How close are we to warp engines ?

[disappoint]

How close are we to warp engines? CMBR distance away.

 

[Pocatello]

All of this is pointless for the most of you.

With the state of global politics, we'll all either be slaves or living in subterranean slums while the wealthy overlords rule us from the sky with their fancy food replicators and sex bots.

Just saw Blade Runner again. Great movie. While I'll never can afford a Rachel, I hope to get a replicant gold fish.

 

[zCypher]

I want me a replicator dammit.

 

[irishScott]

I think it will take a few hundred years. There are so many different areas of science that needs to advance to get to that stage. Eventually it will be possible, it's just whether we get enough time to figure it out. Nuclear war/natural disaster could wipe us out before we have the chance.

Meh, we've got a good handle on living with nukes, and natural disasters have had many thousands of years to wipe us out. What's so special about the next few hundred?

 

[Markbnj]

Meh, we've got a good handle on living with nukes, and natural disasters have had many thousands of years to wipe us out. What's so special about the next few hundred?

Nothing, and that is probably what a Roman would have said in 400 CE . Actually, it's probably what a Roman would have said in 50 BCE, just before Caesar killed the republic and launched the empire. Nobody knows where the next big change will come from, but I agree that we are no more or less susceptible to wiping ourselves out today than we have been in the past.

Around 75k or so years ago an event occurred that anthropologists refer to as the "bottleneck," when the entire population of humans shrank to just a couple of thousand individuals in Africa. We made it through that, so I guess we'll be here for awhile.

 

[Puppies04]

There's a lot of theoretical physics behind it. The problem is energy. To travel at light speed you either need infinite energy or no mass. But if you bend space you can make the distance between two points shorter. Sort of like if you bend a piece of paper, the two edges become closet together. You're bending the laws of physics without breaking them as you're technically not going faster than light. Problem is this still requires insane amounts of energy. A lot of the proposed technologies work on paper but are extremely difficult to implement in practise.

Somebody has been watching event horizon....

 

[zephyrprime]

Warp drives work by stretching space in front of you and compressing space in back of you. Your effective acceleration in this case is 0.

No. You would still need to accelerate. Even if space is stretched, why would you move into it? You wouldn't. You would ALSO have to fly into that region of space like normal.

 

[zephyrprime]

Lol, please. If that was the technology they wouldn't need the deck. You'd sit in a chair and put a helmet on. The holodeck creates these virtual worlds where virtual items have dimensions, mass and density. Admit it, it's silly.

You seem to not know what the definition of the word silly is. It's not silly. Just impressive. What's silly is having Wesley Crusher pilot the ship. Or having Worf stand all the time with no chair.

 

[SKORPI0]

 

[Fritzo]

No. You would still need to accelerate. Even if space is stretched, why would you move into it? You wouldn't. You would ALSO have to fly into that region of space like normal.

You would not need to accelerate. Space around you would remain constant, but your bubble of space would be moving. It's a wild concept, but that's how it would work.

 

[disappoint]

You would not need to accelerate. Space around you would remain constant, but your bubble of space would be moving. It's a wild concept, but that's how it would work.

What so wild about it? Spacetime is moving right now. At the speed of light no less.