How long will it be until we have FTL?

[EmperorChrostas the Cruel]

Once again, a difference, that makes no difference, IS no difference!

Subatomic sized wormholes. Wow. Book me on the next outbound flight. All we need now is for ACME to build a shrink ray! Perhaps Dr. Reducto can let us use his. Harvey Birdman, atn. at law is your point of contact.

Seriously, you can go through as juice, but not as an orange.
Again with the mathematical masterbation. Let' keep the FTL in the realm of pleasant dreams. Don't bring them up as engineering studies if you don't like the answer.
There are plenty of fictional galactic empires that are limited to STL. They just don't involve US, only our desendants.If you still want to dream, think of the Larry Niven style of hyperdrive. It won't work too close to a strong gravitational field. Read that as 100 or so AUs past the orbit of Pluto.

Besides, even if we had a working FTL drive, that would work, B5 or even Star Wars style, we still are 100 years or so away from getting the ships and infrastructure needed to DO anything with it. We would all be pretty much too old to be in on the second blossoming of man.
The best scenario I ever came across, is Harry Turtledove's, "The road not taken", where aliens give us antigravity and hyperdrive. Or rather, we TAKE them. (after we kick their sorry middle ages tech base invasion force's weak asses!) Most races stumble across these two technologies about the middle ages, and it screws them out of newtonian physics, and the resulting knowledge of electromagnetism, and quantum theory. We are the "slow ones", who never discover these tech bases, and develoup along the road not taken.
Earth, with it's present tech base, circa 2015, vs aliens with a middle age tech base! We pretty much conquer everyone we come across, until we get so big we have a civil war.

[Crossover_Maniac]

Once again, a difference, that makes no difference, IS no difference!

Subatomic sized wormholes. Wow. Book me on the next outbound flight. All we need now is for ACME to build a shrink ray! Perhaps Dr. Reducto can let us use his. Harvey Birdman, atn. at law is your point of contact.

Nice job misrepresenting my post. I said the particle accelerators would be used to see if wormholes actually exist or if their prediction in General Relativity was a farce.

Seriously, you can go through as juice, but not as an orange.
Again with the mathematical masterbation. Let' keep the FTL in the realm of pleasant dreams. Don't bring them up as engineering studies if you don't like the answer.

I think someone said the same thing about the airplane in 1903. Wouldn't you rather let the cosmologists and theoretical physicists study the nature of spacetime than to foolishly etch in stone FTL travel is impossible?

There are plenty of fictional galactic empires that are limited to STL. They just don't involve US, only our desendants.If you still want to dream, think of the Larry Niven style of hyperdrive. It won't work too close to a strong gravitational field. Read that as 100 or so AUs past the orbit of Pluto.

The only Larry Niven story I read was the story about some cat aliens in a slower than light spacedrive. I seriously doubt that anyone here will live long enough to see interstellar travel, even STL. But I'm not going to declare I know the future or if the laws of physics permit FTL travel.

[Solid Snake]

I agree with Crossover. Dont be convinced that FTL is impossible. Our knowledge of the universe is only a few centuries refined. In a thousand years? We'll see.

[Robert Walper]

Claiming anything is impossible, is in fact, a unscientific way of thinking.

Personally, I simply do not know. Whether it is "possible" is something we cannot accurately answer now. What we can say is that with our current knowledge and understanding of the universe, our ability to do so or think of a way of doing it is impossible.

[EmperorChrostas the Cruel]

Dream on.
Claiming everything is possible is much more unscientific. Laws of physics, by definition, can not be broken.(Nature, to be commanded, must first be obeyed!)
The arguement that the airplane was considered impossible is one of those myths about the foolishness of our ancesters, like we will never break the sound bariror. The airplane myth was NEVER proposed by any serious scientific mind of the time.The sound barrior myth was based on the theorum that the human in question was to be accelerated supersonic by a cannon, like the early silent movie, with the moon men evaporating when bonked with umbrellas. The G forces needed to do so would kill you. The constant acceleration of a rocket or jet, now...
By the way, these arguments have already been killed, in better literary form, by Darth Wong. Are you reading this thread from the begining? If so, have you come up with any counter arguments, or are you cheerfully ploughing forward, oblivious?

There have always been people who flatly say things are imposible, based on the tech base of the day. This is different than the present day people who use mathmatical models to determine that there isn't enough energy, (even in an antimatter-matter reaction, at 100% efficientcy,) to achieve the goal. To exceed the speed of light, you need MORE than an infinte amount of energy to achieve this. When you can get an INFINITE amount of energy, much less MORE than infinite energy, let me know! The very IDEA of there being MORE than an infinite amout of anything shows astonishing ignorance.

There are things you can say in english, that seem to make sence, in a gramatical way, but are nonsence, in mathematical terms.
Examples: "What happened BEFORE there was time? (Refering to before the big bang)What is outside the Universe?"
"What number is larger than infinity?"
Now a similar examples: "How long is the width of that object?"
"The Polish barber shaves every man except the man who shaves himself, so dose he shave himself?"
The first example is much easier to understand, right off the bat. Lenth and width are two different properties. The second is more complicated, but is due to the juxtaposition of "all," and "except all" in the same logical premis. Have you ever seen the math trick that algebra teachers use to show that 2=3? The equasion has, in one part, deviding by zero. If you are not paying attention, and let this error in logic slide by you, the equasion DOES prove that 2=3!
Now about time. Before is a reference to time, and as such, must be included in the part during which there IS time! The universe is, by DEFINITION, inclusive of all things that exsist. NOTHING, can exsist, by definition, outside the universe, because any thing that EXSISTS is PART of the universe. (Like the fictional "objective viewer."The viewer, by definition, must exsist, and thus have a perspective to view FROM!)

"Faster than light," is actualy a phrase that has no meaning, when taken outside of it's english grammatical judgment perspective. Because light, by DEFINITION, is the fastest measureable speed! Speed means miles PER HOUR. Change the length of an hour, and you change your speed. Time is NOT immutable. The faster you go, the more time slows. At the speed of light, time stops. Faster than light, time goes backward. This has already been confimed by direct experimentation. 2 atomic clocks were syncronised. One was sent into orbit, and was accellerated to a higher velocity, relative to the clock on earth. When the clock in orbit was returned to earth, it was measured to be behind the clock that stayed on earth, proving it RAN SLOWER, during it's period of greater velocity!

When you can tell me the width of the cubes length, then you will have found a way to travel "faster than light."

Just because you can say a phrase, and it is grammaticly logical, does NOT mean the question, or statement has any meaning! (Outside of being gramaticly correct.)

Now on to Larry Niven. He has written LOTS of books. I was refering to his "Known space" series, of which, the Kzinti, (the cats with STL) are only a small part. There were 4 Man-Kzin wars, which we won, the last of which we won, because we perchased hyperdrive from the "Outsiders". If you haven't read the exploits of Beowolfe Shaefer,(ever heared of the "Puppeteers"?) and Luis Wu, (ever even heared of "Ringworld"?) then you are in for a treat. Find them, read then, you will love then, I promise! (The Slavers, the Tnuctipun, the Grogs, the PAK!) You will also learn a great deal about physics.

[Nick]

"The Polish barber shaves every man except the man who shaves himself, so dose he shave himself?"

Another point here is that the terms in isolation may be being used correctly, but the whole is nonsensical, whether we are plain English, or technical jargon.

The above actually has an odd analog in mathematical set theory:

1. Consider the set containing all possible sets (set U)
2. Now partition this set into those which contain themselves (set A), and those which do not (set B).
3. Obviously, set U and set A belong in set A. But where does set B belong?

At which point, the paradox implied by the existence of set B forces you to acknowledge that the partitioning proposed in step 2 is impossible. Not improbable - impossible. Set B is unique, and the partitioning has to acknowledge that.

Now, those who are claiming "but FTL shouldn't be dismissed as impossible" are missing the point. They are treating "possible/impossible" as if it were a binary switch - and it isn't. It's a probability: "Given what we know, how likely is it that X is possible?".

And, given our current knowledge of physics, the probability that practical FTL is possible is extremely low. The probability is not exactly zero, because there remains the remote chance that some discovery will give un insight into some inaccuracy of the current model that allows practical use of FTL communications or travel (entanglement is one such course of investigation). But the enormous chain of events required (discovery of an appropriate loophole, converting the loophole from a mathematical trick to an engineering reality, converting the engineering reality from a laboratory toy into a practical device), with the potential for stalling at any point in the chain, indicates that the only people it should really matter to are the physicists trying to improve the models of the universe.