Nasa project for faster than light travel! how realistic is this?

6 Comments

Dr. Harold White, top guy from NASA (Advanced Propulsion Team Lead) says it's a realistic thing and is now within our reach. He is using taxpayer money in an attempt to create a tiny warp bubble in the lab based on Miguel Alcubierre's 1994 equations. If so, how soon is it going to happen?

I wouldn't say he doesn't know what he's doing. Apart from being a top NASA scientist, he is under government authority and funding. The US govt wouldn't embarrass itself (I guess) with such stuff if Dr White wasn't really up to something. This project began officially in 2011/2012. Is it realistic and worth supporting?

Even if he's not going to succeed, we have to start somewhere sometime so that future generations will have something to go on and build upon. The nearest star is 40 light years away and it would take Voyager 1 (launched in 1977) 17000 years to reach it. We will never get to see other stars and exoplanets unless we begin to work at an alternative method of space travel.

They even have a concept for what the FTL craft will look like. I bet that the more they will develop it, the closer it will get to being a flying saucer. haha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tegdIawRtwg

Quite realistic but still decades away. 9
Very realistic. A few years away. 0
An impossibility. It will never happen. 5
Realistic within the next centuries. 1
Realistic within the next million years. 0
Other. 1
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Comments ( 6 )
  • mystery7
    8 years ago

    Right now it's impossible but I believe it's going to happen. Probably not in our lifetimes tho.

    It was only 100 years ago people thought going faster than 50 mph was 'impossible' and that the human body couldn't stand it.

    And the idea of people going to the moon? That was not only impossible but stupid and foolish.

    I think superluminal travel will happen but not in the way that you think. It will not be about the brute force of pushing a spacecraft through the light barrier with a bigger and better rocket. Instead it will be about bending time and space itself.

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  • lordofopinions
    5 years ago

    Faster than light is impossible but going through dimensions such as folding space is possible. Take a sheet of paper and and measure the distance to get from one side to the other. Now fold the paper many times and measure the distance. It will be a lot shorter. If they figure out how to do this we would be able to travel long distances without breaking Einsteins theory of relativity that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. They are working on it.

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  • TrustMeImLying
    8 years ago

    I've always felt like there are certain "limits" in the universe --lightspeed, absolute zero, converting non-living matter into living and a couple others I can't remember-- that will never be broken/achieved, and in a way I feel it's meant to be that way.

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  • chained_rage
    8 years ago

    I doubt that any human body would be able to withstand it though =/
    So they would probably have to create something to pilot that craft or risk losing it forever in the year 1485.

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  • Darkoil
    8 years ago

    It's impossible. If you travel faster than light then you are effectively traveling back in time which again is impossible.

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    • thegypsysailor
      8 years ago

      I don't have the link, but if you google it, they actually measured some particle moving faster than the speed of light this year. I think it was in the European super collider.
      Time to remove the word impossible from faster than light travel.

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