Breaking Light Speed I wonder how many people know a NASA engineer proposed an engine for a spacecraft. So what you say? Here is why I am mentioning it, he said he could get it to fly at 99 percent the speed of light without it having any exhaust. This reminds me of an engine which has been puzzling scientists and engineers, because it has no moving parts and yet in space can power a spacecraft. While even 99 percent the speed of light is not fast enough to get around, it would still take about 2.5 years to reach the closest star to our own, it is an incredible increase over the speed we can go today. The fastest we have ever traveled is 0.0037 percent of the speed of light, so you can see how much faster this new engine would be. Are you wondering how the engine would work? I know I was and although I could never understand everything about it, here are the basics. Inside the box a particle accelerator would push a helix back and forth as the mass increased with the forward movement and decreases with the backward motion. I know, this sounds very confusing. There was once a machine in the Ripley Museum and it was said to be a perpetual motion machine, which is thought to be impossible and I couldn’t help but be drawn to it. It was a wheel with little ramps on the inside with stops on the end. On each ramp was a ball bearing and as the wheel turned another ball bearing would roll down the ramp to turn the wheel as a different one would roll up. I watch this thing for ten minutes and it just continued to turn at the same rate. It seemed it would go on forever but we all know friction would finally stop the wheel. Could the proposed space engine go on forever or would it run out of fuel or be subject to other laws I know nothing about? I guess it doesn’t matter as long as the engine lasts long enough for at least one round trip from earth. So far, the NASA scientist states this proposed engine can get to speeds which we never thought we could reach and it is still theoretical. It seems to me even if we had an engine which was capable of these speeds, it would be impossible to protect our space craft from collisions. We have to remember even a grain of sand hitting us at this speed would destroy our ship. How would we detect something ahead of us if we were traveling at these speeds and how could we even know of a grain of sand was in our way? These are important questions and I really don’t think we have any answers to these matters right now. There are a couple of ways to protect our ship which might be proposed however. One might be some sort of plasma around our ship which would destroy tiny obstacles so we would only have to detect the bigger ones, but even then, how could we maneuver out of the way in time at the speeds we would be going at? Another way we might be able to avoid these objects is to have some system to push them out of our path when we get within a certain distance. There is nothing I know of which could do this now, but perhaps we could develop some sort of laser or electronic device to do this. Could we alter time in the future just enough to avoid obstacles in our path without hurting our time line. We would have to alter where the objects are in our path and put them back after we pass them. Afterall we don’t want to permanently alter space and time because we don’t know what effect this would have on the universe. The engine I mentioned would need huge amounts of power and take time to reach its optimum speed. It would be great for traveling around the solar system. We could reach Pluto in about 7.8 hours at 99 percent of light speed, making travel around the solar system not only possible, but convenient. There are a lot of things about space travel we don’t know yet, such as wormhole travel or even if we could ever travel through a black hole. It looks like a black hole would crush us if we ever got too near it, after all they rip stars and planets apart. As far as worm holes go, no one as actually seen one. They are theoretical. Even though this is true it seems a lot of scientists believe they exist and Einstein predicted them and he was hardly ever wrong. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact NASA seems to be fascinated with the warp engine. It doesn’t exist but the hope is one day it might. The principle here is different. It would alter the space ahead and behind the craft moving space rather than moving the craft. While this has been a staple of the series Star Trek it seems to me an engine like this could destroy space and the objects in it. Moving things around is not a good idea, but NASA seems to think it is. They are trying to prove the concept could work. Researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center are working on the problem. Can you imagine the damage which could be done to some alien worlds? It seems this could lead to wars. The idea is to control the expansion and contraction of space. Our ship would pull space from in front of it and send it behind the ship. This would move the area where the ship was and people in the ship would feel they were moving even though they were not and space was moving around them. It is believed this would defeat the speed limit which Einstein said would prevent us from traveling at light speed or faster. Right now, the idea NASA is playing with is to move a photon at faster than light speed using the warp theory. I am sure we will break the speed of light eventually. Sometimes the greatest inventions are made from mistakes or just from continuous work in one area. If we get enough scientists and engineers working on the problem around the world, sooner or later we will find the answer to this problem. I hope it happens in my lifetime but probably not. Some say we have already discovered this, but I sincerely doubt this.
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