Warp Drive Concept

[coopert1150]

This has been moved from the Advanced Concepts thread.


I need peace.  I had this idea in the middle of the night, and no matter how I try to tell myself it will never work, I can't seem to put it to rest. 

It came from this thought: how do we create a warp drive that doesn't need negative energy?  Is it even possible?  Well the idea I had was to "pull" the ship along using a gravity well generated THROUGH it.  bare with me.  I included illustrations to further explain the idea.  See pdf attached. 

I am no mathematician, so I have absolutely no idea what this would take in terms of theoretical energy requrements or even if it is possible.  The idea is that there are concentric rings which compound on the effects of the previous, so the warping of space is maximized while reducing the overall consumption of energy.  There could be a LOT more of these, possibly determining how fast the ship could go because of how much space is warped. 

Two ways I thought of doing this:

1: A black hole, but somehow manipulated (maybe with plasma fields?  I have no idea...) so that it can't interact with the space past the edges of the containment rings, but still generates the gravitational pull toward its destination. 

2: Electromagnetism warping space.  I heard a while ago that scientists had detected "wormholes" that were between the earth and the sun, and these were generated by very large magnetic interactions happening in that area.  I never heard much else about this, so maybe it was falsely detected, or a physics dead end.  I also know that electromagnetism creates additional spacial lensing when compared to strictly "matter generated black holes".  This method is thought to require tremendous amounts of energy, so would probably be less viable as a propulsion method. 

I guess the discussion for this thread should be:  Is it possible to create a black hole and "control" it, only allowing certain directions to be warped into it?  How much energy would be needed to maintain such a hole and the surrounding containment (assuming it is possible)

Could the rings idea "compound" on each other, so that less density of energy would be required to produce the same effect?  Please show me all the maths!  I am really curious and always trying to solve this problem of space travel.  I just don't have the mathematical knowledge to figure out these things myself.  Thanks everyone!

[jeffreycornish]

Okay, ideas in the middle of the night happen, and can keep us up.

The fact you brought up 'negative energy' means you have read at least some popularizations of current physics.  That's okay.  It's better (and harder!) to try to become more familiar with what is meant by these things. 

Space----doesn't work the way you are depicting it.  It's not a fluid, and it's not a grid.  What you are depicting reminds me of how the 'ether' was thought of prior to quantum mechanics and general relativity showing it to be not the way things are. 

You might familiarize yourself with General Relativity using the PBS Space-Time series available on Youtube

They also have a great segment on the Alcubierre drive which is requires the negative energy to expand/contract space.


Spacetime is dynamic in that it can expand and contract, but it cannot pour.

[coopert1150]

I reviewed those spacetime episodes, great stuff in there.  i don't think it helped in the context of this discussion though.  I understand space doesn't "pour", but it does bend, and in the case of a wormhole or black hole, "break".  I will definitely be redrawing this so a clearer idea comes through --  I do see what you are saying, where my design shows space flowing through a kind of sinkhole.  Yeah, not the best illustration I guess. 

I guess the next question would be -- is it possible to "control" this spacial warping effect caused by singularities and high energies.  I.E., are there any forces that can more accurately manipulate spacetime, so that the ship itself wouldn't be sucked into the singularity?  Basically picture each of the rings generating a very weak singularity in the center of them, and each one behind building on the effect of the others, so that the space is maximally warped while using as little energy per ring as possible.  The biggest challenge I see this design having is that singularities do not care about direction, and would destroy the ship from the inside.  Is there a known method of containing the singularities energies/gravities, so only certain space is affected and therefore "pull" the ship forward through space?  Essentially, A directional gravitational force generator.

I don't know how plasma fields and magnetic fields are affected by warping spacetime, so this would help!  Thanks!

[dustinthewind]

The idea of the ether is making some what of a come back.  There are reasons for this.  A local observer still can't observe any change in the speed of light, but a non-local observer can.  I'm guessing this is how LIGO worked but I need to look it up some time.  You also might look into the Polarizable Vacuum theory by Puthoff.  Special Relativity doesn't give much room for an ether but General Relativity doesn't seem as set in stone.  Other concepts such as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation suggest an absolute frame of reference for the universe as a whole.  Other effects such as frame dragging suggest matter dragging space time around with it.  Investigations of the quantum vacuum pressure on 2 plates close together (Casimir force) also suggest the vacuum is not empty. 

You might like this.  I was inspired by the concept of frame draging when I made this post in the link below, and is where the image comes from.  https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=39464.msg1484673#msg1484673  The idea is if a rotating planet can drag on space and time to cause light speed to be faster going around the planet than the other way (actually measured by gravity probe b).  The planets velocity is very small compared to the speed of light so what if we configured light to go in a tight circle and see if it has any viscosity relation to space time also. 

other articles: http://cds.cern.ch/record/368557
A previous post by me: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=40959.msg1601804#msg1601804
Another discussion of electron-positron pairs from the vacuum and a paper on light as a superfluid: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=40959.msg1600495#msg1600495

So the idea was to configure a torroid of metal, but part of the torroid is open so you can shoot light into the toroid.  The light would reflect many times inside but follow the walls in a circular path.  The attenuation in metal would be drastic so it would need to be a super conductor, so that the light can keep going around and around.  If there is any coupling of viscosity between light and vacuum, then the vacuum should begin to swirl around as does the light.  As the vacuum accelerates energy should be lost from the light as the light begins to exist in an accelerated frame which represents a transfer of energy from the light to the vacuum. 

The torroid should experience no acceleration due to space as it should be equally pulled in all directions but if you put a ship in the center it would exist in an accelerating frame, and would be pulled along.  Energy should be lost from the vacuum to the ship in the center, which is attached to the torroid ring.  The vacuum vortex around the torroid would have a tendancy to cause the vacuum around it to flow in the opposite direction as the ship is accelerated. 

I think you could just keep pumping light into the torroid if it is a superconductor with out limit except for the  limit of the stress on the walls.  You also have to be careful that the light you pump in is in phase with the light already inside or else it will destructively interfere.  That is unless it would just cause 2nd order effects.

I think it would be an interesting experiment. 

[ChrisWilson68]

The idea of the ether is making some what of a come back.

No, it's really not.  Most mainstream physicists believe in relativity, which says there is no ether, just as much as they have ever since shortly after the theory was published.

Other concepts such as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation suggest an absolute frame of reference for the universe as a whole.

Not really.  Learning the rest frame of the CMB is more like learning the rest frame of the Milky Way Galaxy, but on a larger scale -- it tells us about the average movement of a huge amount of the universe around us, but it in no way suggests that physical laws are different in different inertial frames.  Ether would say the physical laws are different in different frames.