this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Futurology
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Even before this news, I had a serious concern about anti-matter / warping spacetime as means of propulsion.
"We will fold space in front of and behind the craft to propel it faster than light", cool, what happens to all the stuff being folded and defolded? What would happen to matter like a planet in the path of the folding?
Space is really empty though, wouldn't the chance of hitting anything be pretty much zero?
Good point. But at the speeds you'd be travelling... you'd be flying through areas of space we haven't properly mapped. Is it possible to make turns at warp speed?
I mean, let's be practical, the first places we'd go to are the nearby star systems and we have a pretty good idea of what's where in the neighborhood. The chances of running into a rogue planet we haven't found or something must be infinitesimal.
Hitting a spec of dust at the speed of light would be a rough ride
Faster than light, no left no right
Star Trek.
Tom Paris from Voyager, specifically.
Yay, thanks!
I think the last imaginary scenario I read was something like it depended on the mass of any "colliding" objects. Since it relies on the curvature of space time to even work, small mass objects might just be "pushed" aside (small relative to the space craft) or destroyed in a redshifted manner. Larger objects, like planets would essentially disrupt the compression/decompression of space time making it unlikely that the planet would be affected outside from maybe the spacecraft hitting the planet like a meteor