Will the FTL barrier ever be broken?

[vogtmurr]

Well ? Am I completely out to lunch - am I relying on Newtonian mechanics or is a 20 year round trip to Tau Ceti technically unfeasible ?

 

[Perfection]

Well, at .71C relativistic effects play huge roles. You could get away with it as a decent approximation to about .1C, but at .7C you need relativity.

Also, I didn't check ytou work in general so you might have several other flaws.

 

[vogtmurr]

OK - so does that mean I can't assume the same acceleration will hold true for the same propulsion after we exceed about 0.1C ?

 

[Riffraff]

OK - so does that mean I can't assume the same acceleration will hold true for the same propulsion after we exceed about 0.1C ?

Yup.

Tenchars

 

[vogtmurr]

Well then - the best we can hope for with our technology (fusion rockets, Brussard ramjet) is a slow acceleration at a small fraction of g to about 0.2C in a mission lifetime, hardly capable of making Alpha-Centauri unless you're on a generation starship. An antimatter rocket would be another story - or better yet, the Alcubierre drive.

 

[Omni314]

Of cource they will, just not in my lifetime. The thing is to trick the universe into thinking that your moving very slowly but your really bending space, I think that once gravity is understood we will have a fighting chance because I'm pritty sure that gravitons are 4 dimentional, as gravity slows time, so once we harness the time bending, then space bending will be no problem and then speeds such as FTL will be irrelivant

Edit: I've just thought, at FTL speeds what effect would a photon/tachion have if it were to hit you, most likely nothing but I'm not sure

 

[Blitzscream]

I'm certain it will be broken.Theirs new ideas and discovery's coming up everyday in physics why not I believe its inevitable.And so what if Einstein was wrong he discovered other things that were true.

 

[Perfection]

Why are you so certain that the laws of physics will work out so that it is possible?

 

[dutchfire]

The amount of ignorance in this thread is pretty stunning.

 

[Flying Pig]

To be fair, we are talking about advanced astrophysics on a video game forum

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Are there any arguments for why a wormhole or something similar can't exist?

 

[vogtmurr]

I certainly admitted I know next to nothing about special relativity - but I never made my assumptions based on Newtonian mechanics for the given components of the spacecraft model. Knowing what I know now, I realize we have nothing on the horizon that could make up for the identified gaps in achieving 0.77 or some significant proportion of C, and nothing that could sustain 1g acceleration for any useful length of time.