Using Energy In Different Ways To Travel The Universe

The greatest restriction to space travel as far as I can see is that the fuel that is needed to propel the vehicle is carried on the spacecraft. If we use energy to travel the universe in a different way then that fuel may not have to be carried or just a little fuel may be needed to be carried, a much better idea.

let’s start with something that is achievable at the moment. The lightcraft vehicles being used in some  experiments are small, cone-shaped devices with a specially-designed parabolic mirror on their aft ends. The vehicles “ride” along a pulsed infrared laser beam fired from the ground. The reflective surfaces on the underside of the craft focus the energy from the beam into a ring, where it heats air to a temperature of over 50,000 degrees Celsius, or roughly ten times the temperature of the sun’s surface. This causes the air under the ring to explode for thrust. The forward motion of the craft feeds new air into the focusing ring for the next pulse. Lightcraft are spun for stabilization, much like a rifle bullet, and are launched at some 10,000 rpm.

Another achievable propulsion system is the ion drive. The ion Drive is an electric space propulsion in which ions are accelerated by an electrostatic field to produce a high-speed (typically about 30 km/s) exhaust. An ion engine has a high specific impulse (making it very fuel-efficient) but a very low thrust. Therefore, it is useless in the atmosphere or as a launch vehicle, but extremely useful in space where a small amount of thrust over a long period can result in a big difference in velocity. This makes an ion engine particularly useful for two applications: (1) as a final thruster to nudge a satellite into a higher orbit and or for orbital maneuvering or station-keeping, and (2) as a means of propelling deep-space probes by thrusting over a period of months to provide a high final velocity. The source of electrical energy for an ion engine can be either solar (see solar-electric propulsion) or nuclear.

The interstellar ramjet neatly avoids the fuel problem by harvesting hydrogen for use as a propellant from the interstellar medium. The captured hydrogen is fed to a nuclear fusion reactor which supplies the energy for a high-speed exhaust. Nice.

Recently (March 2009) a satellite was launched called GOCE to measure gravity. The satellite needed to be controlled very gently in low Earth orbit and therefore needed a propulsion system that was very smooth. An ion drive was used driven by a nuclear power plant. It is at this moment working very well. Next stop the stars!!

Well that’s all well and good but what if we jump ahead into the future by errr perhaps 500 years? Could we be transforming ourselves into energy and then transmitting ourselves across the universe? It was only 100 years ago that man first worked out how to get up in that great big blue sky and that, then, was like travelling to Mars and creating a colony today. It seemed like a miracle to people that you could actually fly.

So let’s not throw this idea out of the window or airlock before we start. Believe it or not this has already been done (not the throwing out of the window but the teleportation). It’s only the teleportation of atoms but teleportation is teleportation. If you don’t believe me then check out this article on teleportation.

I expect teleportation in the future could be by electromagnetic waves or by the particles that light is made out of, Photons. This would only allow travel at the speed of light so it would take ages to get to the stars which is not really what we are looking for.

Tachyon particles may or may not exist, but if they do exist they would be extremely useful if we could use them for teleportation as if they exist they travel faster than light. Faster Than Light: Superluminal Loopholes in Physics (Plume)by Nick Herbert goes into the ins and outs of travelling faster than light.

You could travel faster than light if you could turn yourself (and your starship if you had one available) into a tachyon. However, special relativity indicates that if you did this, you could travel back in time and violate causality – the idea that causes must precede their effects. You could wind up in the “Grandfather Paradox”: What if you go back in time and kill your grandfather before your father is born? But if you’re never born, how could you go back and kill your grandfather?

I expect that there will be a way around the grandfather paradox as the universe hopefully wouldn’t be so unfair as to put stars out there and not allow us to go and explore them.

An interstellar teleporter is where the physical person or object is scanned or disassembled at the point of departure and information is transmitted so that the person or object may be reassembled at the point of arrival. In other cases (such as “Springers” in John Barnes’ The Armies of Memory (Thousand Cultures)the technology involves a “spatial coordinate remapping” whereby a distant location is remapped to a location adjacent to the point of departure on the device. This assumes existence of two coordinate systems in space: one “real” and one “relative”.

Wormholes connect one point to another, and if you’ve seen Stargate then you’ll know what I’m talking about perhaps, and would transmit matter from one point to another. Spacetimes  containing wormholes are known to be solutions in General relativity. If you think of space as a piece of paper folded up so that the paper is touching at both ends then to go from one end of the paper to the other is a shorter distance than going across it when it is flat. That is what may be done to space in the future.

There is a theory that says that we are all holograms. We are the shadows on a wall. The `room’ is some larger, five-dimensional spacetime and our four-dimensional world is just the boundary of this larger space. If we try to move away from the wall, we are moving into an extra dimension of space – a fifth dimension. In fact, people have recently been trying to think of ways in which we might actually experimentally `probe’ this fifth dimension.

If this was the case then there may be some way to turn off the holographic projector point it in a different direction and turn it back on. This would mean that we had travelled from A to B or star to star and we have our instantaneous travel. Of course if somebody turns off the projector and doesn’t turn it back on thenlike craft we have a few problems.

As you can see there are quite a few theories that gives hints that instantaneous travel or faster than light travel may be possible in different ways. It just takes time and let’s hope it will be soon. See you on Alpha centauri.

GOCE