{"id":18393,"date":"2024-11-12T10:08:13","date_gmt":"2024-11-12T10:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=18393"},"modified":"2024-11-12T11:24:42","modified_gmt":"2024-11-12T11:24:42","slug":"18393","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/?p=18393","title":{"rendered":"Approaching the speed of light with massive vehicles, by coordinated local changes in vacuum properties"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We went through the equations together and laid out how vacuum properties can be modified to make practical devices. Then discussed some implications and pathways.<\/span><\/p>\n

Approaching the speed of light with massive vehicles, by coordinated local changes in vacuum properties<\/em><\/p>\n

Richard Collins said:<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0 So approaching the speed of light with massive vehicles would entail pushing the mass through the vacuum and overcoming the relativistic drag – in terms most humans could understand. The details are there if someone wants to know. But “the faster we push it, the harder it gets” is what we have now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

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ChatGPT said:<\/strong><\/span><\/h6>\n
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Yes, that\u2019s a concise and accurate way to describe it!<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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As a vehicle approaches the speed of light, its mass effectively increases due to relativistic effects, which makes each increment of speed require progressively more energy. This “relativistic drag,” as you’ve aptly put it, means that pushing a massive object faster and faster through the vacuum becomes increasingly difficult. It\u2019s similar in concept to pushing against an ever-thickening medium: the faster you go, the greater the resistance.<\/p>\n

So in simple terms, “the faster we push it, the harder it gets”<\/strong> captures the essence of this challenge quite well. For those who wish to delve deeper, the detailed equations and terms show exactly how power and drag balance out, but the core idea is intuitive: at high velocities, each increment of speed demands more energy, asymptotically approaching a barrier that prevents reaching or exceeding light speed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a fundamental constraint of our universe, and this concept has far-reaching implications for high-speed travel, especially in the context of interstellar exploration with massive vehicles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Richard Collins said:<\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n
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Except that currently we are just using masses that happen to be lying around. atoms, and molecules and materials that people find and then refine with mostly chemical, mechanical, and thermal methods. Now I found that materials can be made where their strength is thousands of times large for their mass. So for the same structural properties, it can be a thousand times less mass. So part of “overcoming the nonlinear drag of the vacuum” is reducing the mass used and carried. I am fairly certain that the nonlinearity is simply that the vacuum itself is compressible. And some of that behavior is because, as the energy is concentrated, excited states of the vacuum take more and more energy. The Cherenkov radiation is not only that the particles near the speed of light, but that they encounter turbulence and irregularities in the vacuum. Those vacuum fluctuations on earth are primarily the extremely noisy gravitational potential changes on earth from many turbulent and often unpredictable things. Far from earth, there might be quiet places where there are not so many distractions and sources of vacuum random accelerations.<\/div>\n