fyl2u
Striker
The man had clearly never seen a bird or a flying insect.
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UFO's
- Thread starter KathyBatesHammer
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The man had clearly never seen a bird or a flying insect.
High Entropy
Midfield
In 2010s a Colonel lieutenant admiral said he saw an alien craft go into the water and come back out while on a training exercise. Turns out he viewed it through a heat imaging camera and the "craft" was the same temperature as the background ocean, giving the illusion that it disappeared into the water, then reappeared a little time later - it never entered the water, he was wrong.
Which just goes to show in both scenarios why you NEVER accept the word of a single person, regardless of their pedigree. You've been told this before when you last popped up with this poor attempt at shitting on science.
I can't get my head around the fact that some of the greatest minds the human race has ever produced have explained how the universe works and why some things are impossible and other things aren't.
Yet here we are, a taxi driver from hetton-le-hole, office worker from Seaham and a fork lift driver from Nissan saying
"nah, it's a load of shite that like, they don't know that for sure"
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PinzaC55
Striker
Violet , what is the point i have missed ?
MunkyHeed
Striker
Aye. That’ll be it.
Why Gary Why
Goalkeeper
I've always taken this to be a comment on the engineering of flight rather than the physics of it. Been plenty of theory done on aerodynamics when he said this and he'd obviously seen a bird fly so would have known it's possible for something heavier than air to fly, I just take that comment to mean he thought no one would ever build a machine to do it.
Obviously he was wrong but this was only 10 years after the first internal combustion engine so I can cut him some slack as to why he would think that. I'm not entirely sure what it has to do with the possibility of interstellar travel as that isn't just an engineering issue, it's a physics issue, especially when talking about near to light speed.
MunkyHeed
Striker
Point I'm making is that just because we don't know how to do it today, doesn't mean it can't ever be. Laws of physics are fixed, obv but we've used engineering to work with them or understand them to a better degree to find workarounds without breaking them. Personally, I don't think FTL travel is possible through dimensional spacetime as it's understood today. If we want to get somewhere a long way away in a timescale that won't kill us (or those left at home) before we get there, it'll need to be via some other method.
fyl2u
Striker
Aye. That’ll be it.
He said that in a time when steam engines were the pinnacle of engine technology. Combustion engines weren't yet viable so he was likely talking about the power to weight ratio of a steam engine of the time being too small to provide the lift required to get itself and all its fuel into the air. That's very different from saying that a powered aircraft would be in violation of the laws of physics.
We understand the point you're making. You seem to be missing the point everyone else is making.
Right now with our current technology, the fastest any man-made vehicle has ever travelled in space is 0.064% of the speed of light. Making a vehicle travel at even 10% of the speed of light with current technology would be impossible, but it is still conceivable that at some point in the future we could invent some new kind of technology that might be able to make a craft travel that fast.
The problem you have when travelling at speeds that approach the speed of light is mass-energy equivalence, or as you might have heard it described before, E=mc^2.
Mass and energy are effectively the same thing. You can't increase one without increasing the other. This is a fundamental law of the universe. It isn't something someone can develop a technology to overcome. It is innate to the existence of the universe.
What this means is that the faster you go, the "heavier" you get, the more energy would be required to make you accelerate each additional fraction of a percent closer to the speed of light.
(This is regardless of the technology being employed to make you accelerate. The propulsion method is irrelevant. Whatever technology you use to turn energy into forward movement, the energy required to accelerate you each additional fraction of a percent grows as your speed gets closer and closer to the speed of light.)
And this is where the "impossible" problem comes in.
The amount of energy that would be required to make a vehicle REACH the speed of light is more energy than exists in the entire universe.
Let that sink in.
More energy than exists in the entire universe.
So, unless you're proposing that somehow an alien race has managed to create an energy source that has more energy than exists in our entire universe, stick it in a little tiny spacecraft, and despite having harnessed this power, still gives enough of a fuck about the tiny people on a tiny planet in a tiny solar system near the edge of an unremarkable galaxy in an unremarkable cluster to fly here, but somehow still has shitty enough technology that they're crashlanding their little 3-seater runabout in Roswell or can be spotted easily by the crappy cameras of today, then I'm sorry to say that there's no way that anyone out there is travelling all this way, expending the energy of multiple universes in order to give their aerial display teams a bit of a practice runabout in the sky near Silksworth.
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MunkyHeed
Striker
Nonsense. Probably. TLDR.
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dangermows
Striker
High Entropy
Midfield
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How are the taxis in Hetton these days, been busy, what time you on till ?
fyl2u
Striker
PinzaC55
Striker
Lord Kelvin would certainly have known manned balloon flight was possible.
fyl2u
Striker
I don't think balloons count as "heavier than air".
That doesn't preclude Einstein–Rosen bridges or warping space.
There is a lot we still don't understand. We will probably destroy ourselves before we do understand it too.
fyl2u
Striker
Einstein-Rosen bridges have been dismissed as viable for transport because they would collapse so quickly that not even light would have time to travel down one, and for the fact that they're purely theoretical, sub-microscopic temporal connections between subatomic particles and almost certainly don't actually exist in the macroscopic universe.
Warping space a lá the "alcubierre drive" again are only theoretical answers that arise from Einstein's field equations, but in reality would require impossible negative energy density exotic particles that not only don't exist but can't exist, and again, more energy to operate than could ever be considered feasible by any race that would bother flying loop-de-loops around the skies in Hetton.
That is just the Zeta Tucanae SAFC Supporters branch. They have just seen the floodlights from when the Stadium was built. They arrived here instantly, but now they can't find the lights and are looping around looking for it whilst catching up with the Netflix episodes.
fyl2u
Striker
More likely the "I just ate some dodgy willicks and now I'm seeing funny lights" branch.
Nah, the Zeta Tucanae lot have already been trying to create accounts on here begging for blackcatpoints and asking why they can't apply for the Liverpool tickets.
The moderators saw them off.
High Entropy
Midfield
There's a lot we do understand too !
Folding space, such as the common piece of paper and pencil example is a Sci-fi plot device, like warp engines and hyperspacial dimensional travel.
Why Gary Why
Goalkeeper
Just because someone believes something might be possible in the future doesn't mean it will come true either. There is no technology we use today that has needed a workaround of the laws of physics either, everything we use is perfectly understandable by the laws that govern the universe.
I've grown up on a diet of science fiction and would love nothing more than there to be aliens and space travel between planets. But it doesn't matter how much I desire that to be true, it comes up against the harsh reality of being able to travel vast distances in any reasonable time frame. And we have absolutely no idea how to achieve that.
