Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Making Faster Than Light Travel Safer (for the people at your destination)

The Alcubierre drive is currently considered one of the most plausible means of an intelligent life form creating a faster than light vessel.  Needless to say, this is awesome.  Unfortunately there are some potential risks that come with violently bending the universal speed limit of light.  In rough terms, the way an Alcubierre drive would work involves warping space time.  By expanding space time behind the space craft, while simultaneously contracting space time in front of the vessel, the ship is able to isolate itself from the universe at large and get from point A to point B really fast.  So while this is really awesome, the contracting of space time at the front of the ship has a strong potential to become a rather dangerous weapon, the contracted space time would pull in dust and gases through out the journey, forming a super dense plasma, when space time returns to normal, all of the energy in that plasma is released, potentially fatally for the planets in the star system the ship was trying to visit.
Generally speaking, explorers aren't trying to kill the star systems they are visiting, to prevent the built up energy from being destructive, there are a few options.  One simply aim the ship so that when you stop, you are unlikely to kill anyone with the blast of energy.  Two limit your travels to relatively short hops, minimizing how much energy is built up.  Three (my idea), create a pocket universe in front of your ship.  A group advanced enough to create a faster than light ship, might also be advanced enough to create artificial pocket universes.  These artificial pocket universes could be generated right in front of the ship, providing a temporary storage volume for untold quantities of energy, ideally, the super hot plasma would be stored in the pocket universe where the energy could be slowly let out.  This torrent of energy could assist in allowing the ship to power up when it moves on to the next star system.

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