Alright, so ripping apart isn't all that simple and probably should have been given a little more attention.
Scientists have playing with making their own miniature black holes for a little bit now with some success. Ripping apart space and time is well within our grasp and we just have to get better at it. Dangerous? Yes.
The tiny little experiments that we are doing now pose little threat as the tears in the fabric are microscopic. Pinholes that don't weaken the overall strength of the universe. At most, a few atoms can slip through the hole but what happens if we need a hole big enough to fit a ship through?
The best case scenario is that the universe wants to stay together. If we poke a finger into a bowl of gel then pull it out, the gel settles back into the space our finger occupied. If the fabric of space works like this then we'll be alright. The hole our warp drive makes will seal itself after the ship passes through.
Now, there is another scenario that isn't very appealing. If the universe is more like Jello then we have an issue. Poking a finger into Jello leaves a distinct channel where our finger has been. It does a fair job of resealing itself but the damage has been done. If we keep poking at the same piece of Jello, it begins to fall apart and we're left with a delicious yet sticky mess.
If our warp travel through the universe leaves these little tunnels where we've been then eventually we're going to make a mess of things. Every trip will make a wormhole that will leak energy and matter from one end to the other. More and more wormholes means more and more leakage. Eventually the wormholes criss-crossing through the universe will make a mess of the universe. Matter and energy will slip about in the universe at random and if the wormholes start to grow then we could see entire solar systems swallowed up and flung about the universe. Scary.
The problem I see is that I don't know if we'll be able to tell which scenario it will be until it's too late.
It's a blog and game all in one! How is this possible? Because he is the...oh wait...they have good lawyers. Because I'm neat...and stuff.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Snowplow / Warpdrive
Good morning!
Yesterday we ended talking about aerodynamics and snowplows. Today we will use them in space.
On Earth, making an object so that it travels easier through a medium is simple. Basically we just make it pointed or sharp. Knives slice through butter because of it's thin leading edge. Airplanes are long and thin so they encounter less resistance when they they fly. This is an easy concept to test and observe on Earth because we are dealing with matter. When we want to improve our speeds while traveling in space, we have to deal with energy and that makes things complicated.
In order to increase our top speeds we need an energy snowplow of sorts. No longer are we concerned with thin edges and pointed nose-cones because now we are dealing with a medium that is made of pure energy. We need a warp drive.
In Star Trek, the warp drive is a device that creates a sub-space bubble around the ship and allows it to travel at insane speeds because it is no longer part of the regular universe. In the real world however we don't really know anything about sub-space but we can use the concept as inspiration.
What we can do is rip the fabric of the universe apart. The fabric of existence, the neutral base energy we talked about, can be manipulated. If we introduce energy at the right frequency and amplitude into space we can excite the NBE and cause it to contract. When it contracts, a soft spot is made in the universe and we can travel through it, at amazing speeds, without having to deal with energy displacement.
We travel in a bubble of pure nothing. Actual nothing. This is the dangerous part.
...which will be explained later.
Yesterday we ended talking about aerodynamics and snowplows. Today we will use them in space.
On Earth, making an object so that it travels easier through a medium is simple. Basically we just make it pointed or sharp. Knives slice through butter because of it's thin leading edge. Airplanes are long and thin so they encounter less resistance when they they fly. This is an easy concept to test and observe on Earth because we are dealing with matter. When we want to improve our speeds while traveling in space, we have to deal with energy and that makes things complicated.
In order to increase our top speeds we need an energy snowplow of sorts. No longer are we concerned with thin edges and pointed nose-cones because now we are dealing with a medium that is made of pure energy. We need a warp drive.
In Star Trek, the warp drive is a device that creates a sub-space bubble around the ship and allows it to travel at insane speeds because it is no longer part of the regular universe. In the real world however we don't really know anything about sub-space but we can use the concept as inspiration.
What we can do is rip the fabric of the universe apart. The fabric of existence, the neutral base energy we talked about, can be manipulated. If we introduce energy at the right frequency and amplitude into space we can excite the NBE and cause it to contract. When it contracts, a soft spot is made in the universe and we can travel through it, at amazing speeds, without having to deal with energy displacement.
We travel in a bubble of pure nothing. Actual nothing. This is the dangerous part.
...which will be explained later.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Warp Drive
We've covered the idea of Energy Displacement so let's look at how the warp drive works.
Traveling through space allows us to achieve incredible speeds with very little effort. Simply throwing a ball in space will propel it at speeds considered insane if you were on Earth. As fast as we are able to travel, we have an issue because the distance between objects in space is vast. Traveling from Northern Minnesota to Southern Louisiana is about 1,500 miles and would take you about 23 hours to drive. The Earth to the moon, our shortest trip in space, is 238,900 miles. Traveling around the Earth is only 24,901 miles. When we start looking at places not in our neighborhood things get farther fast. When things are lined up the best, traveling to Mars is around 36,000,000 miles. That's quite the jump.
New fusion engines being researched for Mars jumps are estimated to get us to Mars in sixty days. That's a huge improvement over our current travel time of over twice that. That's not very good if we want to start colonizing Mars. We need to go faster.
The problem with going faster is that even in space, we have to contend with the Energy Displacement which limits our speeds. Now, you might be wondering what there is to actually displace in space. My last example dealt with grass and air, neither of which you would have to deal with in space. Space is empty; right? No.
This is why we have to think of it as Energy Displacement and not Matter Displacement. Matter is energy and there is a lot of energy in space. Solar radiation, photons, space dust, hydrogen and helium are out there for us to run into. Plus, we have to deal with the neutral base energy of the universe itself. I know, I know, that doesn't actually exist you say. Neutral base energy? That's not a real thing! Well, it sort of is.
Neutral base energy is the stuff of the universe that allows everything else to exist and travel. If there was nothing to travel through then it wouldn't have to travel. You can't have distance if you don't have something between two objects in space to take up the space between. Neutral base energy is theoretically just unformed proto-energy that never bothered to condense to form radiation or particles. It is the fabric of the universe that everything else is painted on if you will. The amount of energy it possesses approaches zero but there is still enough there to have to overcome when we start to look at being able to travel faster.
The faster we travel, the more energy we have to displace at any given moment in time because we are squishing the medium we are traveling through in front of us. It's like punching foam, it's easy at first but once the foam is condensed it becomes more solid. The foams energy becomes tightly packed in front of our fist, resisting displacement and preventing us from traveling any further. Neutral base energy is much like the foam. As we travel faster and faster, the NBE in front of us begins to condense as we travel through it. The faster we go, the greater the condensing effect becomes until it becomes so dense we can no longer pass through it.
It seems I am out of time for this morning...I will continue later.
Monday, May 6, 2013
Displacement Part II
I wanted to expand a little on the idea of Energy Displacement.
Matter is energy and quite a bit of energy at that. Although an atom is mostly empty space there is still a large amount of energy and according to our models of atomic structure that energy is constantly moving. Thus we have a spherical field of energy (electrons) around a center mass of condensed energy (protons & electrons) that can be represented by a ball. Any ball will do really.
This ball has mass which is just a grouping of energy large enough to create a gravitational field. I think we'll hold off on gravity for another time. Anyway, the ball. Much like an atom, our ball has energy passing through it constantly. Radiation in many forms can travel through the ball as if it wasn't there. The waves and particles travel through the ball because they can find the tiny gaps in the energy structure and do not have to deal with displacement.
If we move our ball we have to expend energy. We push the ball and the ball rolls. As it rolls, it displaces the air around it easily as the mass of the ball is much greater than the mass of the air. We can start to understand the total energy equation of the ball.
Y=M+E
Y is the total energy of the equation where M is mass energy of the ball and E is the energy applied to make it attain motion. If Y is greater than the total energy acting against this motion, the ball will move. Gravity must be taken into account down the line but I'm not getting into that mess now. The energy acting against the mass energy of the medium it is passing through and any energy that is affecting that mass as well. This would be the same equation basically but we'll label it X instead. So:
if Y > X then movement is achieved; if Y< or = X then no movement is achieved.
It is energy versus energy in the end that concerns us most. Remember, mass is energy.
Our ball will increase in speed if energy is applied constantly or increased. It will slow down when applied energy is decreased and Y gradually approaches equality with X. Kinetic energy is the equation coming back into balance over time when applied energy is ceased.
So that's the basics of movement. Energy Displacement becomes clearer when the mass of the medium increases in the middle of our balls journey. Say we were to roll our ball across a concrete sidewalk and into a grassy yard. Across the concrete part we are dealing mainly with the medium of air, which is easily passed through. When the ball enters the grass, it encounters a new medium of air and blades of grass. Suddenly the mass energy of the medium shoots up significantly and the equation balances quicker because the total energy of medium increases.
This is the 'stopping' force that the grass imparts on our ball. The energy of the ball fights against the energy of the grass it is moving through. The energy used to move the ball is lost as the medium absorbs the excess energy in the equation and eventually the ball comes to a stop. If we wanted to keep the ball accelerating when it moves into the grass, we would have to put more energy into it's side of the equation. Simply walking over and throwing it again would suffice.
These are the basics. I refrain from using what we consider traditional physics terms for these things because we will be dealing more in the quantum level later which of course plays by it's own rules. Eventually we will get to warp travel. I promise.
Matter is energy and quite a bit of energy at that. Although an atom is mostly empty space there is still a large amount of energy and according to our models of atomic structure that energy is constantly moving. Thus we have a spherical field of energy (electrons) around a center mass of condensed energy (protons & electrons) that can be represented by a ball. Any ball will do really.
This ball has mass which is just a grouping of energy large enough to create a gravitational field. I think we'll hold off on gravity for another time. Anyway, the ball. Much like an atom, our ball has energy passing through it constantly. Radiation in many forms can travel through the ball as if it wasn't there. The waves and particles travel through the ball because they can find the tiny gaps in the energy structure and do not have to deal with displacement.
If we move our ball we have to expend energy. We push the ball and the ball rolls. As it rolls, it displaces the air around it easily as the mass of the ball is much greater than the mass of the air. We can start to understand the total energy equation of the ball.
Y=M+E
Y is the total energy of the equation where M is mass energy of the ball and E is the energy applied to make it attain motion. If Y is greater than the total energy acting against this motion, the ball will move. Gravity must be taken into account down the line but I'm not getting into that mess now. The energy acting against the mass energy of the medium it is passing through and any energy that is affecting that mass as well. This would be the same equation basically but we'll label it X instead. So:
if Y > X then movement is achieved; if Y< or = X then no movement is achieved.
It is energy versus energy in the end that concerns us most. Remember, mass is energy.
Our ball will increase in speed if energy is applied constantly or increased. It will slow down when applied energy is decreased and Y gradually approaches equality with X. Kinetic energy is the equation coming back into balance over time when applied energy is ceased.
So that's the basics of movement. Energy Displacement becomes clearer when the mass of the medium increases in the middle of our balls journey. Say we were to roll our ball across a concrete sidewalk and into a grassy yard. Across the concrete part we are dealing mainly with the medium of air, which is easily passed through. When the ball enters the grass, it encounters a new medium of air and blades of grass. Suddenly the mass energy of the medium shoots up significantly and the equation balances quicker because the total energy of medium increases.
This is the 'stopping' force that the grass imparts on our ball. The energy of the ball fights against the energy of the grass it is moving through. The energy used to move the ball is lost as the medium absorbs the excess energy in the equation and eventually the ball comes to a stop. If we wanted to keep the ball accelerating when it moves into the grass, we would have to put more energy into it's side of the equation. Simply walking over and throwing it again would suffice.
These are the basics. I refrain from using what we consider traditional physics terms for these things because we will be dealing more in the quantum level later which of course plays by it's own rules. Eventually we will get to warp travel. I promise.
A few notes on speed...
The speed of light is considered to be the fastest that anything in this universe can travel. This has remained true for all of history but perhaps we can do better. The warp drive might actually be the key but we are still a ways off from making it happen. How does it work? The concept is simple.
The speed an object travels is determined by the amount of energy the object has dedicated to it's motion. This can be object generated energy such a human being walking or energy imposed on an object such as the effects of gravity on a rolling ball. This is the simplest way of looking at it but there is another important factor. Energy displacement.
Energy displacement could also be called matter displacement since mass is energy in a different form. This is an easier way of understanding how it works. When we travel at speed, we are traveling through a medium. On Earth, the typical mediums traveled through are air and water.
Air is a medium that is easily moved through by humans and their vehicles. Despite our freedom moving around in it, there is actually quite a bit of matter that has to be displaced when traveling through it. In water, there is even more matter that has to be displaced to allow us to move and thus slows our progress.
If we are to expend the same amount of energy moving through water as we would air, we would travel at a slower speed. There is more matter that needs to be displaced to allow our matter to occupy the new space. So not only does the energy expended determine our speed but also the medium in which we are traveling. Seems pretty sensible.
If we travel in space, things become a little more complex but the general idea remains the same. In space there is very little mass or energy that we have to displace when traveling. This allows for much greater speeds with little energy needed to be expended. Light traveling through a vacuum is considered the fastest that anything can travel. It makes sense since it is pure energy traveling through a seemingly empty medium and the photon itself has basically no mass. It is the perfect vehicle for achieving speed.
If we are to attempt to travel at that speed we run into a problem. We have mass, which is energy trapped in a tightly packed ball that interacts with other energies in a problematic way when you want to go fast. In space, as well as on Earth, that much energy must displace the majority of the energy it comes in contact with before it can move forward. A photon can slip past the miniscule amount of energy in the universe because it has little to no mass and rarely interacts with other energies. It barely exists. It displaces almost nothing and thus achieves an impressive top speed.
A human wishing to travel at those speeds would have to be expending a huge amount of energy to attain those speeds because we would be constantly displacing energy we encounter. The faster we go, the more energy we are encountering at any given moment which leads to more energy needed to increase our speed. This eventually leads to a balance problem when the amount of energy needed to overcome the energy displacement is unimaginable. Our mass can no longer displace the energy in the medium and we are considered to have 'infinite mass'. It's like hitting a brick wall while running flat out. This problem kills our ability to travel the stars with any efficiency. Unless you have a warp field.
More on that later...
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Soon?
The base ship sketches for CosmoViking are all drawn and inked now. I'm not sure how long it will take to get them scanned and finished on the computer. I hate scanning things. It's a slow and terrible process that involves not doing very much. Next week I plan on getting it all done if possible since I am taking a little time off of work to catch up on various projects. Go CosmoViking!
Yes, vacation. It's not a proper vacation by any means but it is time away from work. It's been nearly a year since my last vacation and that was when I moved into my new house. As fun as that was, it was still a hectic activity and not really the sit back and relax type of vacation I need right now. The real trick of course is staying motivated on this stay-cation as they call it. I could easily burn through a few days doing nothing of importance but that wouldn't be very good at all.
Big things to get done:
- Basement. I have to get that thing finished up and then the room cleaned up. Sadly this means boxing up all of my Warhammer stuff. So sad. I just worry about them when they're not safe on their shelves.
- CosmoViking. Sketches need to get done. This will be a nice first day of Vacation project I think. I'll set up the scanner in the living room and watch bad movies until they're finished. That sounds like a perfect Monday.
- Prep for the gig. Yes, I have a show next week play with The Seasonals. Friday, May 3rd at the legendary Bridgid's Pub, downtown Bemidji. It's going to be a fun evening and I encourage everyone to get out and enjoy the spring air by walking around downtown taking in the local culture. I need to brush up on some songs but overall I feel good. More than anything I need to get used to the new bass pedal. It's just so solid and well built it feels weird under my foot. It's going to take a little bit to get the feel for it.
Well. That's about it really. I'm sure there will be some partying and all that as well. Hopefully some gaming at some point. Woot.
Have a good day kids.
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