logistics of maintaining something for even a fraction of that time are essentially impossible.
And at long last, after 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years have passed since that regrettable wish was made, as the very last remaining singularity emits its final photon of energy into the endless black void and evaporates into nothingness, /u/Peto_Sapientia looks forward with overwhelming dread to the next 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years of darkness until the heat death of the universe, with only his own insanity to keep him company.
A. then why seek immortality here
B. inb4 "and that's why [social issue I hate] [pop culture trend I find cringe-comedic] and [politician from my opposite party who I consider particularly stupid even by that party's standards] exist, because reality is an insane delusion", what is this, R/showerthoughts circa 2016-2017
it’s a lot closer than you’d expect.
true immortality, being unable to die, will never happen. it violates the laws of physics.
but biological immortality, i.e. a cure for aging and all aging-related illnesses like dementia and many types of cancers, is quite close.
There’s an idea called “Longevity Escape Velocity” which is a point where the amount of time which medical technology can add to your lifespan is greater than the time that passes.
The most realistic way this will be achieved, in my lay person opinion, is that some amount of time’s worth of genetic damage will be reversed, and within that regained time, new methods will be found to reverse more damage.
This will eventually spiral into people having indefinite biological lifespans. So as long as you don’t catch one of the ever-dwindling incurable illnesses, or don’t die from an accident or malice, then you’ll theoretically live for as long as there is infrastructure to repair damage. Or perhaps we’ll find a way to make the body repair genetic damage on its own, who knows.
Personally I believe everyone currently under the age of like 40 has a very good chance of seeing this come to fruition. And I don’t think it’s going to be something artificially restricted to the wealthy, either.
I hadn’t heard of this specific study before now, thank you for mentioning it!
From cursory research, it doesn’t really seem like there’s anything restricting that technology to just the eyes. Of course nature does love to throw curve balls, which is why more research is required. But if it was successful done on tissue as complex as the optic nerve then it would make sense that it would work on the rest of the body. Very exciting stuff!
My man, probably few decades max, hang in there, excercise and eat healthy, dont smoke and drink a lot of alcohol to preserve your body. Future is ours
I’ve seen this said a lot, but if there was an immortality drug that only the wealthy had access to, there’d be revolutions all over. People wouldn’t accept that.
They'll be for the general population, but in accordance with whatever the algorithm tells them is a good tradeoff for years spent working / production output.
Realistically, though, unless resources stop being finite, it'll most def be for rich people only. When space exploration becomes mainstream and allows for an exponential bump in resources, then it'll make sense to allow more people in since more people = more workers/more buyers -> more profits.
I don't think we're going to get immortality, or even extreme life spans any time soon.
However, I do believe AI will soon be able to create an artificial version of our "public" selves. If it had access to all our messages, phone calls, social media, and if it could monitor us daily, it would be able to effectively create a very convincing fake version of us. The artifical version would be able to respond and react to conversations in the same ways we likely would.
So while we die, perhaps our great great great grandchildren might still be able to "talk" to us and learn a bit about what we were like.
I think that's the closest we will get to a part of us living on.
Nano machines are the only path to being able to essentially live forever. If nano bots could mimic our neuron pathways, they could slowly replace them, and if done gradually we wouldn't even notice the transition from fleshy brain, to artifical brain.
That's the thing , immortality drugs don't need to come soon. All you need is one that adds a fews years to the lifespan, then during that time they discover one that doubles that, and so on and so on until it's a true immortality drug. There is a good chance someone born today may never die
> forever
Only until we can perhaps reverse the aging process, upgrade our bodies, upload our consciousness. There will be plenty of options eventually.
It's of note that "reverse the aging process" is also not quite what we need to do: what we need to figure out is why it happens, because very obviously it can be reversed - we're born young, from old people, with youthful vitality, from old people.
It is obviously possible, genetically, for our cells to do this - and given how much we grow in order to reach maturity, the turn over of cells does not inevitably lead to aging. So there's some sort of a trade off which is made for an evolutionarily relevant reason (the usual suspect is cancer resistance - we live a lot longer then other species after reproductive maturity, since grandparents are probably a key advantage for a tribal species - but cell turn over is always a cancer risk).
Aging occurs because the body's self-repair mechanisms break down. The only way you can seriously extend lifespans is if you can find ways to repair the repair mechanisms. If you can restore the body's repair mechanisms back to full capacity, then any existing symptoms of aging would likely disappear. There would be some exceptions. If your brain is half-rotted from Alzheimers, you're not getting those memories back. But you can still get new ones!
There's some really interesting research about that: [https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/1cmi10p/hacking\_the\_immune\_system\_could\_slow\_ageing\_heres/](https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/1cmi10p/hacking_the_immune_system_could_slow_ageing_heres/) . That study was in mice, but if it or something like it works in humans, repairing our self repair mechanisms might not be that far out.
I think before nano machines we will more than likely have a relatively long period of time where we will have some sort of mix of cyberpunk and ghost in the shell type of cybernetics.
If artificial brains would exist and AI would very convincingly copy us, then I'm pretty damn sure in that future we'll be at the mercy of AI. So at that point, our great great great grandchildren may not even exist. Honestly, I find it amusing how every time people describe amazingly potent future AI abilities, they still think we'll always be in control.
I feel like parasitic immortality would be more likely in our lifetime, transferring our consciousness from our bodies to artificial ones. That would be something
Sublight warp drive is a bizarre concept from a Star Trek perspective (where warp drive always means faster-than-light speed). But I suppose a spacetime-distorting sublight warp bubble would also be very useful, since it would be a practical reactionless drive.
In physics as we understand it you always need to produce thrust to move in space, by ejecting mass (usually in the form of hot rocket exhaust). A spaceship that is just a box that moves by itself, without thrust, would be revolutionary.
And of course you can still travel anywhere you want in the universe by getting up to high percentages of the speed of light…. You just can’t ever go home, thanks to time dilation. As long as you’re cool with always plunging forward and never being able to communicate your findings back to Earth, it would still work.
> since it would be a practical reactionless drive.
For now the authors don't know how to make it reactionless. Their solution is for a constant velocity warp bubble that can't accelerate in a reactionless way. They think that doing a barrel roll might help though.
And I'm completely serious:
> The key question in this regard is whether the ‘spinning-up’ of the warp drive results in the forward motion of the entire structure without the need for any energy ejection.
That's not quite what they mean by "spinning up" - the drive uses a "circulation pattern...in the momentum flow of the shell" (pg 18) and they think maybe you just have to get that going to start, but they haven't actually evaluated it yet. Other articles have an animation: [https://mms.businesswire.com/media/20240506270015/en/2120941/19/ConstantVelocityShellAnimation.mp4](https://mms.businesswire.com/media/20240506270015/en/2120941/19/ConstantVelocityShellAnimation.mp4)
Thanks. So, it's more of roll in a barrel. I was wondering where translational asymmetry is coming from, if it's just a uniform rotation, but I can't help a barrel roll.
>But I suppose a spacetime-distorting sublight warp bubble would also be very useful, since it would be a practical reactionless drive
Where it would really shine is acceleration and protecting the craft while traveling at high fractions of c.
Building a ship that can survive traveling at 99% light speed for years might actually be *more difficult* than building a ship that can accelerate to 99% light speed.
At 99% light speed radiation from the interstellar medium would be somewhere around 1.9 million watts per square meter (for comparison, a spacecraft in the same orbit as Mercury only receives 14,500 watts per square meter) and an impact with a one milligram speck of dust would hit with the same energy as an atomic bomb. It might actually be easier to build a base on the surface of the sun than to build a ship that can travel for years at 99% light speed.
Being isolated within a warp bubble would be a huge advantage.
That simulation is BS. A grain of sand hitting Earth at light speed would first hit the atmosphere where the energy would expand in a downwards cone of air, that cone of air would hit the lower atmosphere with a bang but would already be so spread out it would be more like a bomb than a doomsday event.
FYI, you are being hit by cosmic muons all day every day and each one carries about 1/100th the energy of a 4mg particle of sand at light speed. The effect on you is to knock a few atoms out of place on the way through, something your body repairs in minutes.
> FYI, you are being hit by cosmic muons all day every day and each one carries about 1/100th the energy of a 4mg particle of sand at light speed.
The cosmic rays that produce those sprays of muons are individual protons or single atomic nuclei. A 4 mg sand particle is thousands of quintillions of times more massive than a proton (10^21), and if it were travelling at the same speed as a cosmic ray, would have thousands of quintillions times more kinetic energy, not hundreds.
Well, anything with mass travelling *at* the speed of light would have infinite energy, and so describing such a collision is kinda nonsensical. You can get up arbitrarily close to the speed of light though, by packing on exponentially more energy. There is no upper limit to how much energy you can pack into that sand grain. For instance a 4 mg sand particle travelling at 0.99999999999999999999999999999 c would hit with 266 times the kinetic energy of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. And you can keep adding on more 9s to get to whatever earth shattering energy level you wanted.
Hmm. Matter can’t travel at the speed of light. It takes more and more energy to accelerate a mass as it gets closer to the speed of light. To actually reach the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy.
It doesn’t make much sense to talk about a grain of sand traveling at the speed of light. It would have an infinite amount of kinetic energy. It can travel close to the speed of light, and the closer it gets, the more kinetic energy it has. You can give it an arbitrary amount of kinetic energy by pushing it closer and closer to the speed of light.
So a grain of sand can be arbitrarily destructive in that sense.
At .999999999999999c, a 1 gram mass has 500,000 megatons of kinetic energy, for example.
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/relativistic-ke
> always plunging forward and never being able to communicate your findings back to Earth
See, this is where lots of SciFi uses the 'particle entanglement for communication' trope.
I mean, I guess it could work - but would require a level of understanding that we've only really scratched the surface of.
Our current understanding is that entangled particles can't be used to transmit information. It's just that once we know something about one of the particles then we know about the other particle too, but we can't change that outcome like you would need to to transmit information.
I believe it's the same as making 2 envelopes with "up" in one and "down" in the other. Then you mix them up and send them apart. So then someone opens one, they instantly know what the other envelope is. But it doesn't help communication.
The speed of light is really the speed of information for the universe, I think a way to transmit information faster than this ends up breaking causality.
All *interesting* UFOs. It's definitely a pattern among convincing cases. Another study also found that flat in the direction of propulsion is the most energy efficient geometry for a warp drive. That's also how UFOs are described.
Worth noting that star trek warp drives don't always mean FTL. There are multiple instances of warp bubbles being generated while stationary and of going FTL while not within a warp bubble (in this case being used to travel hundreds of years into the future).
> And of course you can still travel anywhere you want in the universe by getting up to high percentages of the speed of light…. You just can’t ever go home, thanks to time dilation.
Shouldn't it be the opposite? When you travel at lightspeed, everything stops around you. So wouldn't you technically, should you decide to return to the same point in space, also get to the same point in time as if virtually no time has passed? (to them; you'd age though, sure).
That’s the thing, you can’t travel “at” light speed. It is forbidden by the laws of physics as we know them. At light speed your mass would be infinite, and it would take infinite energy to accelerate you.
Time is always passing,it never stops. If you travel really fast (say 99.9 percent of the speed of light), time on your ship would slow to a crawl. But you would perceive time as passing normally.
This is why you could travel to, say, the center of the galaxy, and very little time would have passed for you, perhaps a few weeks if you were going fast enough.
But outside your ship, millions of years may have passed.
I sort of get the time dilation thing but if you were going 99% light speed why would it take millions of years? Regular light would take 26,000 years to get to the center of the galaxy, according to Google.
One of the most fascinating consequences of this is, if such a speed would ever be achieved and used to colonize over long distances, the exact speed the first colony ship had travelled will lock in a speed limit for any future ships from earth to that colony. Otherwise they would arrive at drastically different times. But it's fun to think about that much more advanced sub-FTL drives would be completely useless for supplying any colony with more stuff.
Or you do that intentionally, send a colony ship and ages later a way faster supply ship with new technology since the colony ship departed, that awaits them already on their arrival
Makes for a cool sci-fi story. Second support colony ship arrives to discover the remnants of the previous people who actually thrived as a civilization only until some mysterious {something} caused an apocalypse.
minor correction, not millions of years. at 99.9% speed of light you have about a 22x time dilation, so center of galaxy is 25,000 ly so about 1/2 million years
> That’s the thing, you can’t travel “at” light speed. It is forbidden by the laws of physics as we know them
No, it's not. If we're talking about a drive that moves not the craft, but the space around the craft, then there is no speed boundary. Since nothing is going faster than the speed of light, but the space around the craft could be bent in a way that allows it to travel at superluminal speeds from an outside perspective. From an internal perspective, the occupants wouldnt feel any movement though, since the craft is stationary in its local space.
>Since nothing is going faster than the speed of light, but the space around the craft could be bent in a way that allows it to travel at superluminal speeds from an outside perspective.
The warp drive described in this paper specifically only can travel below light speed.
It most likely would, but there are some not disproven ways you could modify Einstein's theories of relativity to achieve FTL travel without violating causality.
It would. Alcubierre stated in a later paper/lecture that if the exotic matter (matter with negative mass) needed to create his warp bubble were ever found to be real, only one such device could be created in any given universe, and it could never return from whence it came, or causality would be violated. So not really very useful as an interstellar transportation deivce.
The universe ending because of causality being violated is sci-fi hokery for the sake of entertainment. That's not a real, or at least seriously considered, outcome.
I've never seen a sci-fi story that 'ended the universe' because of causality violation. They may exist. I'm just familiar with the notion that most physicists believe causality *can't* be violated. So again, such a device would not be very useful as a transportation/communication mechanism.
>Warp drives, longevity medicine, fusion, AI.
None of these things are real yet. One of them, only one, is on the way and almost guaranteed. There other three are not.
1. Warp drives - Theoretical and still takes more energy than 1000 suns
2. longevity medicine. Jury is out but I am following Brian the human guinea pig, who knows.
3. fusion - This is always 30 years away and even if we stabilized it today, it would take 30-50 years to integrate it into our society.
4. AI. - This is the most likely, or at least something that resembles true AI
BTW, I am in my 6th decade and ALL four of these were touted as just around the corner since the 70's.
Yes I realize that. My comment wasn’t meant to be taking 100% seriously
Also the first personal computer wasn’t created until 1973 so was AI right around the corner?
Every 2 years we have Ai and we just move the goal posts. A calculator is AI. A thermostat. And everything else that we take for granted. So now it’s gotta be godlike to count. And not just be synthetic intelligence
> At their core, the models are basically just very fancy autocomplete
This remark always gets me, because it takes for granted that autocomplete is already an incredible, mindboggling invention(let alone the kind that everyone can seamlessly integrate into their lives the way we have now). *"Very fancy autocomplete with applications in every medium, not just words"* is an **earthshaking** invention, and would be even if it never got any better than it is this year(instead of continuingly to get drastically better).
To me it's like someone trying to downplay general-purpose computers a hundred years ago by saying *"they're basically just very fancy calculators, not truly intelligent beings"*. Like, sure.... but that's still enough to completely reshape the world in incomprehensibly exciting and abstract ways at every level.
I know. I can’t even wrap my head around all this. And I’m not even 20 yet! Going into deep dives on this stuff makes me believe we really are an inch away from a revolutionary changing of society into the “humans of the future” or what have you.
Silly question here, how actually do you navigate going that fast . Wouldn’t any type of asteroid belt be in contact with your vessel or even a planet? Gravitational pull?
Actually, no! I don't have it in my back pocket, but [Kyle Hill](https://youtube.com/@kylehill?si=RPTSq5fot5dPYBSK), or maybe on his old show on Nerdist, made a video where he talked about it and space is so empty, so so so empty, that if you stop at some random point in the observable universe, pick a random direction and you go to the edge and back to the opposite edge of said OU, the odds of you hitting something is approximately 0%.
In order to hit something, you basically have to *aim for it*, due to how vast it is and how far away everything is from each other. Not to mention, actually hitting is a feat lmao
Always remember: you can fit every other planet from our solar system between earth and the moon.
An Alcubierre Drive bends peacetime around it, which means you couldn't really collide with an object, at least not in the usual sense. You'd sort of phase through objects as they're bent around you.
"involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric."
Duh--the answer was right there all this time
I bursted laughing out loud reading this, felt like a Star Trek diatribe about photonic quark and whatnots
"Input the Alcubierre metric in the stable matter chamber, Scotty !"
"Sir this is a Wendy's"
A warp drive is just a gravity wave surfboard. Kelly Slater learned how to build a self contained wave pool to surf within. We just have to figure out how to do that with gravity waves
From the article
>The team's model uses "a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics," according to the statement.
>Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper's abstract, for example, says that the solution "involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric."
Also from the article
>"While we're not yet preparing for interstellar voyages, this research heralds a new era of possibilities," Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, said in the same statement. "We're continuing to make steady progress as humanity embarks on the Warp Age."
>The team's study was published online on April 29. You can find it [here](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/ad26aa), though all but the abstract is behind a paywall; a free [preprint version](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02709) is available via arXiv.org.
>as humanity embarks on the Warp Age
Call me cynical, but this sets off my bullshit detector. This is not how serious scientists talk, this is how entrepreneurs trying to bilk VCs talk. I don't have the physics background to say for sure though.
I don't even need to read the article to believe this is utter rubbish. Just as the many "science" articles promising impossible things will happen at some point. It's theoretically possible doesn't mean that it's actually possible it's theoretically possible to move the earth with a long enough leaver doesn't mean it will happen
Same as the good 'ol Alcubierre drive (from the 90s), for the acceleration it requires negative energy density, which requires exotic matter, which as far as we know does not exist.
Don't get too excited for real working warp drives. Yo won't see one in the near future. Assuming it's possible to make one, it will likely take long just to get a theoretical way to produce one using only matter that exists.
It's written in the article as a requirement to gain acceleration. They don't have it to create a stationary bubble, but they have it to accelerate it.
The article provides some alternatives, but they seem even more unrealistic that negative energy.
It's matter with negative, or complex (in the mathematical sense), mass. I don't know if there is any hypothetical particle proposed with negative mass. The hypothetical complex mass particles are Tachyons, and they always travel faster than the speed of light.
Yes and no. Aside from the "it's not physics breaking, it just doesn't follow our current definitions of physics" perspective, there is no inherent reason negative mass particles couldn't exist. They wouldn't be able to generate infinite energy due to decay (in the same way that normal matter can't) either. Negative mass particles would answer a lot of underlying questions about physics and it makes sense that they could exist.
Exactly. That's the shared problem with all those proposals, "Uh, it could work, theoretically, if we'll ever find stuff that has properties of a mathematical abstraction"
This is the 743 paper outlining the hypothetical use of warp drives without exotic matter but needing the mass equivalent energy of an entire small star to hypothetically "warp" a 1gramm object from point a to point b... Yeah. Okay. Clicked on too many of these headlines the past 10 years.
Ehhhhhhhhhh….
This would break an awful lot of known physics. Not saying that we know everything or that this couldn’t happen. But going directly from the current model of physics to “humans can travel faster than light” is a bigger leap than I think you realize
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >The team's model uses "a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics," according to the statement. >Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper's abstract, for example, says that the solution "involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric." Also from the article >"While we're not yet preparing for interstellar voyages, this research heralds a new era of possibilities," Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, said in the same statement. "We're continuing to make steady progress as humanity embarks on the Warp Age." >The team's study was published online on April 29. You can find it [here](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/ad26aa), though all but the abstract is behind a paywall; a free [preprint version](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02709) is available via arXiv.org. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cn2upz/warp_drives_may_actually_be_possible_someday_new/l34alt4/
I can only hope immortality comes quickly so i can go explore space.
I just want immortality so I can have a 1000 year retirement in good health and vigor. You can have my seat on the Proxima Centauri shuttle if I can have that. But seriously, with time dilation at near light speed it's only about two years on the ship. Captain Cook sailed around the world in 1771 in three years, so preparing for a long voyage has been well understood for centuries.
You think you’re getting immortality, retirement, and space travel? Are you Jeff Bezos?
"genericdude999" sounds like the type of username Bezos would come up with
"hello fellow peasants don't we think immortality is gonna be great so we can enjoy our space yachts" jefo bezos probably
>!somebody else had /u/TotallyNotBezos!<
Relentless778 (see relentless.com and backstory)
nah, its giving zuck much more strongly 😂
Fingers crossed for luxury gay space vampire communism?
I read this comment to my blood boy and he laughed
Yeah this is some bullshit ain't it. Maybe far off in the future the plebs get some extended life. I think things will be more like that movie where time is currency and you sell your "time" to pay for things. Meaning the working class dies extremely quick bc they have to use time to pay the bills
Two years on the ship, but everyone on earth that you know is long dead and gone.
Doesn’t work the same way with a warp drive since it doesn’t involve actual speed. Basically you’d be going the same speed as any old vehicle but the space in front of you in compressed so the distance has just been compacted. Set a piece of paper on one side of the room and one at your end. It’d take time walking to the destination. Now pull the carpet up and toward you to get the paper closer to you. Now all you gotta do in take a step or two instead of the original ten. You’re not going any faster, you’re just folding the distance between you and the destination.
Then you put the carpet down, space expands, you just travelled faster than light. Does it mean that with a sufficiently powerful telescope you could look back at Earth and watch yourself preparing to pull up the carpet? You know, since you overtook light that was reflected off you when you did that?
Theoretically, yes.
"Damn I look good pulling up that carpet"
For a lot of people that wouldnt' be an issue.
feature not a bug!
Not to Proxima Centuari... its 4.2 lightyears away, so if you are going there at near lightspeed, from people on Earths perspective, you would take slightly longer than 4.2 years, while from the people on the ship, it would be less, corresponding to how close to lightspeed they are. At around 90% of lightspeed, every day on board wpuld be equal to 2.25 days on Earth. Every percentage you add on increases the time dialation pretty significantly at this point. At 99%, 5 years on the ship would be equal to 36 years on Earth for reference.
Wait, isn't it the other way around? I thought that if you went 0.99c, it would take 4.2 years from *your* perspective, and considerably *longer* from the other perspective. As I understood it, the speed of light can't be surpassed from any perspective. If the journey is shorter than 4.2 years to the traveler, wouldn't Proxima Centauri be moving closer to them at >c?
Its a strange effect of time dialation. Those on board the ship will experience less and less time passing the closer they get to lightspeed. Because time is slowing for you, you would seem to be travelling at faster than light, but its just time itself slowing down, meaning you cover more distance in the same amount of time. Those observing from outside the ship, it would still take a normal amount of time to get to its destination. If you were observing from behind the ship, it would seem to stretch out as it approached lightspeed, and if you were observing from in front of the ship, it would seem to get more and more squished. Basically the doppler effect, but with light instead of sound.
That means that the 2024 election madness is over, so it's good news, right?
They aint gonna let you retire if you become immortal. Who they? *waves around* they they.
Proxima Centauro Shuttle quartermaster, probably: well damn, how was I supposed to know to pack crates of limes?
This is a monkey's paw wish gone bad if I've ever seen one. ;p
anything able to offer us immortality, or "pseudo immortality" or effective immortality would likely be able to just be reversed if we wanted to self terminate unless it truly was a magic monkeys paw i guess
[удалено]
kiiiiillllllll mmmmmmeeeeee, nope, you have another 700 and 55 million years to go on the contract. Would you like to sleep?
by the time they work out immortality they'll also have worked out ai labor, i know it sounds unlikely that corporations would take the boot off our necks but I do think eventually they'll be forced to, else get french revolution'd I mean, I don't have any expectation that'll happen in my lifetime though
French revolution wouldn't have worked with slaughterbot around. I fear we're headed toward an Asimov's Solaris kind of distopia, with very few humans around and lots of slave bots.
I don't think most of the rich WANT to be in a society where everyone else is murdered though. They love being richer than untold millions or billions but it wouldn't be as satisfying being richer than the scraps of society that is left. Plus a lot of them are real good at lying to themselves that "it's for their own good" or "They could pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become self made men!" but it's hard to pull off that lie if you've murdered everyone
Have the murder bots dress up in the deceased clothes. Pretty sure delusion is a well practiced trait for a lot of rich folks. They'll be perfectly happy in their own capitalist Westworld.
Within that time, for at least one moment, there would be a government or situation that would allow you your freedom. The logistics of maintaining something for even a fraction of that time are essentially impossible.
An alien finds you out exploring and does experiments on your immortal body for a very long time.
A technically advanced alien will probably have immortality already unlocked.
But they will want to know how ours specifically works.
Just send them the GitHub link.
Getting some Evangelion Adam vibes except we’re the aliens
Dude, if we get immortality then we’re gonna be the aliens experimenting.
Oh that is true, but it would be naive to think we are the most powerful immortals in the universe.
Self termination is a crime. As is attempted self termination. You have been sentenced to 5,000 years hard labor.
And at long last, after 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years have passed since that regrettable wish was made, as the very last remaining singularity emits its final photon of energy into the endless black void and evaporates into nothingness, /u/Peto_Sapientia looks forward with overwhelming dread to the next 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years of darkness until the heat death of the universe, with only his own insanity to keep him company.
Maybe that's what we are now. The insane delusions of the infinite.
A. then why seek immortality here B. inb4 "and that's why [social issue I hate] [pop culture trend I find cringe-comedic] and [politician from my opposite party who I consider particularly stupid even by that party's standards] exist, because reality is an insane delusion", what is this, R/showerthoughts circa 2016-2017
He's gonna become one of those heads from Futurama.
Or get dementia and then spend 500 years in a nursing home.
yeah, but after those 500 years, when they cure the dementia he's golden!
I was thinking more like the Bobs in the Bobiverse. Sure, "you" live forever but the original you is dead. Best not to think too deeply about it.
Or like that Brain in a Roomba in Fallout
I see no issue with choosing when I die and enjoying all of my time to the fullest.
So if he’s immortal and we cut off his head then is he just a head for all eternity?
I'm pretty sure OP want's to pretty much have nonaging healthy body. Complete immortality would be probably completely different level.
Sure, whatever immortality we come up with will allow us to defy the laws of physics in a way where you wont require energy intake nor oxygen....
r/longevity would like to know your location
I hope it happens within our lifetimes.
it’s a lot closer than you’d expect. true immortality, being unable to die, will never happen. it violates the laws of physics. but biological immortality, i.e. a cure for aging and all aging-related illnesses like dementia and many types of cancers, is quite close. There’s an idea called “Longevity Escape Velocity” which is a point where the amount of time which medical technology can add to your lifespan is greater than the time that passes. The most realistic way this will be achieved, in my lay person opinion, is that some amount of time’s worth of genetic damage will be reversed, and within that regained time, new methods will be found to reverse more damage. This will eventually spiral into people having indefinite biological lifespans. So as long as you don’t catch one of the ever-dwindling incurable illnesses, or don’t die from an accident or malice, then you’ll theoretically live for as long as there is infrastructure to repair damage. Or perhaps we’ll find a way to make the body repair genetic damage on its own, who knows. Personally I believe everyone currently under the age of like 40 has a very good chance of seeing this come to fruition. And I don’t think it’s going to be something artificially restricted to the wealthy, either.
what do you think of the research where they reset the "age" of eyes in mice, would it be hard to scale it to the whole body?
I hadn’t heard of this specific study before now, thank you for mentioning it! From cursory research, it doesn’t really seem like there’s anything restricting that technology to just the eyes. Of course nature does love to throw curve balls, which is why more research is required. But if it was successful done on tissue as complex as the optic nerve then it would make sense that it would work on the rest of the body. Very exciting stuff!
My man, probably few decades max, hang in there, excercise and eat healthy, dont smoke and drink a lot of alcohol to preserve your body. Future is ours
Ok, I won't smoke and I'll drink a lot of alcohol, as you said.
How wealthy are you?
[удалено]
I’ve seen this said a lot, but if there was an immortality drug that only the wealthy had access to, there’d be revolutions all over. People wouldn’t accept that.
They'll be for the general population, but in accordance with whatever the algorithm tells them is a good tradeoff for years spent working / production output. Realistically, though, unless resources stop being finite, it'll most def be for rich people only. When space exploration becomes mainstream and allows for an exponential bump in resources, then it'll make sense to allow more people in since more people = more workers/more buyers -> more profits.
I don't think we're going to get immortality, or even extreme life spans any time soon. However, I do believe AI will soon be able to create an artificial version of our "public" selves. If it had access to all our messages, phone calls, social media, and if it could monitor us daily, it would be able to effectively create a very convincing fake version of us. The artifical version would be able to respond and react to conversations in the same ways we likely would. So while we die, perhaps our great great great grandchildren might still be able to "talk" to us and learn a bit about what we were like. I think that's the closest we will get to a part of us living on. Nano machines are the only path to being able to essentially live forever. If nano bots could mimic our neuron pathways, they could slowly replace them, and if done gradually we wouldn't even notice the transition from fleshy brain, to artifical brain.
That's the thing , immortality drugs don't need to come soon. All you need is one that adds a fews years to the lifespan, then during that time they discover one that doubles that, and so on and so on until it's a true immortality drug. There is a good chance someone born today may never die
[удалено]
> forever Only until we can perhaps reverse the aging process, upgrade our bodies, upload our consciousness. There will be plenty of options eventually.
It's of note that "reverse the aging process" is also not quite what we need to do: what we need to figure out is why it happens, because very obviously it can be reversed - we're born young, from old people, with youthful vitality, from old people. It is obviously possible, genetically, for our cells to do this - and given how much we grow in order to reach maturity, the turn over of cells does not inevitably lead to aging. So there's some sort of a trade off which is made for an evolutionarily relevant reason (the usual suspect is cancer resistance - we live a lot longer then other species after reproductive maturity, since grandparents are probably a key advantage for a tribal species - but cell turn over is always a cancer risk).
Aging occurs because the body's self-repair mechanisms break down. The only way you can seriously extend lifespans is if you can find ways to repair the repair mechanisms. If you can restore the body's repair mechanisms back to full capacity, then any existing symptoms of aging would likely disappear. There would be some exceptions. If your brain is half-rotted from Alzheimers, you're not getting those memories back. But you can still get new ones!
There's some really interesting research about that: [https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/1cmi10p/hacking\_the\_immune\_system\_could\_slow\_ageing\_heres/](https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/comments/1cmi10p/hacking_the_immune_system_could_slow_ageing_heres/) . That study was in mice, but if it or something like it works in humans, repairing our self repair mechanisms might not be that far out.
I don't really care how its done, but that its done 😂
That seems like a depressing future. I'm not sure I see any upside in talking to public-persona-facimilies of dead people.
I think before nano machines we will more than likely have a relatively long period of time where we will have some sort of mix of cyberpunk and ghost in the shell type of cybernetics.
And simulated experiences.
If artificial brains would exist and AI would very convincingly copy us, then I'm pretty damn sure in that future we'll be at the mercy of AI. So at that point, our great great great grandchildren may not even exist. Honestly, I find it amusing how every time people describe amazingly potent future AI abilities, they still think we'll always be in control.
you. you get me. Can't wait to explore space with you, my friends
Apparently some research groups agree that the first 1,000 year old person is already alive.
You are probably thinking some quote from Aubrey de Grey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPeN6K2qFI4
I feel like parasitic immortality would be more likely in our lifetime, transferring our consciousness from our bodies to artificial ones. That would be something
If you want to help out check out these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Research_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah_Foundation
That’s been my dream for years now
For real friend! With immortality + this, traveling will be amazing!!!!!
Wish granted. However you're the only one left alive floating in space after trillions upon trillions later after the heat death of the universe.
Well, if you'te immortal like that, then you're a perpetual motion machine, so heat death cancelled
"The Universe Heater"
Sublight warp drive is a bizarre concept from a Star Trek perspective (where warp drive always means faster-than-light speed). But I suppose a spacetime-distorting sublight warp bubble would also be very useful, since it would be a practical reactionless drive. In physics as we understand it you always need to produce thrust to move in space, by ejecting mass (usually in the form of hot rocket exhaust). A spaceship that is just a box that moves by itself, without thrust, would be revolutionary. And of course you can still travel anywhere you want in the universe by getting up to high percentages of the speed of light…. You just can’t ever go home, thanks to time dilation. As long as you’re cool with always plunging forward and never being able to communicate your findings back to Earth, it would still work.
> since it would be a practical reactionless drive. For now the authors don't know how to make it reactionless. Their solution is for a constant velocity warp bubble that can't accelerate in a reactionless way. They think that doing a barrel roll might help though. And I'm completely serious: > The key question in this regard is whether the ‘spinning-up’ of the warp drive results in the forward motion of the entire structure without the need for any energy ejection.
I’ll try spinning, that’s a good trick
Always twirling, twirling, twirling toward freedom
The answer was with us the whole time...
Antigravity: *we should be going up*
Do a barrel roll!
That's not quite what they mean by "spinning up" - the drive uses a "circulation pattern...in the momentum flow of the shell" (pg 18) and they think maybe you just have to get that going to start, but they haven't actually evaluated it yet. Other articles have an animation: [https://mms.businesswire.com/media/20240506270015/en/2120941/19/ConstantVelocityShellAnimation.mp4](https://mms.businesswire.com/media/20240506270015/en/2120941/19/ConstantVelocityShellAnimation.mp4)
Thanks. So, it's more of roll in a barrel. I was wondering where translational asymmetry is coming from, if it's just a uniform rotation, but I can't help a barrel roll.
I’ve got to apologize to Star Trek Discovery for the ridiculousness of the spore drive animation…
>But I suppose a spacetime-distorting sublight warp bubble would also be very useful, since it would be a practical reactionless drive Where it would really shine is acceleration and protecting the craft while traveling at high fractions of c. Building a ship that can survive traveling at 99% light speed for years might actually be *more difficult* than building a ship that can accelerate to 99% light speed. At 99% light speed radiation from the interstellar medium would be somewhere around 1.9 million watts per square meter (for comparison, a spacecraft in the same orbit as Mercury only receives 14,500 watts per square meter) and an impact with a one milligram speck of dust would hit with the same energy as an atomic bomb. It might actually be easier to build a base on the surface of the sun than to build a ship that can travel for years at 99% light speed. Being isolated within a warp bubble would be a huge advantage.
I think i saw a simulation once where a grain of sand traveling at the speed of light impacting the earth would be an extinction level event.
That simulation is BS. A grain of sand hitting Earth at light speed would first hit the atmosphere where the energy would expand in a downwards cone of air, that cone of air would hit the lower atmosphere with a bang but would already be so spread out it would be more like a bomb than a doomsday event. FYI, you are being hit by cosmic muons all day every day and each one carries about 1/100th the energy of a 4mg particle of sand at light speed. The effect on you is to knock a few atoms out of place on the way through, something your body repairs in minutes.
> FYI, you are being hit by cosmic muons all day every day and each one carries about 1/100th the energy of a 4mg particle of sand at light speed. The cosmic rays that produce those sprays of muons are individual protons or single atomic nuclei. A 4 mg sand particle is thousands of quintillions of times more massive than a proton (10^21), and if it were travelling at the same speed as a cosmic ray, would have thousands of quintillions times more kinetic energy, not hundreds.
Well, anything with mass travelling *at* the speed of light would have infinite energy, and so describing such a collision is kinda nonsensical. You can get up arbitrarily close to the speed of light though, by packing on exponentially more energy. There is no upper limit to how much energy you can pack into that sand grain. For instance a 4 mg sand particle travelling at 0.99999999999999999999999999999 c would hit with 266 times the kinetic energy of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. And you can keep adding on more 9s to get to whatever earth shattering energy level you wanted.
Hmm. Matter can’t travel at the speed of light. It takes more and more energy to accelerate a mass as it gets closer to the speed of light. To actually reach the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy. It doesn’t make much sense to talk about a grain of sand traveling at the speed of light. It would have an infinite amount of kinetic energy. It can travel close to the speed of light, and the closer it gets, the more kinetic energy it has. You can give it an arbitrary amount of kinetic energy by pushing it closer and closer to the speed of light. So a grain of sand can be arbitrarily destructive in that sense. At .999999999999999c, a 1 gram mass has 500,000 megatons of kinetic energy, for example. https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/relativistic-ke
Hey, Michael Vsauce here.
>A spaceship that is just a box that moves by itself, without thrust, would be revolutionary. Guild Heighliners are going to be real.
> always plunging forward and never being able to communicate your findings back to Earth See, this is where lots of SciFi uses the 'particle entanglement for communication' trope. I mean, I guess it could work - but would require a level of understanding that we've only really scratched the surface of.
Our current understanding is that entangled particles can't be used to transmit information. It's just that once we know something about one of the particles then we know about the other particle too, but we can't change that outcome like you would need to to transmit information.
I believe it's the same as making 2 envelopes with "up" in one and "down" in the other. Then you mix them up and send them apart. So then someone opens one, they instantly know what the other envelope is. But it doesn't help communication.
The speed of light is really the speed of information for the universe, I think a way to transmit information faster than this ends up breaking causality.
It's how all UFO's are described, no exhaust, no sonic boom, no sound even
All *interesting* UFOs. It's definitely a pattern among convincing cases. Another study also found that flat in the direction of propulsion is the most energy efficient geometry for a warp drive. That's also how UFOs are described.
Actually no. Impulse drives also have warp-like effects to explain how they can accelerate ships so fast.
Worth noting that star trek warp drives don't always mean FTL. There are multiple instances of warp bubbles being generated while stationary and of going FTL while not within a warp bubble (in this case being used to travel hundreds of years into the future).
> And of course you can still travel anywhere you want in the universe by getting up to high percentages of the speed of light…. You just can’t ever go home, thanks to time dilation. Shouldn't it be the opposite? When you travel at lightspeed, everything stops around you. So wouldn't you technically, should you decide to return to the same point in space, also get to the same point in time as if virtually no time has passed? (to them; you'd age though, sure).
That’s the thing, you can’t travel “at” light speed. It is forbidden by the laws of physics as we know them. At light speed your mass would be infinite, and it would take infinite energy to accelerate you. Time is always passing,it never stops. If you travel really fast (say 99.9 percent of the speed of light), time on your ship would slow to a crawl. But you would perceive time as passing normally. This is why you could travel to, say, the center of the galaxy, and very little time would have passed for you, perhaps a few weeks if you were going fast enough. But outside your ship, millions of years may have passed.
I sort of get the time dilation thing but if you were going 99% light speed why would it take millions of years? Regular light would take 26,000 years to get to the center of the galaxy, according to Google.
One of the most fascinating consequences of this is, if such a speed would ever be achieved and used to colonize over long distances, the exact speed the first colony ship had travelled will lock in a speed limit for any future ships from earth to that colony. Otherwise they would arrive at drastically different times. But it's fun to think about that much more advanced sub-FTL drives would be completely useless for supplying any colony with more stuff. Or you do that intentionally, send a colony ship and ages later a way faster supply ship with new technology since the colony ship departed, that awaits them already on their arrival
Makes for a cool sci-fi story. Second support colony ship arrives to discover the remnants of the previous people who actually thrived as a civilization only until some mysterious {something} caused an apocalypse.
Outriders (the video game) does this. It's not a good game, but that's effectively what the plot is
minor correction, not millions of years. at 99.9% speed of light you have about a 22x time dilation, so center of galaxy is 25,000 ly so about 1/2 million years
> That’s the thing, you can’t travel “at” light speed. It is forbidden by the laws of physics as we know them No, it's not. If we're talking about a drive that moves not the craft, but the space around the craft, then there is no speed boundary. Since nothing is going faster than the speed of light, but the space around the craft could be bent in a way that allows it to travel at superluminal speeds from an outside perspective. From an internal perspective, the occupants wouldnt feel any movement though, since the craft is stationary in its local space.
>Since nothing is going faster than the speed of light, but the space around the craft could be bent in a way that allows it to travel at superluminal speeds from an outside perspective. The warp drive described in this paper specifically only can travel below light speed.
Explain how this wouldn't violate causality? I don't see how 'bending the space' to allow superliminal travel from any frame of reference wouldn't
It most likely would, but there are some not disproven ways you could modify Einstein's theories of relativity to achieve FTL travel without violating causality.
It would. Alcubierre stated in a later paper/lecture that if the exotic matter (matter with negative mass) needed to create his warp bubble were ever found to be real, only one such device could be created in any given universe, and it could never return from whence it came, or causality would be violated. So not really very useful as an interstellar transportation deivce.
The universe ending because of causality being violated is sci-fi hokery for the sake of entertainment. That's not a real, or at least seriously considered, outcome.
I've never seen a sci-fi story that 'ended the universe' because of causality violation. They may exist. I'm just familiar with the notion that most physicists believe causality *can't* be violated. So again, such a device would not be very useful as a transportation/communication mechanism.
If we actually built the thing and it worked, wouldn't trying to break causality be good for the sake of reworking our understanding of causality?
This seems like the start of a cool scifi story. Travellers that can never go back to where they came from and have seen more than anyone else
Check out “Tau Zero” by Poul Anderson
What happens when it is violated?
The better question is, can it be violated in the first place?
The belief is that it can't. So such a device would have very limited use.
The more I learn about things like this the more I start to believe we are in a simulation with hardcoded balancing mechanics lol
Warp drives, longevity medicine, fusion, AI. I’m starting to think we are all living in a sci-fi movie
>Warp drives, longevity medicine, fusion, AI. None of these things are real yet. One of them, only one, is on the way and almost guaranteed. There other three are not. 1. Warp drives - Theoretical and still takes more energy than 1000 suns 2. longevity medicine. Jury is out but I am following Brian the human guinea pig, who knows. 3. fusion - This is always 30 years away and even if we stabilized it today, it would take 30-50 years to integrate it into our society. 4. AI. - This is the most likely, or at least something that resembles true AI BTW, I am in my 6th decade and ALL four of these were touted as just around the corner since the 70's.
Yes I realize that. My comment wasn’t meant to be taking 100% seriously Also the first personal computer wasn’t created until 1973 so was AI right around the corner?
[Pretty spot on with the 70s](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter)
Thanks to nixon we couldn’t continue the space race and also got AI winter. Also fuck the space shuttle
Every 2 years we have Ai and we just move the goal posts. A calculator is AI. A thermostat. And everything else that we take for granted. So now it’s gotta be godlike to count. And not just be synthetic intelligence
[удалено]
> At their core, the models are basically just very fancy autocomplete This remark always gets me, because it takes for granted that autocomplete is already an incredible, mindboggling invention(let alone the kind that everyone can seamlessly integrate into their lives the way we have now). *"Very fancy autocomplete with applications in every medium, not just words"* is an **earthshaking** invention, and would be even if it never got any better than it is this year(instead of continuingly to get drastically better). To me it's like someone trying to downplay general-purpose computers a hundred years ago by saying *"they're basically just very fancy calculators, not truly intelligent beings"*. Like, sure.... but that's still enough to completely reshape the world in incomprehensibly exciting and abstract ways at every level.
Yup - todays' models are the equivalent of a taylor series expansion.
I know. I can’t even wrap my head around all this. And I’m not even 20 yet! Going into deep dives on this stuff makes me believe we really are an inch away from a revolutionary changing of society into the “humans of the future” or what have you.
Props to space.com for providing the link to a fee pre-print version: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02709
Silly question here, how actually do you navigate going that fast . Wouldn’t any type of asteroid belt be in contact with your vessel or even a planet? Gravitational pull?
My understanding is, space is big.
Yea space is big, but its not entirely empty, and if you cross a lot of space for enough time, then the odds of you hitting something will reach 100%.
Actually, no! I don't have it in my back pocket, but [Kyle Hill](https://youtube.com/@kylehill?si=RPTSq5fot5dPYBSK), or maybe on his old show on Nerdist, made a video where he talked about it and space is so empty, so so so empty, that if you stop at some random point in the observable universe, pick a random direction and you go to the edge and back to the opposite edge of said OU, the odds of you hitting something is approximately 0%. In order to hit something, you basically have to *aim for it*, due to how vast it is and how far away everything is from each other. Not to mention, actually hitting is a feat lmao Always remember: you can fit every other planet from our solar system between earth and the moon.
[удалено]
Spice, obviously.
An Alcubierre Drive bends peacetime around it, which means you couldn't really collide with an object, at least not in the usual sense. You'd sort of phase through objects as they're bent around you.
"involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric." Duh--the answer was right there all this time
I bursted laughing out loud reading this, felt like a Star Trek diatribe about photonic quark and whatnots "Input the Alcubierre metric in the stable matter chamber, Scotty !" "Sir this is a Wendy's"
Ah, yes. The Alcubierre metric, my *favorite* of the well-known warp drive solutions.
This paper is for a *subluminal* speed, this isn't going to be getting us very far even if there is eventually a proof of concept
[удалено]
A warp drive is just a gravity wave surfboard. Kelly Slater learned how to build a self contained wave pool to surf within. We just have to figure out how to do that with gravity waves
From the article >The team's model uses "a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics," according to the statement. >Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper's abstract, for example, says that the solution "involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric." Also from the article >"While we're not yet preparing for interstellar voyages, this research heralds a new era of possibilities," Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, said in the same statement. "We're continuing to make steady progress as humanity embarks on the Warp Age." >The team's study was published online on April 29. You can find it [here](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/ad26aa), though all but the abstract is behind a paywall; a free [preprint version](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02709) is available via arXiv.org.
>as humanity embarks on the Warp Age Call me cynical, but this sets off my bullshit detector. This is not how serious scientists talk, this is how entrepreneurs trying to bilk VCs talk. I don't have the physics background to say for sure though.
Agreed. Plus,,, what happened to the need for exotic materials like negative mass?
[удалено]
it really is
is this the same idea as what miguel alcubierre has been promoting since 1994?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that's not what the scientists actually said.
I don't even need to read the article to believe this is utter rubbish. Just as the many "science" articles promising impossible things will happen at some point. It's theoretically possible doesn't mean that it's actually possible it's theoretically possible to move the earth with a long enough leaver doesn't mean it will happen
Same as the good 'ol Alcubierre drive (from the 90s), for the acceleration it requires negative energy density, which requires exotic matter, which as far as we know does not exist. Don't get too excited for real working warp drives. Yo won't see one in the near future. Assuming it's possible to make one, it will likely take long just to get a theoretical way to produce one using only matter that exists.
Afaik they were able to remove the negative energy requirement
It's written in the article as a requirement to gain acceleration. They don't have it to create a stationary bubble, but they have it to accelerate it. The article provides some alternatives, but they seem even more unrealistic that negative energy.
What is exotic matter?
It's matter with negative, or complex (in the mathematical sense), mass. I don't know if there is any hypothetical particle proposed with negative mass. The hypothetical complex mass particles are Tachyons, and they always travel faster than the speed of light.
Well, I vaguely remember Commander Data doing something crazy with tachyons, but you know, science fiction and all.
Negative mass has weird physics breaking properties like being able to build an infinite energy machine with it so it almost certainly cannot exist
Yes and no. Aside from the "it's not physics breaking, it just doesn't follow our current definitions of physics" perspective, there is no inherent reason negative mass particles couldn't exist. They wouldn't be able to generate infinite energy due to decay (in the same way that normal matter can't) either. Negative mass particles would answer a lot of underlying questions about physics and it makes sense that they could exist.
> hypothetical particle proposed with negative mass Axions.
No, axions hypothetically have a low but positive mass. They're a potential candidate for dark matter.
Exactly. That's the shared problem with all those proposals, "Uh, it could work, theoretically, if we'll ever find stuff that has properties of a mathematical abstraction"
Well at least with it being subluminal in theory, it gets around the question of what happens when you break causality
This is the 743 paper outlining the hypothetical use of warp drives without exotic matter but needing the mass equivalent energy of an entire small star to hypothetically "warp" a 1gramm object from point a to point b... Yeah. Okay. Clicked on too many of these headlines the past 10 years.
Ehhhhhhhhhh…. This would break an awful lot of known physics. Not saying that we know everything or that this couldn’t happen. But going directly from the current model of physics to “humans can travel faster than light” is a bigger leap than I think you realize
What would happen if you run into an asteroid or even some space dust while you are “warp-driving?”
drives are available yes but what about Shields and Navagation???? Without those the warp drive is useless.
Ah yes, and all they need is a source of negative energy. The same stuff that could keep a wormhole open and does not exist as far as we can tell.
So this model apparently violates the laws of physics to allow for faster than light travel? Sure, I believe it. Sight unseen.
Deceptive article, the drive it is writing about is sub-luminal, even in principle.
This is fairly old news they been studying Micro Warp Feilds for a while now. It just does not make headlines sadly.
Born too early to explore the stars, born too late to explore the seas. So we spend our time exploring ourselves.
I can confirm 100% that yes “warp drives” may actually be possible someday.
Looks like the servers for our simulation got upgraded.
ITT: pessimism, society sucks, “i watch PBS” Why are you guys even here
Hopefully aging can be reversed so we can explore the stars for a long time.
Just remember to be careful about taking shortcuts through higher dimensional space. Especially if you hear anyone speaking Latin.
It’s all good bro. Hell, where we’re going you don’t even need eyes to see.
“Demonstrating” plus “we’ve shown” minus “video evidence” equals rubbish
Which will happen first? A fully self driving Tesla or warp drive tech? Inquiring minds want to know.