If, as in star wars, star trek etc, we could travel faster than the speed of light, when driving your spaceship at said speeds would you hit an asteroid before you saw it and if so, would you then see the impact afterwards in a 'wow, that was cool' kind of way?
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Question for the scientists.....
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Posted 5 months ago #
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if you were travelling faster than light you'd have to either find a magic shortcut (in which case maybe there'd be nowt in it) or else somehow you'd "have" to have no mass and so a collision wouldn't, err, work
(awaits scientists)
Posted 5 months ago # -
Yeah, hypothetically impossible question, so rather impossible to answer. Most of the ideas* of space ships travelling extremely quickly involve worm holes and the like, which you could guess to be "short cuts" through different dimensions. You'd hope there's nothing in those other dimensions for you to crash into.
Although if you could create two huge charged fields around the spaceship, so when items pass through the first one they get positively charged, and then when they encounter the second one they get repelled, that would remove a lot of items in the way. Bigger stuff you'd have to have some sort of radar type gizmo, and steer around them, or blast them out of your way with your ultra death canon.
One of the things that I've thought about in star wars is the laser guns. Lasers travel at the speed of light right? So when someone shoots you with a laser, you won't see the laser until it hits you, as the light travelling from it is going at the same speed. Therefore it's impossible to react to it and casually bat it away in the direction of the nearest droid.
*From like films and novels and stuff, not from science.
Posted 5 months ago # -
Drifting back to a drunk weekend at uni where I watched an entire Voyager box-set, don't they have deflector shield thingies to solve exactly this problem?
Posted 5 months ago # -
would you hit an asteroid before you saw it
You'd 'hit an asteroid before you saw it' at speeds a lot less than light speed ...
But never mind that - what's the speed of dark?
Posted 5 months ago # -
Yeah - you aren't travelling through space in the same way as we do normally. It's like travelling from one side of a piece of paper to another by folding the paper in half (or warping it) and punching a hole through from one half to the other. That's why it's called a warp drive.
It's also known as hyperspace in many books, which is a little more difficult to explain. Hyperspace is a space including a fourth dimension of space. It's best thought of by considering a two-dimensional world where no-one in it can conceive of the extra dimension coming in or out of the page. If their space was curved, they would never know about it, but you could pop out of their world, travel at an angle relative to their world and reappear somewhere else without having travelled through their two dimensional space.
Hyperspace is like that but in 3/4 dimensions instead of 2/3. See Flatland by Edwin Abbot for brilliant introduction to this idea.
Posted 5 months ago # -
I recall Han Solo saying he had to "do some calculations" before he made the jump to lightspeed to avoid exactly this problem.
Posted 5 months ago # -
Its because travelling through hyperspace aint like dusting crops boy
Posted 5 months ago # -
You're bias to the visable spectrum will be your undoing. "See" is the wrong word. If you were to clip something at a gnats chuff under the speed of light then it would smart a bit and I dare say there would be some localised chaffing BUT if you were to look behind you, you'd see what you hit disappearing rapidly in a blue shift of light.
Posted 5 months ago # -
there are two sorts of faster than light drive. There is the blackbox drive where you simply flip a switch on a black box and the vehicle goes faster than light and there is the doubletalk drive where you have a plausible sounding explanation such as skipping thru hyperspace or using wormholes or the like.
I have a thousands of SF novels - I should know.
Posted 5 months ago # -
jedi's don't see the lasers in order to bat them away, they feel them.
i assume they feel the action of the person firing the laser, rather than the laser itself.Posted 5 months ago # -
Tracer rounds!
If you managed not to be obliterated while hitting an object at relativistic speeds and beyond you would see the collision once the light had caught up with you. You might have to sky+ it though because you'll have far larger issues to worry about, namely the huge rip in the skin that keeps all the nice gases near your lungs.
Posted 5 months ago # -
What if the ship was on a treadmill?
Posted 5 months ago # -
You'd 'hit an asteroid before you saw it' at speeds a lot less than light speed ...
"Sorry mate, didn't see you..."
Posted 5 months ago # -
Maybe people have invented lightspeed lots of times but then they always crash into an asteroid so we never know about it.
"Where did Bob and Harry go?"
"Dunno. Hey, look at this diagram, we could use this to build a light speed drive."Posted 5 months ago # -
You'd see it, otherwise you'd know you were travelling at the speed of light even though there was no nett resultant force acting on you.
And I should know - applying scientific concepts I understand poorly outside of context is my speciality.
Posted 5 months ago # -
What if the ship was on a treadmill?
That was going to be the next question after someone answered the original
Posted 5 months ago # -
jedi's don't see the lasers in order to bat them away...
I suspect that blasters actually fire coherent pulses of energised particles - at considerably less than the speed of light. Still very fast though, needing more than normal hand-eye coordination.Now, lightsabers. Making a beam that cuts almost anything isn't the hard part - the hard part is getting the beam to stop dead a meter from the handle.
Posted 5 months ago # -
But never mind that - what's the speed of dark?
Ali answered that with his light switch boast
Posted 5 months ago # -
the hard part is getting the beam to stop dead a meter from the handle.
Dead easy. The light is actually being switched on and off really quickly. You switch it on long enough for light to travel one metre, then turn it off again.
Posted 5 months ago # -
You switch it on long enough for light to travel one metre, then turn it off again.
The answer being 3.3356409519815204957557671447492e-9 seconds or 299792458 times per second, that's faster than the average yoof can text!!!
Posted 5 months ago # -
I have a thousands of SF novels
So at least we now know where all your information and views come from.
Posted 5 months ago # -
You switch it on long enough for light to travel one metre, then turn it off again.
Nice idea, but just because you turn it off, doesn't mean the light that's already omitted will stop dead. So won't work.
Posted 5 months ago # -
applying scientific concepts I understand poorly outside of context is my speciality
Scuzz, meet TJ. You two would get along.
Re lightsabres - it's a plasma held in a 1m long cylindrical magnetic field, surely? I thought that was obvious.
Posted 5 months ago # -
Are Jedi's travelling at the speed of light whenthey have light sabre duels? If they are on a spaceship travelling at light speed it makes no difference otherwise it would be pitch black inside the ship anyway. You wouldn't leave the internal light behind you somewhere at the point where you got to light speed. (Or would you?)
Posted 5 months ago # -
Light speed? Why is evereyone always in such an almighty hurry
Posted 5 months ago # -
A bigger question is why doesn't everyone get crushed whenever they accelerate to/from these huge speeds.
Part b) would be: and if you can answer that tell me why they all fall around when their ship gets a small little shove.
Posted 5 months ago # -
I suspect that blasters actually fire coherent pulses of energised particles - at considerably less than the speed of light.
Correct. They fire "blaster bolts," not lasers.
Re lightsabres - it's a plasma held in a 1m long cylindrical magnetic field, surely?
Lightsaber. And, yes.
Posted 5 months ago # -
I, Jedi explains how to build a lightsaber
Posted 5 months ago # -
couldn't you just have mohammed ali as a lookout? hes so fast when he turns out the light switch hes in bed before the room get dark
edit: damn it, sorry - been done already
Posted 5 months ago # -
I would mount a small black hole on the bullbars of the spaceship. Would matter what you hit then.
Posted 5 months ago # -
Would an infinite improbability drive solve this problem?
Posted 5 months ago #
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