Alternate Ship Design Systems

[TKalbfus]

What if you could create a wormhole, but instead of leading elsewhere, they led to a mirror universe made out of antimatter. This builds upon the brane theory ofthe universe where gravity leaks across the branes of the universe. Lets say the Universe has 2 branes, one brane is where we live and the other one is where the universe is predominantly made out of antimatter. Our gravity leaks into the antimatter universe causing antimatter to gather in the gravity wells in our universe. In the antimatter brane there is a star occupying the same location as our Sun in our brane. This star may be more or less massive, there are also planets in the same orbits as the planets in our solar system, though those planets aren't necessarily in the same places in those orbits as our planets. A starship can jump instantly to the other brane and gather antimatter and then jump back and use its rockets to travel to other stars. In fact you could have an antimatter ramjet that alternately jumps from one brane to tne other to gather either hydrogen or antihydrogen from interstellar space.

 

[TKalbfus]

On the otherhand you could just have a large number of branes to travel to. Mapping would be very simple, each system would be like another page in a book. Some would be made out of matter and others out of antimatter, it should be possible to detect which is which before coming in contact with it.

On the other hand what if an comet made of antimatter were captured into Solar Orbit by the influence of Jupiter. The comet would have a tail made out of antimatter and from that antimatter might be collected safely using a magnetic scoop. No alternate universes are required in this explaination, the comet just was mysteriously captured from interstellar space and no one knows its origin. Lets say this anti-comet is about 30 km in diameter and is made out of the sort of stuff most comets are made of except in this case its antimatter. Perhaps there is a wormhole lurking out there which this comet happened to pass through before entering the Solar System, perhaps it is the remains of a giant Alien Starship. Lets say that this comet was its fuel supply but that it somehow escaped containment.

One configuration is to have a giant starship slightly larger than this comet, but separate from it. The comet has a magnetic field and the starship has a superconductor plate in front of it. The comet is out in front of the starship with its magnetic field. The superconducting plate "levitates" the comet out ahead of it without touching it. The starship is behind the plate and pushes the plate in front of it. There is a tiny hole in the center of the plate. A laser beam vaporizes a tiny portion of the anticomet and magnetic fields funnel the plasma into the starship's reaction nozzle where it reacts with matter. The matter/antimatter reaction pushes the starship forward, which pushes the superconducting plate forward, which pushes magnetically the anti-comet ahead of the ship. The comet also annhilates interstellar debris that hits it, preventing it from hitting the starship behind.

But what if something hit the starship from the side destroying the starship while letting the anti-comet go on its way. The Starship just happened to be entering the Solar System when this happened and the comet was going slow enough to be captured by Jupiter. This comet, produced at great cost by some alien civilization, can now fuel many Traveller-sized starships.

 

[Straybow]

Why don't they take prototyping machine tools and make their own fusion powered antimatter plant in the destination system? They've got time; they rotate cold sleep and duty shifts while automated miners extract metals from asteroids and planets, parts are tooled, etc. It may take a couple decades to set up the system and generate enough antimatter.

Why is it we're talking about TL17+ sublight starships?? That would make a boooorrrriiiing Traveller campaign.

 

[mike wightman]

IMHO TL17+ for antimatter is way to high, unless it involves some sort of magical nuclear damper/meson screen manipulation of matter to convert ordinary matter into antimatter
NASA has antimatter powered vehicles in the concept stage now.
Most of the antimatter research articles I've read mention that there is a major increase in the amount produced per year (OK, we're still talking micrograms but at least it's an improvement ).
As for mass production in a Sci-Fi setting, I like the way it is done in Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn series. Criminal organisations set up solar powered antimatter factories in orbit close to the star in an uninhabited syatem. Why build a fusion plant when you have the technology to buil right next to a naturally occurring one

 

[Drakon]

Okay, I think we are wandering a bit. I thought your goal was to reduce the amount of rubber science in you TU.

I admit that I have a bit of a prejudice against braneworld theories, and I don't think they will work in your case anyway, even if my prejudice is unfounded. Let me deal with the second part first.

In the real world, I am a technician at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. We make anti-matter, positrons, for experiments run by physists. The process is actually quite simple on the small scale we use, but it does take a lot of electricity.

Recently our site has been doing experiments to investigate what is called CP violations. According to the standard model, matter and antimatter should be identical except for a reversal of electric charge. (Or magnetic moment for things like neutrons) If that is true, then we should not exist. The universe should have recombined the matter and antimatter rather soon after the big bang, resulting in nothing being left but gamma rays. Since there is something besides gamma rays left, (like people to wonder about such issues) there is a bug in the model.

So the question is, what mechanism in the natural laws of the universe favor matter over antimatter? Right now, we are looking at discrepancies in charge and polarity between matter and antimatter, and especially in the decay times and products of unstable particles, like the B and K mesons.

Now, assuming that your anti-matter brane/world/universe exists, this means different rules are established there, as compared to here. In other words, even assuming you can open a wormhole between here and there, and move a ship through it, and assuming that your ship is not immediately damaged or destroyed because it is a matter ship in an antimatter universe, IT WON'T WORK as expected.

It is an interesting thought experiment, whether your matter ship will function the same once its on another brane. But at first glance, I don't think it will. Even if it could survive all the other insurmountable challenges, its interaction with as well as its functioning may depend on what rules apply on the brane, as opposed to what rules apply here.

The very fact that it is an antimatter brane means its rules are different than here. And that is going to be a big problem, finding a ship that can function under either or perhaps even both sets of rules, I don't see how you are going to get around it. Especially if your power source depends on nuclear interactions.

And this says nothing about the fact that attempting to open a wormhole between a matter universe, and an antimatter universe, has a high probablity of destroying the site, if not the planet, such an experiment is performed on.

Or that having wormhole technology will give you warp drive, as many of the concepts and technologies involved in one, are extremely applicable in the other.

But that aside for a moment, I am very hesitant to buy into brane theory at this stage of things. It sounds too much like it suffers the same problems I have with Copenhagen QM, Everette's multiverse or Bohm's pilot waves. In each case, the proponents are using some feature or postulated entity as a "rug" to sweep under unpleasant details.

In the case of Copenhagen, it requires a fundamental change in the meaning of probablity. Back in the old days, it was thought that, if you had available all the relavant factors, table friction, cube weight, velocity of throw, etc. you could accurately predict the role of a die. We use probability because we don't know the value of all the factors, and may not know what all the factors are that go into determining which side is on top.

In other words, the universe was thought to be deterministic. Probablity simply was a tool to get a "close enough for government work" answer, to take into account all the known unknowns as well as the unknown unknown.

Copenhagen changed that. Bohr proposes that the universe is at its smallest level, fundamentally undeterministic. The rules no longer applied, especially at the smallest scale. probablity was no longer seen as a place holder for those unknowns but for things that were, even in principle unknowable, or did not even exist. The universe was truly random at the atomic scale.

And so you end up with undead zombie cats wandering around unseen boxes.

Many years later, chaos theory started coming into existence, which I think is going to be a fundamental science not to long from now. What it has already shown is that very simple systems can display extremely complex behavior. Recursive and non-linear mathematics, even if not related to anything real, can produce unique and highly complex patterns.

I don't see multiple branes as being that much different. The central message, (to me) of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM is really, "We don't know what is actually going on at that level, so we are sweeping under the rug of Indeterminancy" In Everette "We don't know why the particle decays in this way, so we are sweeping it under the rug by positing that in another almost identical universe, it does decay the other way."

In the case of branes, I have heard that they are being used to 'explain' why gravity is so weak. That most of the gravitational force leaks into adjacent branes. Very convienent since there is no means of detecting or observing these other branes.

Bohm is a little better, but it still posit "backward in time waves" that cannot be observed. Once you start positing unobservables to explain away irratations in your model, I think you got a problem.

 

[TKalbfus]

But branes have an advantage, unlike other stars, they are not light years away. Branes are separated by a tiny distance along a fifth dimension, not time but another dimension where you can stack parallel 3-d spaces like pages in a book. Since gravity leaks across the branes, there is a likelihood that matter or antimatter will accumulate in these gravitational depressions if there is indeed matter/antimatter in these other branes. I think a matter spaceship can survive in the vacuum of an antimatter brane for a time. Stray anti-hydrogen atoms will collide with the hull, but so long as not too many of them are encountered and the shielding is adequate, the ship should survive. I guess the question to ask is would an antimatter spaceship survive in our universe? Is antimatter, once created, stable so long as it doesn't come in contact with matter? My understanding is that you can build things out of antimatter, am I wrong? I know conditions in the early universe may have created a bias against antimatter, but what dos that say about the continued existance of antimatter in our universe once created? I think if antimatter reacts with matter in our universe then matter should equally react with antimatter in an antimatter universe. Perhaps there is a predisposition for matter to form on one side of a brane and antimatter on the other.

Admittedly brane universes make things convienient for a Traveller Universe; instead of worrying about how to cross light years, you just worry about crossing the brane. In the next brane their could be another star sitting in the Sun's gravitational well. Some of the Sun's gravity will leak into this brane, but then some of this brane's star's gravity will leak back into our brane where the Sun is located. Just roll the chance of a star's presence in a given hex as the given chance for another star and planets to be sitting in the Sun's gravitational well in another brane. Planets wouldn't hold corresponding positions in their orbits as different star masses imply different orbital velocities for the planets. The other brane counterpart to the milky way would have roughly the same masses, so stars would tend to sit in each other's gravity wells.

Basically roll for star presence, new star type if yes, and then new planets every time the PC's starship jumps to a new brane. For mapping purposes, just detail each new brane star system on a new page in a note book. As there is only one transbranar dimension you can only move in or out or forward and back however you want to term these direction. No prodigious amounts of antimatter need necessarily be required.

By the way, these branes aren't parallel histories; they are completely different star systems with no shared history at all. These branes have existed since the beginning of the Universe and more branes aren't created through time travel. Each brane is fairly deterministic but acts gravitationally with other objects in other nearby branes. This is the "missing mass" in the universe as seen from each brane. These are different sorts of parallel universes from the Everett model. There is not likely to be any counterparts to you or I in these other branes. Any planets in these other branes aren't going to be parallel Earths in a strict sense. There may be life bearing planets, but they'll contain alien life. Brane-crossing colonists will have to adapt to these local conditions or terraform.

 

[TKalbfus]

So the above is an example of a possible Traveller Universe without FTL. Instead of an FTL drive you simply cross the Brane instead. Everything else is similar. You could suppose that crossing the brane is easier and requires less energy away from the gravitational wells of planets (such as 100 diameters away from Earth) Planets will vary in size, mass, and location in the parallel star systems. A brane jump at 100 diameters will likely leave the spaceship at least tens of millions of miles away from the nearest planet if there are any planets at all in the counterpart to the Solar System in the destination brane. The ship will likely have to use its maneuver drive to travel some distance in order to reach this planet. the stars seen in the sky from here will likely hold some of the same positions as seen in the night sky as seen from Earth, but the stars will be either brighter or dimmer from their corresponding stars in our brane. Some stars in our brane will not have counterparts in the other brane and vice versa. The overall mass of the galaxy should be the same however. The overall bands of the milky way will be in the same place, its just the precise details of the exact concentrations of matter or antimatter, as the case may be, that are different.

 

[Drakon]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
But branes have an advantage, unlike other stars, they are not light years away. Branes are separated by a tiny distance along a fifth dimension, not time but another dimension where you can stack parallel 3-d spaces like pages in a book.

I thought your goal here was to reduce the rubber science required for your Traveller Universe. As it stands now, branes are rubber science, and as I have said earlier, I see them as really nothing more than sweeping problems under the rug.

You have to assume branes exist, in the first place. You then have to assume that this 5th dimensional separation is in fact "short" and not long. For all you know, that distance could be as far as it is to the nearest galaxy. Then, on top of that, you have to assume that such distance, what ever it is, is tranversible by wormholes.

And again, if you got wormholes, you got warp drive, so the whole concept of branes is not needed, not required, and superfluous.

Then, in additions to all the other assumptions you have made so far, you have to posit the ability to construct technology that will operate in two different universes, under two different sets of natural laws. You are adding to the rubber science, rather than attempting to diminish it.

Since gravity leaks across the branes, there is a likelihood that matter or antimatter will accumulate in these gravitational depressions if there is indeed matter/antimatter in these other branes.

Again, more assumptions, more positing of entities that increase your rubber science.

I think a matter spaceship can survive in the vacuum of an antimatter brane for a time. Stray anti-hydrogen atoms will collide with the hull, but so long as not too many of them are encountered and the shielding is adequate, the ship should survive. I guess the question to ask is would an antimatter spaceship survive in our universe? Is antimatter, once created, stable so long as it doesn't come in contact with matter?

Research indicates that it is almost as stable as matter. But the interstellar medium is not a perfect vacuum. The density is like 10 atoms per cubic centimeter. Not a lot, but think a minute. If you do any travelling at all, you are going to run into far more, which will erode your ship, (or the antimatter ship in this universe) a lot quicker.

but what dos that say about the continued existance of antimatter in our universe once created?

There ain't none here. When matter and antimatter get together, there is a bright flash, some gamma and thats it. If it touches anything whatsoever, its gone in a flash.

The CP violation experiments, if I am understanding this right, shows a very very slight bias in the decay of B and K mesons toward matter. Not a lot, something like 1 part in a billion. What this means is that out of say, 2 billion and 1 decays of these particles, 1 billion will be antimatter, another billion plus 1 will be antimatter. The matter and antimatter will pair up, anniliate each other, leaving the lone gal at the ball without a date left to form everything we see in the universe.

Perhaps there is a predisposition for matter to form on one side of a brane and antimatter on the other.

Intriguing speculation, but again, that is all it is.

Admittedly brane universes make things convienient for a Traveller Universe;

I am NOT seeing this at all. It sounds like added complexity, above and beyond, and far worse than any objections I have about the reality of jump drive. Far from being convienient, this looks more complex, and more "rubber scienty" than what we already have.

Instead of having one map, you have to create two now. Or one for each and every brane. And no, there is not going to be any transbrane colonies, there can't be because your colonists are made of matter. In an antimatter universe, this is a problem. And renders the entire brane far to dangerous to live in.

 

[TKalbfus]

What are you afraid of? The fact of the matter is going 1 light year in less than a year external observer is time travel. For any FTL velocity, there is a STL point of view for which that FTL object goes back in time. It doesn't really matter how slow the FTL object goes, because if there is a STL object going fast enough in the opposite direction, it will appear to be going backwards in time, its hard to have an FTL based space opera without time travel. Warp drive requires a portable black hole in front of the ship and a "white hole" behind. The problem is that "white holes" are impossible. Imagine turning a black hole inside-out so that its gravitational force points outward instead of inward. The "white hole" has an even horizon that lasts for an instant of time and then it explodes and a star's worth of matter comes rushing out. In order for the gravitational field to be reversed, the mass of the matter has to be negative. As all this negative matter comes rushing out, it will appear to slow down, not due to gravity, but because the reduced gravitational potential slows down time for the outfalling matter to match the rate of the rest of the universe. With all the negative matter gone, the "white hole" disappears, it becomes an expanding cloud of negative matter. The "event horizon" of a white hole is "theoretical" as it could never quite exist. Even light cannot overcome this objects repulsive gravity to reach this distance from the "white hole's" center of mass, all the negative mass that makes up this white hole must therefore exist entirely outside this radius and it immediately rushes outward. A "white hole" is not an object; it is an explosion. A black hole, unlike a "white hole" persists because while a "white hole" accelerates time near itself, a black hole slows it down, time comes to a stop at a black hole's event horizon while an infinite amount of time passes at the "white hole's" event horizon for every instant that passes in the external universe, and the moment it exists, it explodes and ceaces to exist. The best you can hope for is to compress a relatively dense ball of negative matter and that ball will be larger than the equivalent positive mass of a black hole. The ball repels the black hole and the black hole attracts the ball. In-between the flattening tidal force of the ball cancels out mostly the stretching tidal force of the black hole, but if you move out of that sweet spot, you'll be flattened into a very thin "pancake" or stretched into "spagetti", that is unless both objects have a circumference equal to 1 AU. That's the rubber science of warp drive; the fact that you could imagine a starship controlled by PCs doing this, it would be much worse that the GM giving the PCs their very own Death Star. Such a warp drive can explode a sun and throw its planets into interstellar space if it passes too close. Interstellar travel in a reasonable amout of time requires unleashing enourmous amounts of evergy either to bend space or to go near the speed of light.

I thought your goal here was to reduce the rubber science required for your Traveller Universe. As it stands now, branes are rubber science, and as I have said earlier, I see them as really nothing more than sweeping problems under the rug.

There is rubber science here, I don't say there isn't, but there is a number of phenomina that brane theory explains quite neatly. For one there is all the missing matter in the galaxy. The galaxy spins too fast for all the stars to be held in their orbits by the visible mass of the galaxy and all that mass couldn't be in the central black hole since the orbital velocities of the stars don't decrease with distance as if most of the mass were in the center. Out among the stars, there is unseen mass, this mass is not gas; otherwise it would form more stars, it couldn't be planets as they would be pulled together to form stars due to their concentration. There are forms of matter that interact with the stars only gravitationally, light does not reflect of of them and they can pass through solid objects. Now the branes would exists a short distance along a higher dimension, this higher dimension is small and curves back upon itself. At very short distances gravity obeys the inverse cubed law as it propigates outward in 4 dimensions, but as it propigates back in upon itself along this short dimentsion, beyond a short distance gravity becomes an apparent inverse squared law and it appears weaker than it actually is. One way to test out the brane theory is by making a black hole in a laboratory. Since gravity could be a much stronger force than we think it is, tiny black holes should be easier to make than we think, they don't last long, but their existance would prove the existance of more than 3 spacial dimensions. The 5th dimension could be small but it may nevertheless contain many branes that we cannot detect except for the gravitational objects inside of them. The black holes we could create would exist in many branes at once since they are 3+ dimensional objects and gravity is actually a 3+ dimensional force. The objects in the closest brane could not be light years away along this 5th dimension because we would otherwise not feel their gravitational influences, and if it were light years away, the 5th dimension would be at least light years long and gravity would propigate according to the inverse-cubed law at astronomical distances, the result would be that the planets in our solar system could not remain in orbit unless their orbits were perfect circles; planets would either spiral into the sun or be flung outwards never to return. Since this is not happening, the 5th dimension could not be large enough for the next brane to be light years away, but it could be large enough to contain multiple branes, perhaps a million of them since their thickness is something on the order of a Plank's length.

Its an interesting parallel Universe model and the gravitational field propagate into other branes causing other planets to form within them when the pass through molecular clouds. This phantom gravity could cause molecular clouds to collapse and form planets and stars. Some of these could be coincident with our own solar system. Since gravity does not propagate perfectly through higher dimensions, only a small portion of the Sun's gravity would exist in a parallel brane, this small infuence might be enough to cause a star to form parallel to the Sun in this brane. the advantage here would be that the nearest star after our own sun could be nerely angstroms away from our own sun. Perhaps some tiny manipulations of forces could cause a spaceship to slip from one brane to the next. The stars that are light years away in our own brane would be ignored as they would be difficult to get to. The explorers in this universe would be most concerned with what lies in the next brane. If what you say about antimatter is true, then all the branes could be matter branes following the same physical laws as our own brane. The other branes and our own are part of the same universe and not truly seperate universes, they are just parts of this universe that we can't normally get to. Perhaps some unknown manipulation of physical forces will pemit us to travel to these other branes, but that's what science fiction is all about.

Since they are close; we don't have to worry about time travel implications, we don't have to put antimatter into PCs hands and it makes mapping nice and neat since we don't have to map in 3 dimensions. If you imagine two higher dimensions you could even uses the OTU maps except the worlds shown in the hexes aren't orbiting stars parsecs away, but parallel branes only angstroms away, you can't see them in the night sky as what you see in the night sky is irrelevent to exploration. You would have jump drives that can jump from 1 to 6 branes at once. There is no jump space as the jump is instantaneous, and near instantaneous communication is possible with gravity waves, or outside induced jumps.

 

[Straybow]

No, traversing a distance at an effective speed greater than light is emphatically not time travel. There are no breaks in causality, there is no observer for which the FTL object goes "back in time," only observers who can't observe the causality in time order.

I can't observe causalities in time order simply because they are too remote. I assume that the car that was absent when I went to sleep and present when I woke up arrived in time order. I don't assume that the car was manufactured tomorrow and appeared today just because I didn't see its manufacture. Just so with a time-dilated observer and a passing FTL object.

 

[TKalbfus]

Suppose you had an arbitrarily powerful telescope, and you just witnessed a starship travel from here to Alpha Centauri in 2 seconds, land on the planet and wave all as seen through your telescope in the space of 2 seconds. You know that a few moments ago, the space ship just departed and 2 seconds later, you can see them on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri waving to you.

Now knowing that the light from that planet is 4.4 years old, what just happened?

From the point of view of an observer on Earth, that spaceship just moved back in time.

All FTL systems have a flaw that under certain circumstances, they can be used as time machines, that's just the rubber science that's used in these science fiction settings.

In another example you once again have an arbitrarily powerful telescope, but this time, the starship is seen to take 4.4 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri and land on the planet there. Knowing that the light from that planet is 4.4 years old, that starship must have completed its journey at the same moment it left from the point of view of the observer. In other words the starship was traveling at the reciprical ofthe observers velocity as seen by the observer. Since the observer was traveling at 0 m/sec relative to the observer, the starship was travelling at 1/0 m/sec, an infinite instantaneous velocity. Now lets switch to another observer passing by in the opposite direction at 0.1 c, to him the first observer is traveling at 0.1 c and the starship is passing by at only 10 c, Alpha Centauri is also moving away at 0.1 c as seen by the second observer so the first observer is not gaining much on the star system, but the starship is closing the distance at a rate of 9.9 c and will arrive there in 0.44 years, (not instantaenous). If the second observer sees the ship arrive in 0.3 years, then the first observer will see the ship arrive in its past, since he will see it arrive with light that must have began it jouney before the starship departed.

 

[TKalbfus]

Let me add a little extra rubber science:

What if there was a second speed of light? The speed of light generated by an FTL light source pointed in the direction of motion. This speed appears to any STL observer as the reciplrical of 0 c. This light ray moves at infinite speed relative to any STL object. To an FTL object this speed of light equals c in the forward direction. This instantaneous light ray can't be seen from any slow than light frame of reference but FTL ships can detect it. My modified jump drive in this universe would cause a ship to jump to 2.4242 c from 0 c. or about 724,000 km/sec. Not much I admit, but when plotted against a time/space diagram, this worldline makes a 67.5 degree angle from the vertical time axis. Beyond this velocity, any additional velocity is added witgh rocket power in the classic Newtonian sense. Lots of antimatter will be required to get any where in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps multiple jump drives would be required here. This first one would be jump 0, which is the half angle on the time/space diagram between 45 degrees and 90.
Half between 67.5 and 90 is 78.75 or 5 times the speed of light; this could be jump 1.

Jump 2 would be half again between 78.75 and 90 or 84.375 equal to about 10 times the speed of light.

Jump 3 would be 87.1875 degrees or 20 times the speed of light.

Jump 4 would be 88.56875 or 40 times the speed of light.

Jump 5 would be 89.284375 or 80 times the speed of light.

Jump 6 would be 89.6421875 or 160 times the speed of light.

Jump 7 is 320 times the speed of light and

Jump 8 is 640 times the speed of light.

Don't want to go much further than that, because then we'll be crossing galaxies. These 9 speeds should be enough for a Traveller campaign. This system involves FTL travel without time travel and it goes to stars we can see in the night sky.

 

[Straybow]

Suppose you had an arbitrarily powerful telescope, and you just witnessed a starship travel from here to Alpha Centauri in 2 seconds, land on the planet and wave all as seen through your telescope in the space of 2 seconds.

That's what a ship going 0.9999999…c would look like, it's image from 4.4LY arriving at your telescope just moments before the ship itself arrives.

An FTL ship would not be seen by light-limited sensors before its arrival. All the time paradox situations set up by FTL critics are perception based, not causality based. You know that light images from Alpha Cen are delayed by 4.4 years, so any perceived causation relationship must be back-calculated. This is no different from any situation where causative events are unobservable. We don't assume spontaneous generation.

What if there was a second speed of light?

Again, mathematically problemmatic. But on the other hand, who says c can't be effected by the total mass of the universe, akin to Mach's Principle? While an object with naturally occuring zero mass travels at c wrt any reference frame, perhaps an object that is artificially isolated from inertial effects can exceed c.

 

[TKalbfus]

"That's what a ship going 0.9999999…c would look like, it's image from 4.4LY arriving at your telescope just moments before the ship itself arrives."

Why did you move the telescope from here to Alpha Centauri? I said,

"Suppose you had an arbitrarily powerful telescope, and you just witnessed a starship travel from here to Alpha Centauri in 2 seconds, land on the planet and wave all as seen through your telescope in the space of 2 seconds."

Notice that "here" and "Alpha Centauri" are separate places. What did you think I meant? Clearly the telescope remains behind in the Sol System and sees the spaceship go from here to Alpha Centauri in 2 seconds, in order to see that, the space ship has to go back in time. Ordinariliy any spaceship going slower than light will be seen taking at least twice as long to get their as the distance it travels in light years.

What if there was a second speed of light?

You said,

"Again, mathematically problemmatic. But on the other hand, who says c can't be effected by the total mass of the universe, akin to Mach's Principle? While an object with naturally occuring zero mass travels at c wrt any reference frame, perhaps an object that is artificially isolated from inertial effects can exceed c."

Well you wanted FTL travel without time travel, one way to do this is to have an infinite light speed beyond the ordinary speed of light. This second form of light is not detectable to slower than light objects. This could be called "Dark Energy" to us since we can't see it. Now this infinite speed doesn't appear infinite to an FTL object, its just that in the FTL frame, an object approaching this speed will experience the same time dialation that ordinarily effects an object approaching the speed of light, to a slower than light observer, the FTL spaceship will seem to be increasing its speed in an unbounded fashion. Anyway, you argued that FTL spaceships should not be permitted to go back in time. Why have you suddenly switched sides in the argument?

No one really knows what happens to objects that move faster than c. Our mathematical models are simply projections based on what we know about STL speeds. Until we discover an honest to goodness tachyon, we are just playing with numbers. So the task then falls to creating a mathematical model that works for an RPG.

Any way these speeds could work as warp factors:

FTL Warp Factors
Warp 0 = 2.4242 c
Warp 1 = 5 c
Warp 2 = 10 c
Warp 3 = 20 c
Warp 4 = 40 c
Warp 5 = 80 c
Warp 6 = 160 c
Warp 7 = 320 c
Warp 8 = 640 c
Warp 9 = 1,280 c

STL Warp Factors
Warp 0 = 0 c
Warp 1 = 0.4142 c
Warp 2 = 0.6682 c
Warp 3 = 0.8207 c
Warp 4 = 0.9063 c
Warp 5 = 0.9521 c
Warp 6 = 0.9758 c
Warp 7 = 0.9878 c
Warp 8 = 0.9939 c
Warp 9 = 0.9969 c

The formula to derive the FTL warp factor into speed is :
Warp 0 = tan(45 deg. + 45/2 deg.) c
Warp 1 = tan(45 deg. + 45/2 deg. + 45/4 deg.) c
Warp 2 = tan(45 deg. + 45/2 deg. + 45/4 deg. + 45/8 deg.) c

And just continue this progression to any warp factor that you like.

The STL Warp is the same except minus the initial 45 degrees.

 

[Drakon]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
But branes have an advantage, unlike other stars, they are not light years away.

Branes might not even EXIST, let alone be populated with stars, (that you will not know exist until you get there, and that is assuming you last long enough under different natural physics than is part of this brane. If you don't last that long, and don't make it back to tell the folks back home...) And even if they do exist, there is no reason to assume there is only a small separation between our brane and this other one.

The entire subject is purely speculative. Its a lot more rubber science you are putting in. And again, you still are assuming wormholes, which uses the same technology and physical concepts that warp drive uses. So, if this is done with a goal of reducing the rubber science, if that is your reason to reject FLT, you can't do it this way. The very act of conjecturing branes and your method of accessing them, gives you reasonable FTL anyway.

The branes become unnecessary once you have worm holes.

I guess the question to ask is would an antimatter spaceship survive in our universe? Is antimatter, once created, stable so long as it doesn't come in contact with matter?

It has as much chance of surviving in our universe as a matter ship has in its. Which is to say, not much.

You cannot land, you cannot touch or eat anything. You cannot date the natives, nor can they date you. (There has got to be a joke in here somewhere about Big Bangs, but I will leave them as an exercise for the reader.)

You can build stuff out of antimatter, as long as you don't touch it. You need conditions far better than even the best vacuum can provide.

Once created, antimatter does not last long, because it comes into contact with matter. Remember that the difference is in the electrical charge, and the EM force is like 43 orders of magnitude stronger than gravitation. It "WANTS" to contact normal matter, and mutually annihilate itself. It is a tendancy that, while it makes itself an ideal fuel, also makes it so dangerous, and the consequences of even a small leak so catastrophic, that I doubt it will ever be used commercially or even in wide scale military operations.

Not even in starships that never set foot on a planet. All it takes is one accident, one ship to obliterate most of a planet, and such power systems will be banned legally, and avoided commercially.

 

[Drakon]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
What are you afraid of?

Huh?

It was my understanding that your reason for investigating this brane idea is that you wanted to reduce the needed "rubber science" for your Traveller campaign. You ain't doing it, by following this brane path, because to date, branes ARE rubber science. This isn't an issue of fear, and frankly I have no idea where that even comes into play. It does have to do with you taking a tack which is contrary to your stated goals, and that renders your readers a bit confused.

Time Travell: I have already stated my thinking on this subject. It is important to remember that in FTL, gamma does NOT go negative, it goes imaginary. The square root of a negative number is undefined, and as to whether that can result in violations of causality, I just don't think it can.

In order to think that time travel is possible, you have to assume a particular behavior of the equations when confronted with an imaginary component. You (and a lot of folks as well, including some leading scientists) think it does mean the same thing as "negative". I don't.

The fact it may appear to be going backward in time to an outside observer is irrelavant. Whether it is actually going backward is, and is an assumption that I don't see as valid given what we presently (think we) know about the way the universe works.

black holes and white holes: This is a gross oversimplification, but declaring them "impossible" I don't see as being realistic. You want the manifold to curve in the opposite direction than it does in the presence of matter. Whether it can or cannot, at present is an open question. And there is evidence to suggest that it can. (Casimir, inflationary cosmology, etc.) You are not turning a black hole inside out. You are simply curving the manifold in the opposite direction.

It should be noted that the 'negative mass' involved in warp drive does not occupy the zone behind the ship. Rather, and I know it is counter-intuitive, but the 'negative mass' is located in the transition zone, between the compacting forward section, and the expanding aft one, of the bubble.

There is rubber science here, I don't say there isn't, but there is a number of phenomina that brane theory explains quite neatly.

I don't see it as much of an explaination, so much as sweeping the problem under a rug. It does not explain what happens on these alternate branes to missing gravitons, it just posit they escape into the bulk. The idea that perhaps the gravitons are missing, that matter/energy does not simply produce as much as is expected, or the idea that gravity may be related to EM and what we are seeing is something like the parity breaking going in CP violation are also other areas of investigation currently going on.

There is no jump space as the jump is instantaneous, and near instantaneous communication is possible with gravity waves, or outside induced jumps.

Umm.. actually, there is. There is the "Bulk' in which all these various branes exist in, sort of like a 5 dimenional "super manifold" that contains all these other 4D ones. This will take the place of your 'jump' or 'hyper' space.

 

[Drakon]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
Suppose you had an arbitrarily powerful telescope, and you just witnessed a starship travel from here to Alpha Centauri in 2 seconds, land on the planet and wave all as seen through your telescope in the space of 2 seconds. You know that a few moments ago, the space ship just departed and 2 seconds later, you can see them on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri waving to you.

Now knowing that the light from that planet is 4.4 years old, what just happened?

This assumes you get the time order that you want. What if you are looking at the planet and you DON'T see the guys there landing 2 seconds from take off?

This is an extremely poor argumentative tactic you are following. Your goal here is to try to prove to Straybow and myself that time travel IS a consequence of FTL travel. But in your example, you are assuming time travel took place in the first place, as part of your proof. This is called "begging the question" I believe. It does not work, because your premise is unsound.

If you got light from 4.4 years ago, showing the ship land, then you might have something. But until you do, you don't. Even as a thought experiment, it don't work. It only works if you can do it in real life, prove it in real life that you do see the astronauts after an apparent flight time of 2 seconds.

And like I said earlier, the reason for this presumption of time travel is due to an supposed consequence of imaginary numbers showing up in the equations. You are assuming that imaginary numbers operate the same as negative numbers, and that is not true even in reality. We already have examples of systems that utilize negative numbers, none involving FTL, but plenty that deal with electricity. And so far nothing remotely like what is suggested or would lead one to suspect this "imaginary = negative" thing you are talking about.

Supposed you saw winged pigs in the sky? Then that would be proof that pigs can fly. But unless and until you do, it ain't proof to posit a sighting of flying pigs, to make up such an example, as proof that pigs do fly.

 

[Drakon]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
Let me add a little extra rubber science:

What if there was a second speed of light?

This really does not make a lot of sense. the reciprocal of 0 is undefined. It may be infinite and as a quantity approaches the limit of zero, the reciprocal of that quantity heads toward infinity. But what the actual meaning of the reciprocal of zero is mathematicall undefined.

And how that relates to the real world is anyone's guess.

The speed of light generated by an FTL light source pointed in the direction of motion.

This is the old "flashlight" puzzle that has been bandied about in physics for some time. Its not bandied as a potential problem, it is taught as standard general relativity.

The short version is that the photons or wave front of the light, travelling at FTL, won't be seen, because they are overrun by the ship itself. The speed remains the same, however the frequency will change, will doppler as the ship passes you by.

So far it looks like light only has one speed in a vacuum. Yes you can alter the speed, reduce it considerably. The problem is that you do so by getting rid of the vacuum and making the light travel through something else. And so far, we have only been able to slow light down. Not speed it up.

 

[Drakon]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
Well you wanted FTL travel without time travel, one way to do this is to have an infinite light speed beyond the ordinary speed of light.

I think you are confusing a few things here.

The problem with time travel only crops up if you posit, or assume, a particular behavior (or rather relationship) between the equations of GR and Special Relativity, once gamma goes imaginary. It is an assumption that presents the problem. You don't take the bait, the problem is not there.

Take another example. Some sniper rifles are able to project a bullet at transonic speeds. What this means is say, you are standing next to the dictator of Freedonia. You see him clutch his chest, and fall over dead, from a gunshot wound. THEN you hear the shot ring out. Does this mean that the bullet traveled backwards in time? You did hear the effect, (the dictator falling) before you heard the cause. Just because you saw it in that order, does that mean it occured in that order?

You may want to look into Galilean Relativity. Galileo was the first guy to recognize that, if the water was smooth, and you did not look out the windows, you could not tell if you were moving or standing still. Nothing you do inside your cabin would tell you. It is only by looking outside that you can tell you are moving.

And if you were travelling backward in time, don't you think you might notice something like that? If you don't, then perhaps you are not.

So, if you want to make YTU more "real" but still preserve space or star travel, you don't need time travel, or branes or really much of anything. Wormholes and warp drive, on which there is already extensive theoretical research that has been done, and you can look up, (If you can get through the math, which I can tell is a tough one.) solve the problem, while minimizing the rubber science in your campaign. Even sticking with Jump Drive, and not changing anything, is less rubber science than what you are proposing.

 

[TKalbfus]

quote:
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Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
Let me add a little extra rubber science:

What if there was a second speed of light?
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The short version is that the photons or wave front of the light, travelling at FTL, won't be seen, because they are overrun by the ship itself. The speed remains the same, however the frequency will change, will doppler as the ship passes you by.

But then you are violating the rule of relativity that states that the speed of light must always be the same for all frames of reference. Now what about the occupants of the FTL spaceship? If light only shines in one direction, things will look very funny inside the spaceship. The crew would effectively be blind. If they shine their flashlight toward wall at the stern of the ship the reflected light cannot reach their eyes, since that light must travel faster than the speed of light in order for them to see that wall. If they shine their flashlight forward, the light never reaches the wall in front of them. According to relativity everything must appear normal inside of the ship. In my original model the forward pointing photons are traveling backwards in time relative to the STL frame. In my modified modle they are traveling at 1/0 c. Undefined you say? Well I'll define it in this case: the top number is how far the photon travels and the bottom number is how much time elapses as the photon travels that distance. This is if you could see the photon from a STL frame, from the ship itself, the photon must appear to travel at c.