Re: Fermi's Paradox and FTL drives

Gene Ward Smith wrote:
> Sea Wasp <seawaspObvious@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in 
> news:47ABCD51.3060806@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
>>Gene Ward Smith wrote:
>>
>>>Sea Wasp <seawaspObvious@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in 
>>>news:47ABB0DF.8050200@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
> 
>>>What are these speed-limited systems? Setting up the 
>>>connection makes sense as a speed limit, but what else 
>>
> does?
> 
>>     Go ask the physicists. Alcubierre, was that one?
> 
> 
> The trouble with that is that the Alcubierre drive isn't 
> really a drive, and has no answer to the question of what the 
> top speed is. A sort of bubble of space-time is propagating 
> along as fast as it happens to be going, which will be 
> different in different frames of reference. You can't use it 
> to go anywhere, because you can't get inside the bubble, and 
> if you are inside, you can't get outside.
> 
> So no, I don't think this counts.
> 
> 
>>     The obvious answers are a drive that alters properties 
> 
> of spacetime 
> 
>>so that your effective distance is shorter, but not 
> 
> infinitely 
> 
>>shorter, based perhaps on how much power you can put into 
> 
> your 
> 
>>spacewarp trick.
> 
> 
> Um, Dude-that one we know about. 

	No, we don't.

>It's called relativity, and 
> is standard physics.

	No. Relativity merely describes what (presumably, and backed up by 
experimental results thus far) happens when you accelerate to a 
certain speed.

	What I was describing is a device which distorts spacetime WITHOUT 
you accelerating first, so that the apparent distance from here to 
there is shorter for you, but not for anyone else, and in which if you 
then apply some form of acceleration you will travel from here to 
there in a time which both you, AND the people you left behind, AND 
the people in the place at which you will arrive, is shorter than the 
time a radio or laser message beamed from here to there would have 
taken to get from here to there.



  If you accelerate at one standard
> gravity, effective distances will start shrinking 
> exponentially, allowing you to reach the Andromeda galaxy in 
> the course of a lifetime.

	No, it won't. In the course of MY lifetime, perhaps, but not in the 
course of the lifetime of my friends and family who didn't come along.

	This is clearly NOT what I was describing.




-- 
                      Sea Wasp
                        /^\
                        ;;;	
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