Tuesday, June 30, 2009 - Terrestrial Warp Drive Capability

"We now have the technology to take ET home". [Dr. Ben Rich, March 1993]

According to some the United States, and I suppose by extension, the Earth, has a fleet of some 8 (eight) ships, the size of a modern day Aircraft Carrier, and some 43 space planes. This would be significant if true. But, just how could any Earth based government do such a thing; there are significant technological issues to be resolved.

We are going to introduce and explore some of the resolutions that Terrestrial science already has.

It needs to be understood that any fleet of ships working in space would require ship drive systems that are somewhat beyond the usual reaction systems Earth is used to. Rockets are fine for near Earth operations, but, why build a fleet of such large ships and keep them in close orbit; it doesn't make any sense.

So it would appear that something greater is at play here. A fleet that large is what you would use to venture to the outer planets. And, indeed, from the reports that have filtered out, Humans have established bases on both the Moon and Mars. However to do this, some sort of faster-than-light system needs to be in place.

So then, here are some ways to do just that.

Dipolar gravitomagnetic fields

In March of 2006, the European Space Agency announced the results of experimental work into the generation of artificial gravitational fields. The early work on this produced gravitational forces in response to changes in angular momentum.

The experimental work used a 15 cm Niobium ring cooled to super-conducting temperatures, and then spun at a medium velocity (around 4000 rpm). When changing the rpm of this device a gravity field was produced. This original system didn't work well as a transportation system because of the directions in which the gravitational field was produced, however it was stated, they felt this could be overcome. At another place in the original article it was stated that the super cold temperatures were not required.

This is the first Terrestrial work to publish results in the area of artificial gravity.

Read the original article at http://www.hpcc-space.de/publications/documents/FieldPropulsion.pdf

Alcubierre drive

The Alcubierre Warp Drive is currently a speculative mathematical model of a space drive system that is somewhat like the "Warp Drive" of Star Trek. This however, is a far cry from Science fiction. The main drawbacks of this system are its very large power requirements and the theorized requirement of Dark Matter.

The power requirements would seem too great for conventional power generation systems; even a large nuclear reactor would be incapable of supplying the drive, although it would easily handle all of the support systems. Even if Earth had practical fusion power, it might not be capable of handling this energy hungry machine.

Space drive systems like this generally would require the output of a small star to operate. However, take hope, a combination of power generation systems, that could be housed in an aircraft carrier is just within the realm of possibility using off-the-shelf Terrestrial systems and hardware. If we were to use a conventional nuclear reactor for support systems, and a fusion reactor coupled with somewhat more exotic systems, a low warp system could be built. This system might not be practical for interstellar travel, but interplanetary travel would be well within the realm of possibility. [The nearest star with any significant civilization is about 50 light years away, such an earth vessel would take 6 months to travel one-way].

Here is a link for more info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

Zero point energy

Zero-point energy, the energy source that's tapped by the fictional "Zed PM" (ZPM) of the "StarGate Atlantis" television series, this device produces a virtually unlimited amount of power for all their technology.

However this bit of fiction is based on real world science. Zero-point energy is defined as the lowest quantized energy level of a quantum mechanical system, in our case the quantum mechanical system is the Universe.

According to quantum physics, all of space is filled with this energy (zero-point field), and, at a fairly high density. It was estimated that this field might have 100+ orders of magnitude more energy than the core of Earth's sun. This would certainly qualify as the "output of a small star".

While this is still only theoretical in public literature, it does point the way for the ability to produce massive amounts of power, certainly enough to power a starship.

Here is a link for more reading http://www.calphysics.org/zpe.html

Conclusion

While I've only touched on a few technologies here, leaving much research up to the reader, it should be evident that the construction of a fleet of "Starships" should be possible using current Earth knowledge and technologies.

There are still some problems however. The smaller "Space planes" could not house the massive power generation systems that the 'mother ships' can. There is a way around this.

Remember the niobium rings above? If these rings were large (more massive) and kept at some distance from a large gravity well they would exhibit many of the same properties of those larger gravity wells. If the rings were used as primary propulsion, then they would be required to produce their artificial gravity fields. This field moving through space could produce the same space-time distortions that planets do, in this case a small compression of space in front and a lengthening of space behind. This is exactly what the warp drive does, just on a smaller scale, and without the great energy requirements. While these space planes wouldn't be as fast as their mother ships, they could still be capable of speeds up to several times that of light (for instance; Earth to Mars is 38 seconds).

What we have here is a mother ship capable of speeds something on the order of 100 times the speed of light and a space plane doing 10 times the speed of light. It should be noted that these speeds are valid only to an outside observer; within the local "warp field" the velocities are a small fraction of the speed of light. This preserves the "speed of light" speed limit.