Faster than light travel may actually be possible using a warp drive to bend space around a starship. New calculations suggest such a vehicle would require less energy than once thought.
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When he was considering white dwarfs and neutron stars in the context of what he called ‘gravitational machines,’ Freeman Dyson became intrigued by the fate of a neutron star binary. He calculated in his paper of the same name (citation below) that gradual loss of energy through gravitational radiation would bring the two neutron stars together, creating a gravitational wave event of the sort that has since been observed. Long before LIGO, Dyson was talking about gravitational wave detection instruments that could track the ‘gravitational flash.’
Image: Artist conception of the moment two neutron stars collide. Credit: LIGO / Caltech / MIT.
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The idea of traveling to another star system has been the dream of people long before the first rockets and astronauts were sent to space. But despite all the progress we have made since the beginning of the Space Age, interstellar travel remains just that – a dream. While theoretical concepts have been proposed, the issues of cost, travel time and fuel remain highly problematic.
A lot of hopes currently hinge on the use of directed energy and lightsails to push tiny spacecraft to relativistic speeds. But what if there was a way to make larger spacecraft fast enough to conduct interstellar voyages? According to Prof. David Kipping, the leader of Columbia University’s Cool Worlds lab, future spacecraft could rely on a halo drive, which uses the gravitational force of a black hole to reach incredible speeds.
Prof. Kipping described this concept in a recent study that appeared online (the preprint is also available on the Cool Worlds website). In it, Kipping addressed one of the greatest challenges posed by space exploration, which is the sheer amount of time and energy it would take to send a spacecraft on a mission to explore beyond our solar system.
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What would happen if humans could deliberately create a blackhole? Well, for starters we might just unlock the ultimate energy source to create the ultimate spacecraft engine — a potential “black hole-drive” — to propel ships to the stars.
It turns out black holes are not black at all; they give off “Hawking radiation” that causes them to lose energy (and therefore mass) over time. For large black holes, the amount of radiation produced is miniscule, but very small black holes rapidly turn their mass into a huge amount of energy.
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Over the years NASA have conducted a huge number of highly ambitious projects with the goal of the perfection of space travel but their latest project may be the most extraordinary yet.
In a seismically isolated room in the Johnson Space Center, researchers from the space agency are working with an electric field that they are trying to manipulate in such a way that it could literally bend the fabric of space and time. The researchers believe that if they are successful then they could theoretically begin work on interstellar space travel that would allow craft to fly faster than the speed of light. But is this really possible?
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“Desperate Housewives” star Marcia Cross said her anal cancer could be linked to her husband’s throat cancer diagnosis in 2009. USA TODAY
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Girls, boys, young men and women, parents: the HPV vaccine helps to prevent cervical, anal, penile, vulvar, throat and esophageal cancers.
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Jean-Philippe Courtois, EVP and President, Microsoft Global Sales, Marketing & Operations, provided a compelling vision with his opening keynote at the historical UN ITU AI for Good Global Summit (AI4G), hosted May 28–31, 2019 at UN ITU HQ, Geneva.
Key themes in Jean-Philippe’s speech included these areas:
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There is enough room to plant another 1.2 trillion trees on Earth. If we plant 1.2 trillion trees this could cancel out the last 10 years of CO2 emissions and sequester 160 billion tons of CO2.
Above – Potentially possible tree density: Additional trees in yellow. (image: Crowther Lab / ETH Zurich)
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