Warp Drive Continued

Not sure what happened to the formatting of yesterday's post.  Sorry about that.  Anyway.

Foam!  Space foam!  Yesterday we started talking about how energy displacement in the black of space is like trying to push through a big block of foam.  If we had a spaceship with an engine that could put out an unlimited amount of power we could let it loose and attempt to hit the speed of light.

First things would go pretty well.  Our powerful engine would provide us with enough energy to tip the balance in our favor and we'd accelerate with ease.  As we continued to accelerate however, we would now be passing through more and more energy at any given moment as the foam around us begins to condense.  Since we have unlimited power in our engine we just lay on a little bit more and keep going.  When we approach the speed of light, the foam becomes thicker and thicker around us as we compact it before us. Eventually it becomes so thick that it begins to become hard to push through.

We keep laying on the power with our super engine but we are no longer accelerating, the amount of energy in the in the foam condensed in front of us begins to equal the mass energy of our ship and the engine's energy output.  Our engine may have infinite power but space is infinite as well.  As the equation comes into balance another problem begins to arise.  Our engine is putting out infinite energy and pushing against the back of our ship while condensed infinite space in front of us is not letting us travel forward anymore.  We are a tin can trapped between two infinite energy sources.  Since our ship is not made of infinite energy it is crushed between the two.  The force is so great that even the atoms of ship are crushed and all mass is released as pure energy.  This energy cannot go anywhere since the infinite pressures on either side are still there.  It becomes a sphere of pure energy, something that really shouldn't exist.  It goes without saying we'd be dead.

So how can we go faster than the speed of light if energy displacement will never allow it?  We build a snow-plow.  A cosmic razor snow-plow.

If the buildup of foam in front of our ship slows us down and eventually kills us, we simply have to push the foam to the side as we travel to decrease the amount of energy we have to deal with at any moment.  It's the same principal as a V shaped snowplow on a truck.  Without the plow, snow builds up in front of the truck as it travels until it becomes so heavy the truck can no longer move.  With the plow however, we do a neat little trick with physics and some of our forward energy is used to move the snow aside as we travel, reducing the buildup and allow us to continue forward.  We're cheating at energy displacement!  This is of course just aerodynamics and what we use to streamline vehicles so they can go faster.  Nothing special really.

Time's up!  Sorry kids.  More later.