New Way To Travel Faster Than Light
When you need to go a long way, like across continents, you book an aeroplane journey with the expectation that you would be in the air for a while.
However, because everything is so far away when travelling through space, you must move more quickly!
Researchers have long been trying to find a means to go faster than light in order to reach deep space more swiftly!
In essence, every technique explored has severe limitations, but researchers have uncovered a new approach!
How does it function? What are the specifications? When will you be able to take it on the road? Please join us as we introduce to you a new kind of super-fast travel!
We are able to move without abruptly bumping into objects because of the sun and other artificial light sources that humans have created. However, you’ve surely heard that light travels quickly. But how quick is light? It’s interesting to note that the foundation for most other measurements is the precise speed of light, which is known.
In a vacuum, light moves at a precise speed of 299,792,458 metres per second, or 983,571,056 feet per second. That implies that in only one second, the light will have travelled 186,282 kilometres! When you turn on a light in a dark room, the light fills the space almost rapidly, and you won’t even realise that it is moving. This is because light moves so quickly. The light-year, which represents the distance light can travel in a year, is another unit of measurement related to light.
This amount equates to around 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).
It is one method by which astronomers and physicists gauge the vast distances present across the cosmos. As was previously said, the cosmos is so big that it can take years for light to travel between two points. For example, the moon is roughly one light-second away if light travels from the moon to our eyes in one second. The sun is only a few light minutes distant, but sunlight travels farther, taking roughly 8 minutes to reach our eyes.
The closest star system to our own, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years away, thus it takes its light around 4.3 years to reach us.
From a few light-years to a few billion light-years out, there are other stars and objects besides our solar system.
Because of this, everything that astronomers “see” in the furthest reaches of the cosmos is actually past.
When they examine distant things, they observe light that depicts those items as they were at the moment the light left them.
Even though light may be used for a variety of exciting purposes, researchers have looked for ways to move at the speed of light.
This is intriguing since it means that humanity will eventually exist on other planets!
For instance, millionaire CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk wants to establish a colony on Mars, but his explorers must endure a minimum of five months of space travel before arriving there!
Depending on how near the two planets are to one another, this may potentially be almost a year!
And that is before it lands on the Red Planet with all the dangers it carries!
They can, however, move at the speed of light and complete a far-off journey in just four minutes!
To achieve travelling at a very high speed, researchers have experimented with a wide variety of techniques.
However, there has always been an issue that other solutions could not address, until a scientist disclosed the new finding we will share with you in this post!
It is extremely difficult to even approach 1% of the speed of light, which is still rather quick considering you could go from Los Angeles to New York in just over a second.
One word may describe the issue: energy! Any thing in motion possesses energy, which physicists refer to as kinetic energy.
You need more kinetic energy to move faster. The issue is that increasing speed requires a lot of kinetic energy! It takes four times as much energy to make anything move twice as fast. Nine times the energy is needed to make anything move three times as quickly, and so on. For instance, it would take 200 trillion Joules to accelerate a kid weighing 110 pounds to 1 percent the speed of light!
That is nearly equivalent to the daily energy usage of 2 million Americans! Consider the EmDrive, which was hailed as the device that would quickly transport mankind to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. Theoretically, this invention—which has already received a patent—works by enclosing microwaves in a shaped chamber, where their bouncing generates push. Since there is no fuel input and no thrust output, the chamber seems to be moving by itself from the outside. The EmDrive is based on Newton’s Second Law, which says that force is the rate at which momentum changes.
Thus, an electromagnetic wave (EM) moving at the speed of light will transmit some of its momentum to a reflector, producing a minute force. The EmDrive, which appears straightforward yet fundamentally flips our understanding of physics on its head, is made possible by this accumulated little force in huge amount. When energy enters or exits a system, questions like how waves begin to move, how they continue to travel, and where they get their momentum arise. Without an understandable push, spontaneously generated momentum is impossible, which is why many scientists don’t even take the EmDrive seriously.
If the EmDrive is successful, a lot of what physicists believe to be true about the cosmos is disproven! Even scientists from Dresden University of Technology tested the EmDrive, demonstrating that the NASA and Chinese studies that demonstrated thrust were all positive false positives explained by other influences! However, as demonstrated by Dr. Erik Lentz, a physicist with more than 10 years of expertise in real-world applications, the warp drive has significant promise.
Lentz wasn’t even the first to work on developing the warp drive into a practical, non-fictional technology. Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican mathematician, made the first attempt. His idea was adopted as the first official warp drive literature in 1994.
Unfortunately, the dreaded exotic matter is a co-ingredient of the “Alcubierre Warp Drive,” as it has come to be called, which demands an incredible amount of energy. Researchers haven’t ever seen this extremely radioactive material in nature, much less developed it; it’s all just theory.
Since then, a few modifications have been proposed, including one from Dr. Harold G. “Sonny” White, a former NASA engineer, who updated the physical design of the Alcubierre Drive in 2010. Even though his revision required far less exotic matter than the Alcubierre method, the quantity of energy required was still too high, hence his approach was still impractical. Another group of Swiss researchers under the name Applied Physics, or APL, presented their own theory. It’s interesting that their drive’s warp bubble may be created without using any unique materials.
Though exceeding the speed of light is the ultimate goal of space travel, their model was unable to do it. Lentz begins by pointing out the physical characteristics of the traditional AlcubierreDrive, upon which practically all other solutions are more-or-less built, to illustrate how his idea differs from others that have already been put out.
According to him, the Alcubierre solution gave a clear illustration of what a warp drive would do, which is to constrict the space directly in front of the ship or transport’s centre section and to expand the space directly behind.
This demonstrates how a spacecraft will travel to its destination using a wave-like warp drive!
Lentz contends that while being the foundation of warp travel, it is not even the most important component. He claims that an answer put forward by scientist Jose Natario in 2002 demonstrated that the expansion and contraction were not required to move the ship ahead. He had to reconsider how a warp might be made utilising only regular matter and NOT exotic matter as a result of his efforts.
Natario was able to demonstrate that the expansion might be insignificant or nil everywhere and still accomplish the same objective of moving a ship!
This is a significant development because it eliminates the need for the exotic matter that nearly all theoretical warp drive solutions use to warp the space in front of and behind the theoretical passenger. Lentz developed his own hypothesis by expanding on Natario’s, which he thinks is even more credible because it is based on classical physics.
Lentzin stated that his approach differs geometrically from Alcubierre and the majority of others owing to how the energy is distributed across the warp bubble, in addition to this significant material distinction. The energy is contained in a tiny torus between the areas of strong contraction and expansion in the Alcubierre solution, where the energy density and curvatures are isolated from one another to the maximum extent possible. Instead, Lentz’s model has closely associated curvatures and sources, with nearly perfect overlaps between the high energy density and high expansion and contraction zones.
Lentz’s idea is perhaps more workable as a warp solution than others previously offered because of these geometrical differences between it and the conventional ideas. Lentz’s warp Drive is still only a theory, of course. However, he does see some immediate actions that may be done to try to bring his theory closer to reality, which like all prior drive hypotheses includes lowering the amount of energy required. From here, where does Lentz want to direct his warp drive?
The next goal, according to him, is to use a contemporary fission reactor to create a warp bubble that is capable of travelling at 1% the speed of light. The physicist stated that he would think about patenting his warp drive, but he made it clear that his work is only a small portion of a much larger and quickly expanding body of work in this area.
He also stated that the recent increase in new warp drive concepts since Alcubierre’s 1994 proposal gives those in his fields hope that a real, testable version may be closer than we think! Lentz remarked that it has been encouraging to observe the rapid advancements achieved recently in the warp drive field. He anticipates many more developments in the coming years and believes they are already underway. Comment below and let us know what you think about the speed of light travel!
