"Jutta Stöckel" wrote:
> >From an article in "Der Spiegel" 50/1995 on Lawrence M. Krauss, a
> physicist
Yeps... this guy seems kewl ;)
He has also written at least two fun little books for the general public :
The Physics of Star Trek (Star Trek Series)
Beyond Star Trek : Physics from Alien Invasions to the End of Time
check also the Erk's relativity page at
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/eric_baird/homepage.htm
For myself it's an excellent ressource about the theory of relativity and
interesting related stuffs.
> , I learned that it is theoretically possible to travel through
> space by artificial spacetime flexure: Space in front of the starship is
> getting contracted while space behind the ship is getting expanded. The
> problem about it would be that the starship has to "carry" the energy of
> a few thousand suns with it.
easy game ;))
Alcubierre warp drives and related stuffs are demanding HUGE quantities of
energies and the building of HUGE mega structures in space far beyond our
current technology.
if you like such speculations you will enjoy, for example, the following
adresses :
http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/warp.htm
http://www.stardrive.org
For the little i can recall, no need to transport energy inside the ship at
all, in fact the ship should not be more than just a box to contain you...
the real problem is the construction outside the ship. Ah i need a memory
extension... a mole of octets should be sufficient... at least for the close
future ;)
> I would like to know if there are other kinds of artificial spacetime
> flexures possible, too.
Well ;)... Yes other kind of speculations are talking about the use of wormholes for space-time travel... also demanding huge quantities of energies and also exotic matters.. things like negative mass or energy ;)...
> If they are possible: Can human bodies be
> exposed to artificial spacetime flexures, or are there dangers such as
> radiation etc?
Well... we are permanently exposed to space-time curves, since we are
exposed to gravity.
I guess that if you are in the part of the space that is expanded by a warp
drive you should be quickly dislocated, if you were in front of the space
ship you should be very highly compressed... this raise interesting
questions about the possibility of implementation of such stuff, it become a
lot more speculative : since all the matter in front of the ship will be
compressed during the process... but i'm not at all knowledgeable enough
about that so i leave that to other peoples on the list..
And radiation certainly ;)) since the use of -->huge<-- amounts of energy is
needed.
> If yes: How would a human body have to be protected - or maybe even have
> to be transformed?
In the theoretical use of a warp drive, no need of such attrocities for the traveller, since in fact he is not moving at all in his part of space.
> And would a computer which is able to create spacetime flexures
> (probably with the help of an accelerator) automatically be able to
> create new (cyber-)spacetimes?
I fail to understand the question.
But for the fun, we can imagine to put some kind of computer inside a
wormhole and use it as an infinitelly fast calculator ;))... It would
probably be forbidden since it would generate some fun paradoxes ;))
Delriviere
Christophe