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Spacecraft in a ‘warp bubble’ could travel faster than light, claims physicist

Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity famously dictates that no known object can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum, which is 299792 km/s. This speed limit makes it unlikely that humans will ever be able to send spacecraft to explore beyond our local area of the Milky Way.

However, new research by Erik Lentz at the University of Göttingen suggests a way beyond this limit. The catch is that his scheme requires vast amounts of energy and it may not be able to propel a spacecraft.

Lentz proposes that conventional energy sources could be capable of arranging the structure of spacetime in the form of a soliton – a robust singular wave. This soliton would act like a “warp bubble’”, contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind. Unlike objects within spacetime, spacetime itself can bend, expand or warp at any speed. Therefore, a spacecraft contained in a hyper-fast bubble could arrive at its destination faster than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws, even Einstein’s cosmic speed limit.

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“We’re going to try to catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower arm, using the grid fins to take the load,” Musk said via Twitter on Dec. 30. SpaceX will try a different approach to landing its future reusable rocket boosters. There are some benefits with this landing method: first, by omitting landing legs from the rocket design altogether, SpaceX can save weight and cost, because unlike Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy first stages Super Heavy won’t need landing legs. In a second place, it could allow SpaceX to essentially recycle the Super Heavy booster immediately because the rocket would be “ready to refly in under an hour”.

~Video credits: @tijnm_02 Text credits: www.space.com www.techcrunch.com.

Five ways artificial intelligence can help space exploration

Do humans really have to go into space?


Artificial intelligence has been making waves in recent years, enabling us to solve problems faster than traditional computing could ever allow. Recently, for example, Google’s artificial intelligence subsidiary DeepMind developed AlphaFold2, a program which solved the protein-folding problem. This is a problem which has had baffled scientists for 50 years.

Advances in AI have allowed us to make progress in all kinds of disciplines – and these are not limited to applications on this planet. From designing missions to clearing Earth’s orbit of junk, here are a few ways artificial intelligence can help us venture further in space.

Do you remember Tars and Case, the assistant robots from the film Interstellar? While these robots don’t exist yet for real space missions, researchers are working towards something similar, creating intelligent assistants to help astronauts. These AI-based assistants, even though they may not look as fancy as those in the movies, could be incredibly useful to space exploration.