Spacecraft may surf the solar system on magnetic fields

On a sunny day (14 Mar 2007 04:36:34 -0700) it happened Winfield Hill wrote in :

Just use plain old nuculear energy ,and an engine like this

Back in a few month from mars...

And pigs will soar the azure skies on gossamer wings of gold....

A Pessimistic View of Space Space sucks for people...It's too hostile.. Every place takes too long to reach. The solar system appears to be full of dead planets. It's too hot, too cold and no air. Lack of gravity makes movement awkward and affects health. We're creatures of the earth and are not suitable for space. Space is good place for robots. Also, the cost seems to be more than the gain. There's no place like home. D from BC

Every time somebody suggests "warp speed" and atomic engines for speeding through the universe, I remember that all matter has a property called inertia. If the warp engine can instantly accelerate a spacecraft from 0mph to a gazillion mph, what happens to the occupants? My guess is that they are forever plastered to the inner walls of the craft in a layer of one molecule thick. That assumes, of course, that the matter that constitutes the spacecraft itself can survive the inertial stresses. How does "warp speed" get rid of that inertia thing that keeps bugging me?

forever

well

and now that they may have found the Higgs Boson, maybe......

martin

We are very lucky to have what we have here.

greg

forever

I must be showing that I'm a bit of a sci fi buff.. I'll take some guesses.... For warp... One explanation in sci fi is that everything can be controlled. Such as space,all the energies, all types of matter and time. Inertia is controlled.

Or... The spacecraft is not accelerating at all, therefore no inertia.. It's the warped space that's speeding by. (Star Trek)

Or... there's the no movement necessary sci fi idea. One can pop into another region of space. (Galactica, Farscape)

Then there's hyperspace....My guess this sci fi idea is another dimension that's like traveling in a compressed universe. Again there maybe no inertia because it's not the spacecraft accelerating..it's the space that's going fast. (Star Wars, Babylon 5, Andromeda, Stargate SG1)

D from BC

inertia.

forever

itself

They have barf bags for that.

Now imagine having reached Warp-1 and one of the occupants exclaims "Oh drat, I forgot to turn off the coffee maker".

Obviously, you invent yourself an inertial damper. (I would almost indicate :^), but it's been said. Come on, don't you watch StarTrek?)

Tim

-- Deep Fryer: A very philosophical monk. Website @

And yonder in them thar skies it ain't easy gitten the farwood started for some lip-smackin' barbeque.

Quote "To charge itself up, the stocking could be coated with a radioisotope, and one of the most powerful would be polonium-210, the isotope used to poison former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. But it should be safe to use on the stocking, says Peck, "as long as people working on the spacecraft don't lick it"."

Now imagine some guy from the greenies reading that.

Win, did you try to pull our leg here?

Surf? NASA will have to recruit blonde astronauts in Sothern California with good tans and a gnarly, "Whoa, duude!"

Mars by 1984! Well, that didn't happen. And I recall an article in a childrens mag (Look and Learn) circa 1964 titled "Shall we sail through space". About solar sails. The answer is "NO".

The best the US can do is hit the timewarp back to the early 60s and redo Apollo.

My money is on the Chinese.

grant.

inertia.

forever

itself

Well, if you acknowledge higher dimensions, you could simply take a sheet of paper as a model of the universe, and draw one rectangle near one corner, and another rectangle near another corner - they could be billions of light-years apart - but with a well-placed bend in the sheet that represents space, the two rectangles can be placed smack-dab on top of each other - open the gate, and you'd step through to the other world as if through a doorway.

You might want to put the doorway(s) inside an airlock, depending on the source and destination's relative atmospheric pressures. :-)

This would be called a "space warp". :-) (cf "wormhole").

Cheers! Rich

grant.

inertia.

forever

itself

have you read Peter F. Hamiltons "Pandoras star" and "Judas Unchained"? He has wormhole technology like that, and uses trains.....

fabulous books. I read the first one in one sitting, then started back at the beginning.

Cheers Terry

Well? Can we try to put some numbers on that, to see if it's at all practical?

Lessee, magnetic flux density in earth's vicinity is about 50uT. Orbital speed in the same area is about 7.5km/s. That gets us about 370mN/C of Lorentz force, at best.

I haven't the faintest idea what electrical field strengths might be in space.

How much electrical charge can a spacecraft hold? I don't see off hand how to figure that to within three orders of magnitude, either.

Jeroen Belleman

grant.

inertia.

forever

itself

When I fantasize about Outopia, I envision little teleportation booths on every street corner, like telephone booths. It'd sure cut down on traffic if you could just dial up your target doorway, step through, and be anywhere in the known universe.

Most people would probably use it to avoid the commute - voila! No more traffic!

Cheers! Rich

To me, the diagram looked more like an ordinary ion jet, albeit higher-powered than what we have so far, not like "surfing the magnetic waves" or any of that aery-faery stuff. :-)

For example:

Cheers! Rich

grant.

inertia.

forever

itself

it would also allow for instant riots - anywhere, anytime. as at least one SF writer explored, a long time ago (cant recall who, Niven? Gil the arm springs to mind)

Cheers Terry

...

The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester? In that one, you didn't even need a wormhole - somebody discovered that people have the innate ability to teleport themselves; it just has to be developed. They called it "jaunting".

Gully Foyle was the hero. Apparently, he was much sought after - somebody scuttled him in deepspace, and he space-jaunted, which nobody had ever done. You still needed ships to go from planet to planet at the time.

Cheers! Rich