Isnt Warp drive technically impossible?
We all know the concept of warp drive is to warp space and connect two points far away together. Theoretically, the only things that can warp space is a super massive object like planets, and stars, but those only have very minuscule effects on the space they affect. The only thing that can comes close to warping space considerably is a black hole (and possible a neutron star a.k.a a failed black hole), and that takes the death of a super massive star to form. So the energy required to even consider something like warp drive probably requires more energy than the Sun.
February 25, 2016
8 Comments • Newest first
@fradddd: It's fine if you dislike me.
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@cb000: I said massive objects warp space and time, and gravity waves are the proof. But this is the problem. We were able to observe the effects of a black hole, but we never observed a white hole before, so it is possible that black holes don't warp space enough to even create a wormhole, if in fact exist at all. As for the energy requirement, the original theoretical calculation for warp drive says that we need more energy than the entire observable universe. Nowadays, they say we probably need as much energy as the energy equivalent of Jupiter, fantastic, we only have like one gas giant of it's size though. source: http://news.discovery.com/space/private-spaceflight/how-to-make-an-energy-efficient-warp-drive-120924.htm.
Either way, Warp drive just seems technological impossible, and there are no proof wormholes exist anyways.
Black holes aren't dependent on total energy; they depend on energy density. The LHC probably creates short-lived black holes all the time due to the energy densities involved in their particle collisions. Of course, creating and maintaining a usable warp in spacetime would cost a lot of energy (though smaller than the mass of the sun, which has a Swartchild Radius of about 3km, much bigger than needed), but who's to say some advanced civilization can't possibly achieve the required technology? We can already create very high energy densities by focusing lasers into a single point, and one can imagine a scaled-up version of that used to create black holes.
Also, gravitational waves don't cause warping of space and time; they ARE warping of space and time. A binary system of black holes has a fairly significant rotating quadrupole moment, very similar to electrical quadrupole moments, which is why it can radiate waves. Funny thing, half the paper on the gravitational wave detection is devoted to the bibliography and the list of all the authors and labs that worked on the project.
@fradddd: The gravitational waves proved Einstein's theory about how that massive objects can cause a curvature in space time in the form of gravity. While it doesn't disprove wormholes can't exist since it proved the idea that space can be warped. However it also shows the only objects we observe so far to be able to cause significant distortion are massive black holes. The two black holes that were responsible for the recent observation of G-wave both had 29 solar masses, and 36 solar masses respectively. 1 solar mass = the mass of our Sun. And using the simple E = MC^2 formula, there isn't really a way for us to acquire that much energy.
@xdwow2 so you're saying gravitational waves don't make it more likely that wormholes can happen...?
*waits for 3 page long explanation*
@fradddd: It's always known gravity warps space and time. That's why black holes exert time dilation. In fact Einstein's theory is something like this, if we imagine space as a flat 2d plane, and we place massive objects like stars on it, it causes the 2d plane to distort (like a little dent on the flat plane), and within that distortion space, and time is affected. But the level of distortion depends on the mass of the object. A Black hole contrary to it's name isn't a hole, but a point of almost infinite density, and it literally causes so much distortion in space that if we view it in the 2d plane, it looks like the distortion is a seemingly bottomless hole, although it probably isn't.
The reason gravitational wave thingy was created by a collision of two black holes, and it serves to prove Einstein's theory, or at least that's how I understood it. But like I said, for a black hole to form, it would take a star several times as massive as our Sun to collapse, and even then there is no evidence that black holes cause enough distortion to warp space so completely that it connects two points in space, since by that logic white holes would exist, where matters would get split out. We have yet to observe such a phenomenon, so it's plausible to say warp drive is impossible, and even if it were possible, there's no way we can harness enough energy equivalent to that of a black hole within the solar system.
http://i.imgur.com/RdL2G7W.jpg
Doesn't the evidence of gravitational waves mean that those waves can bend space and time throughout the universe or something?