Wormholes and Warpdrives

For years science fiction writers have come up with methods to tie interstellar empires together. Although these semi scientific methods of travel are as varied as the stories that accompany them, they all must be quick and cheap means of transportation. It is difficult to even imagine a society that extends outside the solar without some means of travel faster than light. While light moves at 300,000,000 m/s, those speeds would be far too slow to effectively tie civilizations in different solar systems together. A second problem with sub-light speeds is time dilation. When traveling at speeds that are a significant percentage of the speed of light, time slows down compared to those on Earth. This would present a problem to those that travel between two solar systems as years or decades would have passed before they even reach their destination although for them it might seem much shorter a journey. On the other hand, technologies that would allow for faster than light speeds are currently predicted to be impossible. Along with time dilation the mass of an object speeding up increases as that speed approaches 300,000,000 m/s. In short, the energy to send a spaceship to another star at the speed of light is infinite. There are only two proposed methods that could circumvent this cosmic speed limit and make a vast interstellar civilization possible.

The first of these is the wormhole. This idea was first formulated by Einstein and Nathan Rosen. They realized that a solution to the equations of general relativity allows for the existence of "bridges" in the spacetime continuum.
These could connect any two points in a spacetime whether it be another solar system thousands of lightyears away, a time in the distance past, or even another universe. In theory, the use of wormholes for space travel is simple. While no spaceship can move over a given distance faster than the speed of light, a wormhole could be used to decrease the actual distance traveled to another point in space. In other words, while still moving slower than light a space traveler could reach a distant star first by taking a massive short cut.

Unfortunately, simplicity ends there. While wormholes would be perfect for interstellar travel in theory in reality wormholes are very unstable. Any matter or energy that entered the wormhole would cause it to collapse. To solve this problem, exotic matter is required. Exotic matter put simply is a material with negative mass. As such it is repelled instead of attracted by gravity. The covering of the throat of a wormhole with such a material would cause the wormhole to stabilize. The only known way to create a negative mass is by use of the Casimir effect. A mysterious force in of itself the Casimir effect causes two metallic plates to repel each other when place in a vacuum. Although this force falls off very quickly with distance, it is powerful enough to apply a force equal to that of our atmosphere at 10 nm.

The second proposed method for faster than light travel is more similar to that found in Star Trek or Star Wars. Known as the Alcubierre warp drive, this method of travel would circumvent the speed of light entirely by keeping a spacecraft immobile. By manipulation of spacetime itself a warp drive would propel a ship forward at arbitrarily large speeds. By contracting spacetime ahead and expanding it behind a ship, it is theoretically possibly to create a spacetime bubble which would move the spaceship forward. Such a warp drive would require both exotic and normal matter in order to bend spacetime. Alcubierre's drive is similar in concept to a moving walkway. Although the speed that a person can walk down the walkway is limited just as the speed of a spaceship is limited by the speed of light, the rate at which a person can get to their destination is much greater due to the additional speed that the walkway imparts. The downside of the Alcubierre drive is that the walkway must be constructed before it can be used. Since the ship moving inside the spacetime bubble is moving faster than the speed of light outside of the bubble it is impossible for the pilot of the ship change course or end the journey of his ship. A road which the bubble will follow is necessary to control, accelerate, and decelerate any starship. Another objection to the use of this theory is the massive amount of energy needed to create such a bubble. Even by the most conservative estimates, it will take on the order of 6 x 10^30 kg of matter and at least a few milligrams of negative mass to create a spacetime bubble big enough to transport a small starship across the galaxy. While this may seem like a vast amount, some have predicted that it will take more energy to shape such a bubble than is currently contained within the universe.



http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/W/wormhole.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnikov_Tube

http://www.zamandayolculuk.com/cetinbal/warpDrivesx.htm

Energy of the Void

When most think about the vacuum of space, they associate with it emptiness. But in fact, space is filled with energy even when nothing else is present. This Zero Point Energy as it has come to be called is the lowest energy level a system can be reduced to, but this does not mean that it is a trivial amount. Indeed, the energy in empty space is so great that it has caused several dilemmas due to relativity. Since relativity equates mass and energy and gives both a gravitational field, the amount of Zero Point Energy should noticeably bend space. While assuming that Zero Point Energy doesn't exist or is very small would remove this problem, the theoretical energy level has been upheld by observations in very small objects. The force that results between metal plates that are very close due to Zero Point Energy becomes more significant the closer the two plates get in the absence of an electrical field. At 10 nm the force exerted as a result of Zero Point Energy is roughly equal to the pressure exerted by the atmosphere. While this force drops off extremely quickly with distance, its effects have become quite important to nanotechnology and other miniaturizing techniques.

Millennium

The Millennium Simulation is one of several projects to predict the evolution of universe by inputing large amounts of data. What makes Millennium different from the others is the shear size of the simulation. Using over 10 billion particles over a cubic region of space 2 billion light year on a side, the Millennium Simulation has successfully modeled the evolution of this large part of the universe from only 400,ooo years after its beginning till the present. The 25 terabytes of information on the 20 million galaxies, which held up an entire super computer center for a month, has cleared up several perceived difficulties with the modern view of the universe already and many more discoveries are expected.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHBRwAu8S2E

http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/millennium/

http://www.pparc.ac.uk/Nw/millennium_sim.asp

Pastafarianism

An argument that has been waged for hundreds of years, the controversy between creationism and evolution has come to the fore again in recent years. While direct teaching of Creationism in a science course has met with stout resistance due to its mention of God in most school districts, Intelligent Design has begun to be proposed as an alternative. By not directly mentioning God, but instead teaching that the universe is better described in its current state by the existence of an intelligent being than by Evolution, proponents hope to placate critics. This has not been the case. Most scientists have condemned Intelligent Design as being at best a pseudoscience on par with astrology and palm reading, and when the Kansas Board of Education decided that Intelligent Design should be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution, Bobby Henderson, a physics graduate, sent in a letter to the board a demand that a spoof religion that he had created based on Intelligent Design should be used instead.

In his religion which became known as Pastafarianism, Bobby claimed that a giant flying spaghetti monster was the great designer behind the universe and world. Although ignored by the board at first as nothing but a prankster, Henderson's new "religion" became quite widespread when he uploaded his letter onto the internet. In his letter Henderson outlines some of the core beliefs in his version of Intelligent Design and claims that Pastafarianism should be taught in schools because it is completely cohesive with traditional Intelligent Design. In most cases Henderson's letter pokes fun at the precepts of Intelligent Design especially at its more shaky concepts. For example, for Pastafarians pirates were embodiments of goodness, and the increase in hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions are all direct consequences of the decline in pirate numbers since the 1800s.