Tag Archives: FTL Drive

Playing with ideas


I’m currently messing around with an idea regarding warp technology. Just postulating a measurement of warp speed using the logic outlined in ‘clearing up’ I came up with a measurement that would fit with the described technology of an Alcubierre warp drive. Warp speed being measured in increments of ‘Ex’, short for ‘Exponential’ where velocity increases exponentially with warp field flow and compression.

After all, ‘Ex’ sounds a bit more dramatic and flexible as a term describing the more pedestrian sounding ‘Warp 2.5’ which could mean anything. ‘Ex’ as a measure sounds more exciting, a better adjective for multiples of light speed through warped space.

Woke up in the wee small hours this morning with an idea about a triggering event for something like the Younger Dryas era 12,800-11,600 BCE (Before Common Era). About 1,300 years. Now the current preferred (But highly debated) hypothesis is for a meteorite impact.

However, what if that were not the whole story? Meteorite impacts happen all the time. What if, and here’s no reach, astrophysicists have proved that there are extrasolar or ‘rogue’ planets, wandering giants with their own trajectories. 540 detected at the last count, with millions more potentially out there. There’s even a NASA mission scheduled for launch in 2027 to detect more of these objects and find out if any pose a threat.

Then another ‘What if’ that one such, a Jupiter plus mass object, passed at speed, too fast to be captured by our suns gravity, but exerting enough influence to subtly shift the orbits of Earth, Mars and Venus, then swung out on a hyperbolic slingshot to disappear among the stars again at the end? That might have triggered the mini ice age of the Younger Dryas, depending upon the orbital mechanics.

It’s a hell of a thought to wake up with. There might even be a story in it. It’s a gardening day today, so I’ll mull it over as I dig before putting fingers to keyboard.

Clearing up


Spent the day cutting up fallen branches in the yard after our return home. There’s a lot to do still, but at least I’ve made a start. The main yard is now clear of windfalls, but all that has done is show me how much more there is to do, fixing the tree damage due to that storm and our secondary septic systems grey water drains are backing up.

What all these manual problem solving tasks do is give you time to think,while focused on the mainly physical, letting inspiration come as your hindbrain focuses on the mundane, allowing the frontal lobes to play around with concepts and storylines uninterrupted.

Like on the ferry over, I was making some routine notes and looked up to see a curious sight. Looking out of the window at a 45 degree angle a life ring attached to the ships rail gave rise to a curious optical illusion that made me think. To the left, in the direction of travel, the sea looked to be flowing normally toward the life ring (From left to right), but around the edges appeared to compress into streams warping around the life ring, and to the right of the life rind, appeared to be accelerating rapidly in opposition to the direction of flow.

I blinked, but the sight did not disappear. Turned my gaze from right to left. Tilted my head and then watched curiously as the illusion changed. All this gave rise to some half buried thoughts I’d had about space warp drives, and how they might work within space / time. What effects would they produce for those traveling within the warp bubble? Would such a field produce an anti relativistic effect for those traveling within it? I’ve explored this idea before in ‘Sky full of stars’ where the drive used to speed FTL travel has some unexpected effects of space / time for those using it to travel between star systems.

That idea being such a vessel traveling faster and further would, because of space / time compression and distortion, cause said vessel to arrive slightly backwards in time, because the flow of space / time around a warp field would mean that space / time in the direction of travel would be accelerated and compressed past the warp field, but, as nature abhors a vacuum, so does space, and would subsequently rush in to fill the void behind the accelerating bubble of space / time containing the FTL drive ship. Like a ships wake, only this phenomena would help accelerate the warp bubble at an increasingly Faster Than Light (FTL) velocity..

Obviously this is only a blog post, and a pretty non technical one at that. However, it is an intriguing thought. Would an Alcubierre type drive behave in such a manner? Einsteinian and Quantum physics say no, but the principles of flow and displacement are well established, and why should they not apply to space / time? Or had I just consumed far too much caffeine that morning?

This sort of thing occurs to me as I meander through my life. I find it more entertainment than anything anyone else can put on screen.