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How many horsepower to reach the light speed?
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The horses you need live on planet hidden within (by some weird coincidence) the horsehead nebula. Their hooves are naturally evolved quantum flux capacitors (I kid you not).
If you mount one of these horses, you can naturally travel at just under the speed of light.
The only problem is (apart from them being a very long way away) is that they are genuis level, blood sucking predators who consider it the height of shamefullness to be ridden by anyone.
That said, there is one member of their species, considered mad by the rest and exiled, who is currently residing in my garage.
Now, if someone could please help me find my dog, I'd happily introduce you to "Snappy."
(Snappy being a rough translation of his (I think he might be a he - not quite sure) unpronounceable name which sounds like a tuba being sucked through the snout of an aardvark).
Signed Concerned.
You guys have been smoking some really good stuff, didn't you?
Faith, horsepower is nominally the power that can be generated by a good horse - a crazy unit. Better to use kilowatt. Power is the rate of change of energy. However, energy can be used to generate force (-dV/dt), and with the horse there are two major forces: pushing on the ground, and overcoming the internal resistance to moving legs. So when it gets to its maximum speed, poor horse cannot change its kinetic energy, and all the energy it generates is wasted maintaining its then condition.Nothing, including Hawking radiation, can travel faster than light, at least according to Einstein's relativity, and, for than matter, Maxwell's electrodynamics. Hawking radiation does not travel faster than light - it travels precisely at light speed - and the gravitational field causes it to lose frequency :-)
The speed of light can never be attained by a physical object as it takes exponentially more energy to increase velocity even a small amount at relativistic speeds.Reaching slower speeds would also be moot because collisions with even tiny particles would cause devestating kinetic energy impacts. In the movie Passengers e.g. the ship is doing 0.5 c and its shields encounter an asteroid field. Even a pebble would have blasted the ship into vapor.
If you're writing about space travel, make it unimportant or use hyperspace, wormholes etc. Travel through normal space at high speed is not workable, unless you slow down and don't mind the trip taking way longer.
If you are writing about space travel, recognise the horrible forces generated by wormholes - OK if you are dead centre, but otherwise, ugly stuff coming your way. Of course nobody has ever seen a wormhole, and nobody has any idea how to make one. Then what makes you think there is any such entity as hyperspace, and even it there is, how do you get there? You might be better off flipping into alternative dimensions of string theory, which in turn could get extremely ugly.My view of travelling near light speed, which I have used in my fiction, is that the ship can scoop up the very rare gas particles and use that like a ram jet for more energy. Although I gave no details, for obvious reasons, the concept is you need to be preceded by a field (a little like the Alcubiere drive here) that can ionise whatever is in front, and then it is standard magnetohydrodynamics to save the day :-) That will work with small particles to. Hit an aasteroid and you are clean out of luck, although my way out of that in my "Mirandas Demons" was the ship can sense what is in front provided it is resonably below light speed, and it turns it into a plasma with an advanced weapon.
A ramscoop is a classic solution, yes (on Star Trek they have the deflector dish), but anything larger than a dust grain would be a problem. But good call on the path-clearing weapon.
"The tachyon drive is already running at 110%... I canna get anymore outta her.""The quantum manifold is breaking down!"
"OMG! There's a pebble directly ahead."
"Sir! This thing turns like the Titanic..."
All eyes and not a few tentacles turned toward the captain.
"Arm all phasors ... Fire!"
One would have to build up to a fast speed slowly in any event, to avoid being crushed by acceleration, so turns would be slow too. And no one would apply a huge off-axis propulsion that would crazily spin his ship. Otherwise, a normal spin eg taking less than a few g's of force wouldn't do anything bad.
Wonder if a person has a finite composition at any given time. If say Mr. X's composition at 12-00 is ___K molecules of ___, another ___K molecules of ____, yet another ___K molecules of _____ and he has a layout, design, MRI's, whatever . You broadcast the composition and all the rest with the light speed and a big 3d printer on the other end just prints it out. Will it work or will we still need to distill a soul?
In principle it could work, but now you copied the person. Unless the scanning process kills the original. :)From the original person's perspective, he either dies or he doesn't go anywhere.
Ray wrote: "In principle it could work, but now you copied the person. Unless the scanning process kills the original. :)From the original person's perspective, he either dies or he doesn't go anywhere."
As the cloning may be prohibited and once the copy is operational and identical, I guess there will be a need to dispose of the prototype -:)
It'll be also a slight time travel for the person. Since the 12-00 version will be reconstructed and not the one after he/she's visited the toilet at 12-05 for example
Faith wrote: ""Beam me up an orange juice, Scottie. in a cup this time please."..."A beer 4 me, pls, at around 8pm..
Once the singularity kicks in and money abolished, that's what we gonna be doing it seems
Forget teleportation of mass. Even if you could work out how to do it, the energy requirements would approach infinite, but there is a worse problem for the Star Trek type - you have to have a corresponding piece of equipment at the receiving end. My answer for advanced aliens that I mentioned in one of my novels is an improvement from the energy and safety point of view. All you do is teleport thought into another brain, and effectively take it over. You lie down, and through this transfer you control and see trough another body, which, as an aside could be technically dead, since you can also teleport the information to start up the necessary processes, and make that being do what you want. Effectively demonic possession. Having invented this process in "Scaevola's Triumph", I hardly used it. You can probably see why - it makes it very difficult to get an exciting plot because everything is out of balance. Gives you a new chance at zombies, though, if you like zombies.
Hi Ian,Could get ugly if someone flicks the off switch half way through the transfer process, and the mind gets split into two partial entities.
Also the target is presumably a clone - ref AVATAR? or would any old body do?
Hi Graeme,Explicitly stated is control stays with your brain. If "it" gets shot, you feel instant pain, but then nothing, and you are back to yourself. The concept was also that most bodies would do. The major part of the process is keeping the other body working, which is done there, so there has to be enough "working chemistry" - if it has been dead for a while it would not work. The important thing is it is your brain that does the thinking and sends out the signals - it is the field that transmits the thoughts and stimulates everything so it works, and returns messages of sensations.
Do you have enough horses to feel light-headed?
Are these Alcubierre horses? Do they expand space time when they gallop with their front hooves and contract it with their back hooves? Because if so, I can't imagine you'd need four to achieve light speed :)
Matthew wrote: "Are these Alcubierre horses? Do they expand space time when they gallop with their front hooves and contract it with their back hooves? Because if so, I can't imagine you'd need four to achieve lig..."I would imagine four hooves would work best for symmetry considerations? And why not be a devil and contract it with the front hooves and expand with the back ones?
It occurs to me that most people won't make much of my last post. The Alcubierre drive is an opportunity fro General Relativity (like wormholes) to beat the light speed issue, and it works by contracting the space in front of the vessel and expanding it behind. It sort of brings the distance closer, which makes it quicker to get there. So Matthew's horses would be running backwards and the rider would have to be looking over his shoulder all the time if he wanted to see where he was going. Of course, on one argument he might also be going backwards in time.
Matt, Ian - good that you brought it up and elaborated. Enjoy an opportunity to look up and familiarize myself with something new-:)
With our mathematical department enhanced recently, we may evaluate the number of horses we need to achieve a light speed velocity. Or maybe we just need to melt mass into wave and learn how to condense it back at destination.
As you imagine, this is not an entirely serious topic, however you may offer here your ideas for superfast travel.