Which "faster than light" travel is more feasible?

Question

Star Trek's "warp drive" or Battlestar Galactica's "FTL jump"

Answer 1

It is very hard to say which would be more feasable, becuase not much is known about the battlestar galactica ftl drive. There is very little techno-babble describing the workings of their drive and it is not known which, if any, of the proposed faster-than-light physics concepts apply.

Little time appears to pass on the ship during a jump and objects within the ship do not appear exhibit the signs of momentum/inertia associated with acceleration/deceleration. It also appears that they cannot sustain ftl travel over very long distances, unlike the warp drive in star trek. This to me is more likely the way an faster than light drive would work. It would be very difficult to sustain it over a period of, sometimes, weeks as we see in star trek. Unless the ship had an enormous power supply. They also dont mention on battlestar galactica if they use any sort of deflector to deflect particles during ftl travel.. it really seems like they dont want viewers to think about it too much, and focus on other aspects of the show.

Also, in my opinion, battlestar galactica, i dont think, is set as far forward in the future as star trek is. Therefore, their technology is more than likely less advanced.

So all in all, it is hard to say. In star trek, they give us more pseudoscience explaining the workings of their drive, and as we know very little about the bsg ftl drive, i would tend to lean towards the star trek warp drive as being more likely.. but then again, neither are actually possible according to our current understanding of physics!

Answer 2

FTL Inquirer:

In the fictional world, BOTH. Star Treks FTL drive seems to work on a gradual increase on energy to acceleration technique, while Battlestar Galactica's FTL works on the principal of dynamical charged inerial engines going from point-to-point jumps instantenously. Though the Galactica's engines seem more like the true FTL-drive type for space, Star Trek's FTL-drive is more realistic ... if science ever had anything to say about it. Beside... an Instantenous jump would take enormous amounts of energy (that of the energy of our sun) to travel say ... 1 lightyear (5.3455 trillion miles) in a fraction of that time (a year), and keep all objects associated with the ship (people, supplies, equipment, etc) from magnetically and molecularly de-stabilizing ... would be impossibe to calculate at this time.

We will have to wait until Quantum Computing comes to a full and complete understanding to do this ... and maybe then we could ask ourselves this very same question.

Answer 3

A jump drive supposes that you can connect two points in space and therefore translate material between them

the more feasible (though still unlikely) is the warp drive from Star Trek. The Warp engines create a sort of shield that Warps space time such that the ship can travel at speeds faster than light by essentially fooling the universe into thinking that there is not FTL going on... How this is acually accomplished is irrelevant, the concept is the point.

In order to travel faster than light, we're going to have to break the law. Light is the fastest speed, and that is that. Worse, when mass accelerated to near the speed of light, time seems normal to the mass but it is actuall slowed with respect to everything else, and the mass increases! To beat this rule, you would have to make space-time behave as though you weren't breaking the law. Or maybe slip yourself into a warp field of some kind that "protected" you from these rules.

So maybe that jump drive is looking good after all... If you don't actually move, then you haven't violated any laws of physics. In order to make this work, you have to find a way to connect two points in space. This is sometimes called space folding (imagine folding a peice of paper and then poking a hole in it with a pencil), but more often just jumping.

Physicists have found ways to perform small scale quantum teleportation--but there doesn't seem to really be a way to connect two arbitrary points in space.

FTL travel is likely not possible. That said, there was also once "science" that proclaimed that the "sound barrier" could not be breached. As we gain more understanding of the universe, we may find that there are ways to "fool" space into thinking that we are not violating it. This may turn out to be something unexpected--maybe more like hyperspace, slipspace, or something as yet un thought of.

Answer 4

i'm not sure what "FTL jump" is exactly in battlestar, but I will attempt to say that a Warp drive is not faster than light travel.

In star trek the warp drive is accually a manupliation of the fabric of space. It should be called a "Space fold" in what they are accually doing is making small folds in space and unfolding them. They do this over and over again and call that warp speed. I would say that this could indeed be possible in the far future as it is kind of like a "wormhole" phenenom.

Answer 5

No inertial mass travels faster than light (FTL)...period. Neither FTL method is feasible; so any claim that one "is more feasible" than the other is meaningless. That would be like saying one false answer is less false than another false answer.

And that is a bummer as far as scifi writers, who want to travel through the "last frontier," are concerned. So, like all good fiction writers do, they invent some fiction...in this case, fictional physics, to get around the limits of reality.

Tachyons, for example, are pure fiction based on the question "But what if I could travel FTL?" If we could travel faster than light, which we can't, the Lorentz transforms for time show that we could travel backward in time. So the scifi writers invent tachyons and travel back in time.

The FTL limits are imposed on inertial (rest) mass. So the scifi writers get around that little problem by converting mass into fictious energy particles, which have no FTL limits. Thus, we can have stargates from star to star by decomposing, transmitting FTL, and then reconstituting people and things at the destinations.

Finally, the real kicker, if we can't send rest mass FTL through space, let's just bend space to meet the mass. Interestingly, this may be the most likely, but still infeasible, physics in scifi. We know space can bend; it has been both predicted by relativity and shown experimentally. What if we could just bend space until it bends in on itself, like a fold or warp in cloth.

Unfortunately, this scifi work around the FTL limit would require more energy than found in all of space. Why? Because of this:

"The effect is small, such that (in the case of strong lensing) a galaxy having a mass of over 100 billion solar masses will produce multiple images separated by only a few arcseconds. Galaxy clusters can produce separations of several arcminutes. In both cases the galaxies and sources are quite distant, many hundreds of megaparsecs away from our Galaxy." [See source.]

Gravitational lensing is the effect of bending (warping) space itsefl into a lens that bends light. But it takes the mass of "100 billion solar masses" to bend space only a few "arcseconds," not even one degree of arc...let alone the 180 degrees it would take to warp space in on itself. Even contained antimatter drives, if they were feasible, could not muster up that kind of energy.

Bottom line, FTL travel by inertial mass is simply infeasible. But there is more than inertial mass in this universe and, perhaps, that can go FTL.

For example, there is a recently found quantum physics phenomenon called "quantum entanglement." Two quanta, like photons, meet, dance and fool around for a short moment, and then go on their merry way. But after the entanglement, you can't tell one quantum from the other. In fact, what you do to one, INSTANTANEOUSLY happens to the other.

For example, if you were to change the up momentum of one to a down momentum, the up momentum of the other quantum would instantaneously change to a downer...no matter how far separated the two quanta are. Thus, theoretically, we could instantaneously transmit information (up, down) across the universe. And that is waaaay faster than the speed of light.

Answer 6

The speed of the mind is instantaneous.