Is it just me or does anyone else automatically dismiss articles where the caption ends in “and here’s how!”
I do not. They intrigue me.
Living long enough to realize light speed travel is possible 👍
Living long enough to realize just how slow light speed really is 😭
It really does have a tendency to slow things down…
If it makes you feel any better, you won’t notice the years pass by while you’re travelling.
Just make sure to take your loved ones with you…
It’s a good primer for anyone who hasn’t heard of Sonny White’s work or the Alcubierre theory/drive. Currently the best option we have at the moment for making any progress beyond conventional action-reaction rocketry. Also very far away still. The biggest error is in the subtitle, claiming “reach the far ends of the cosmos in the blink of an eye”. If it worked it would be magnitudes faster than anything Newton-related we can imagine, but it’s still enormously slow compared to the size of even just our galaxy.
A great beautiful video short by the amazing Erik Wernquist (and narrated by the same Sonny White) called “Go Incredibly Fast” shows how big even “near” space is.
Another good example is in the game “Elite Dangerous” which uses the Alcubierre concept for its local space drives making travel within most systems reasonably fast. Even in the game use going from star to star they resort to a more instant “wormhole” technique as the warping effect would take too long to get anywhere in the galaxy.
But without some kind of loophole past Newton and Einstein, we’re pretty much stuck in our own solar system, or to end up using generation ships that take hundreds or thousand of years to get anywhere.
This is literally straight out of 3 Body Problem - book 3 iirc written like 10 years ago
Basically creating a low density area next to a high density area will cause the high density to rush to low density to fill the void, ya know, like wind.
He explains it better in 3body
And even at the speed of light, we would never reach “The end of the cosmos,” because the universe is expanding at the speed of light.
Hense why as you go closer to the speed of light you experience time more slowly than an observer, because time is basically a by-product of this expansion. You would never even reach the next galaxy because we’re moving away from each other at the speed of light.
Edit: At least not with this method. We would need a warp like in Event Horizon.
