Faster Than Light
POSTED BY: AnthonyT
UPDATED: Monday, August 2, 2004 20:22
VIEWED: 19488
PAGE 5 of 7
For more information on FLT travel, check out these NASA and University sites:
Tachyons:
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970612b.html
http://www.physics.gmu.edu/~e-physics/bob/tachyons.htm
Warp drive:
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/warp.htm
The page with descriptions of wormholes, Alcubierre’s "Warp Drive" and other FLT subjects, go here:
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/html/warp/ideachev.htm#worm
Also, simple web searches will find more information than you can stand...
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SIMON: What happens if they board us?
ZOE: If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing
and if we're very very lucky, they'll do it in that order.
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Okay, so I can't really claim to understand exactly what all the stuff on the tachyon page means. BUT...
What if you could invert the mass of an object? What if you could give an object, like a ship, negative mass?
--Anthony
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Asked this question once, and the answer is really cool. Its largely extrapalation from what we know about positive mass, lets see if I remember it all.
First off, a negative mass object would be repelled by a positive mass object. Which means that if you bonded the two of them together (mounted one of each on a stick) the positive mass would be attracted to the negative one, and the negative one would be repelled.
Which means it would move away. Which means, if they were bound together, they would keep moving away, picking up speed, keep going faster and faster until the masses separated. Kind cool.
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"Which means that if you bonded the two of them together (mounted one of each on a stick) the positive mass would be attracted to the negative one, and the negative one would be repelled."
I have to disagree. Positive mass (as you've called it) attracts positive mass - what we call gravitational attraction. If you assume that negative mass exists then negative mass must be attracted to negative mass. Thus negative mass would repel positive mass and likewise positive mass would repel negative mass and hence the two 'balls on sticks' would repel one another.
The analogy is charge. With charge you have positive and negative but in this instance positive and negative attract and likes repel. If you change this so that likes attract then you must have opposites repel.
To be honest though 'negative mass' doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. Charge is a property of mass but mass in not a property of anything - it just is!
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The concept of negative mass makes no sense to me as well. But this tachyon business is supposed to involve negative mass.
--Anthony
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Last I checked the closest thing to negative mass was vacuum energy. Sort of like Einstein's cosmological constant except it really exists.
Anyway, is there any reason that it can't be in one system? There is evidence from the show to support that it is, and if there were multiple planets in orbits, orbits close together, and atmospheres that trapped vastly different amounts of heat I don't see why it couldn't all be in one system.
There are only around 70 "worlds" and many are likely moons, assuming a star with a large habitability zone and what I already said why couldn’t it be in one system?
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Maybe you don't even need a large habitability zone.
What if you had a large binary star system?
What if you collapsed a few Jovians into stars like in 2010?
What if several dozen large asteroids were forced into a controlled collision to form a new planetoid of roughly 1g? What if this were done a dozen times?
There ARE "What If's" that don't involve FTL.
And I think I remember the term being hundreds of earths, yeah? I'd think that means at least 200 planets colonized. A Jovian can have twenty or so big moons, I reckon. The system would have to be HUGE.
-Anthony
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Hey... it so happens we have a trinary star system right next door.
"Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to us. The binary star system Alpha Centauri A and B is circled at a great distance by a third member of this trinary star system. "
--Anthony
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Quote:
...I want to point out once again that in Out of Gas, when the atmo and propulsion are out, there are still some lights and a working beacon (back-up battery, probably), but the gravity is also still on. The ship in Bushwhacked also had working gravity.
Yep. And in Serenity the battery power of the wreck they salvage is deadm hence they're floating out the cargo. Only hole there is that there is no gravity as they enter Serenity with the salvage until they add the atmosphere, then they make a point of showing the boxes drop.
Of course,it may be that they intended to do more of these effects but it got lost in the story line, or had to be cut because of the budget.
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I would assume that for the ease of moving things onto the ship, gravity in specific sections can be deactivated and activated at will. This IS demonstrated in Serenity. (They flip a switch. This gives them atmosphere but it also gives them gravity.) Therefore the internal and external gravity manipulation MUST be independant.
--Anthony
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