Finally something I can sit through well I'm sitting in surgery recovery. Your a champ bud and thanks for taking my mind off this tube sticking out of my lungs
@@isaacarthurSFIA the speed of light is variable, u find a large enough gravity source u can walk faster than it. also gravity travels faster than light we are just a visually biased species.
Why have I never heard that 'you gotta push your kinetic energy in addition to your mass energy' explanation before?! Makes things so much clearer. Thanks.
@@jackhand4073 I always counted fuel as part of the mass, so lifting/moving/accelerating the fuel needed to move more was all part of the M part of the equation. Realizing that at those speeds you also have to worry about the E side just 'clicked' things for me.
@@Jcewazhere Good stuff man. It kind of grows on itself. I think it's exponential but not sure if that's right. "Just add more fuel! but hang on we need more fuel to lift that fuel"
I'm a physicist and that description doesn't make much sense to me. Have you never heard of the concept of 'relativistic mass gain'? It makes a lot of sense. Energy equals mass, so with more kinetic energy, your mass increases. Physicists eventually stopped talking about relativistic mass gain because there are still some flaws with this explanation.
I think it’s ironic that out of all sci-fi franchises Avatar is the one which has spaceships slower than light. It takes them nearly 7 years to reach Alpha Centauri stated in the movie. And if you look up the behind the scenes design, it takes months to accelerate and months to decelerate and only reaches 70% light speed at its max. Which of course is still way beyond what we know how to do but as far as sci-fi goes it at least sticks with known physics.
@ no I didn’t because the alien franchise has much faster than light travel. The star system they arrive at is over 30 light years from earth but they’re only an 11 month trip from earth. And in aliens it only takes them a few weeks with the Suloco (and that’s not relativistic time, it was a rescue mission). They don’t explicitly state in the movie what their drives are but it’s supposed to convert the ship and crew into tachyons
@@bradysmith4405 The Avatar ship has a 50 megaton per second energy output, enough to glass entire countries in a minute or so. Way over out heads, even carbon nanotubes can't make magnetic cages big and strong enough for it to work, not by a factor of 1000.
Yep, I'd meant to do them one year later but it works out to be just abut 1 3 months since the nebula ones all come out at the top of the month and then arrive here usually on the last Sunday in place of the livestream I used to do.
Thus why these ships have to be aerodynamic, likely with an assist from an EM shield as a supplement, not forgetting that regolith makes good shipskin.
Ionizing radiation and a magnetic field which accelerates matter perpendicular to the nose axis of the ship can get out the way some smaller objects. Scouting robot ships would be needed for larger objects.
@nikmontecristo3683 not as a direct protection no. But creating something providing a direction of flow for prticles. I think at these speeds, Bernolli's gas laws would come into effect again. Be fun to see that.
I read a sf story once, where people using relativistic ships to travel to Earth colonies in other solar systems had a city dedicated to them on Earth. Civilizations and cultures would change around it, but the city itself was maintained and kept unchanging so the travelers would have a familiar home to return to after their long journeys. I always thougth it was an interesting concept, although I don't know if it could actually be implemented in reality.
@@isaacarthurSFIA Yes. As described in the story, the city was built on Earth. It would at time be in the center of a vast megalopolis, other times it would be surrounded by wilderness, and anything in between. As Earth changed and evolved around it, the city would remain untouched and ready to welcome its occupants whenever they came home. I wish I could remember the title of the story.
Fusion ships for interplanetary travel Black hole ships with plasma shields for interstellar travel Btw would love to see a video on what technology can be achieved with plasma
How is that plasma shield gonna work? I am not saying it wont, i just never heard of it before. And how are you gonna make that black hole for your starship?
We don't necessarily need fusion ships for interplanetary travel per se. It depends on which destinations in the solar system we're willing to reach in reasonable time spans. I'd also like to read how you envision 'plasma shields' for black hole ships and what you'd want to use them for, though I kinda guess what you probably have in mind. Personally, I envision future spaceships could use their nuclear drive designs (fusion or otherwise) to generate their own artificial magnetospheres. From that point on the next logical step is for the next gen designs to even generate their own plasmaspheres entrapped in said magnetospheres (basically a cold plasma region partially surrounding the ship, just like it does around Earth). In principle this would be useful to deflect and absord incoming solar wind and cosmic rays.
I would really like to see an episode about interplanetary ships that can reach ~0.1% the speed of light (300km/s). It would be interesting to hear about the technologies that would allow that, the considerations for optimal acceleration G's (1G for 8 hours to accelerate and then 8 hours of 1G to decelerate towards destination?), whether waiting for a "window" for planets to get closer to one another or just fly whenever you want, the effect on space tourism or settlement, etc.
Never. You'd be at about 1 MW (kinetic energy gain) per second per kg. Your ship would arrive as an ionized plasma. Lower accelerations result in nozzle or electrode errosion. Physics limits us to only about 50 km/s delatV for single stage engines if extremely lucky. You need a laser sail and wait.
Man these episodes get better every time. The animations just out of this world. I'd love to know how the space scenes are created to this standard. Amazing! Merry Christmas Mr Arthur.
Any civilization that has the capability for "timely" interstellar flight has to face all the same obstacles. We've either been visited, or we haven't. If we've been visited, the obstacles are "just" a matter of engineering. If we haven't been visited, maybe that's why.
UAP reportedly do posses this tech and can dial it to fly the sub light speeds and change directions almost instantly. Too bad nobody is gonna share the blueprints because no one needs crazy neighbor
This just seems like a list of reasons why, one way or another, we're not, practically, travelling anywhere at all: until - and if - we develop a way to totally bypass directly interacting with space-time, altogether.
More of a reason why we have to find a swetspot between the challenges of going faster and the challenges of keeping the ship and crew alive and on mission.
@isaacarthurSFIA Well, yes. That's the other - and, I would say, far more significant - thing. "Faster"? A worm is faster than a snail - and, in my view, that's the order of terms we'll have to stare in the face, probably for centuries. Either we get to FTL, or we're going to be missing all the parties. So, until that branch of sci-fi stops being quite so stubbornly sci-fi, I say we should focus on supporting Life. Speaking _generally,_ [I do love your work], I see a lot of energy expended on different math for the hypothetical warp drive that somebody might make 3 thousand years from now, if they find a dark matter or a tachyon to charge it up with. Of course - that's all nice: I just wish I saw as much energy devoted to the issue of sustaining Life. As far as we know, there's nothing for us to breath, nothing for us to drink and nothing for us to eat - anywhere, but here. If we want to go on a little trip off this world, we're going to have to take all that with us, or make it on the way; and/or find a way to reliably put ourselves into hibernation and wake ourselves back up again. Personally, I think all that piece has a higher priority.
Alpha Centauri doesn't seem so bad with an anti-matter drive tho. And we can already make anti-matter, albeit in tiny quantities. It's still years in space, but we'll have to get used to that anyway with today's propulsion just to travel around the solar system.
@ArawnOfAnnwn "Doesn't seem so bad"?.... _What_ anti-matter drive are you referring to? You talk in these casual terms like someone just needs to come back from lunch and we'll be ready to get in with the launch ...... do you know how much anti-matter has been produced by the human race? A raisin weighs about 1 gram. Humanity had produced the equivalent of 15 BILLIONTHS, of a gram, of antimatter - that's 0.000,000,015, of a gram.... Nobody, is firing up the antimatter drive, any time soon - maybe in a few centuries and that's an if. If we send anyone anywhere interesting, we're never going to see them again, anyway - so we may as well give more thought to working out a way to freeze and thaw people while we we're waiting for someone to burn through all the energy in the solar system trying to make a few atoms-worth of antimatter.
This is going to be one of those ‘Isaac Bite’ episodes I wish we talked more of. Honestly, I can settle on 99.99%+ of Light Speed so long as Isaac episodes can be pinged to my subscription box at 100% the speed of light 😌
When studying university physics in the 1970’s I used to think about antimatter and limits of propulsion. Noone else seemed to write about this then. This video seems to cover all the options. Bravo
Targeting Stellasers: Solar Laser Array Propulsion Sail System: (10% speed of light) for solar system travel is spot on IMHO. After slowing down, one could turn on the nukes for local system travel. Definitely can vizulize this type of solar system travel in future. For Fun : Two SYC-FI examples: 1) Starwars - millenium falcon (HyperSpace Travel) = Stellaser sail system. 2) Startek: = impulse power (nuke for local travel). Saved this vid along with many other of your vids, Thanks Isaac Arthur. 😊
5:04 Mind officially blown by this explanation of how the particles can be measured post collision. Literally been a good five years since I’ve been so tripped out about physical science.
Future production note: 15:47 You really should have flipped the small diagram (bottom left) so the arrows for neg- and pos-mass circles matched the main gravitational dipole diagram.
20:25 Honestly, I don't really pay attention to it unless you mention it. 😅 (Which is better than before, when I didn't notice _even _*_when_* you mentioned it). I think it's just been "fine" for years now that it's now just recieving incremental improvements here and there. Not to trivialize your progress, just figured I should remind you how easy it is for your fans to ignore... -I -_-also -_*_-then-_*- remembered this is probably the 1000th or so comment you've had "reminding" you, but figured I had gone on too long to pull back now... 😬-
Brilliant. That certainly is a tour de force - it has insight, clarity, depth, reasoning and enthusiasm ! Have liked, saved and subscribed. Love your accent as well 👍😊 Big thanks Miles
That altered explanation of why it gets so hard to accelerate is actually something I'd never heard before and the universe just clicked in a way it hadn't before.
To solve your dust issue, there is also the possibility of having long vacuum tubes where spaceships travel at relativistic velocities. You briefly mentioned this option in your intergalactic travel episode. In addition there is also the option of launching spaceships off relativistic launch rings, which are a few lightyears in diameter. This has the advantage of being able to store the kinetic energy in rotational energy and gain/give it to other ships. It would be similar to how a skyhook is like an orbital battery.
I don't think that would work. First, how would you get the few atoms or molecules sucked out of the tube? A pump does not work in those conditions. Second, the tube would quickly end up with *more* stuff in it than the space around it, because spaceships will inevitably leak or shed as they go through the tube. Also, cosmic rays would knock particles off the tube itself, many of which will end up inside the tube.
@@danielhall271 No. The lasers would just knock off more atoms from the inside of the tube. Besides, vaporizing things just changes its form, it does not make the atoms disappear.
Awesome video! Like you I was disappointed when I found that it is unlikely that warp drive and other forms of FTL are unlikely. I think the lighthuggers from Revelation Space are arguably one of the best depictions of ultra relativistic travel in fiction. Anti-matter rockets seem like a logical candidate for ultra relativistic travel. Maybe the first stellar pioneers will get to other systems using antimatter and built stelasers and laser highways for larger ships to follow.
@UpperDarbyDetailing technically I don't think we can know immortality is impossible or even that 50,000 years old is impossible--which is functionally immortal. With enough technology complementing the body, I don't see why it can't be
@ yeah, I mean, it’s not impossible in the sense that “nothing is impossible”. I just think it’s functionally impossible. Just the fact that viruses and bacteria will continue evolving with us is an important point. Though I can see getting to a point where it’s not a good evolutionary path for them to infect humans, or perhaps a good path would be to infect humans, but become functionally irrelevant to us. I think there’s a limit to the upper end for biological life, and I don’t think uploading the mind into a cybernetic body or computer system is possible either. Hopefully I’m wrong.
@@HedonisticPuritan-mp6xv Your premise that we always seek technology to solve problem is incorrect. We’ve been doing “pure science” for hundreds of years. Even today it can be hard to get funding for these projects as there’s no obvious end result, but we often find a result afterwards. X-Rays were discovered in this manner for example. How does give a planet a magnetosphere? There are three (hypothetical) methods that have been proposed that I have heard of: The brute force method is to simply drill down to the core and use nuclear bombs to melt the core, which should then begin rotating or the planet will rotate around it and the drag between planet and core create a magnetosphere. The most elegant is probably to build a magnetic field generator and deploy it at the planet’s L1 Lagrange point to act as an “umbrella” and block the solar wind that way. This has the added bonus of not creating Van Allen radiation belts in the planet’s low-mid orbital paths. My favorite is number three: build an orbital ring and mount magnetic field generators on it to create a field around the planet. (Search “Isaac Arthur orbital rings” for more info)
A friend of mine came up with the idea of a the perfect starship drive in the form of a sphaleronic ramscoop. Basically, you heat any old baryonic matter past the electroweak energy, and use the reactions made possible by that to propel yourself. It only needs to carry enough fuel to get up to speed, after which it can feed entirely from the interstellar/galactic medium, or even the CMB once it’s blueshiftsd into the pair-production range
Maybe it's the ganja I'm smoking on right now, but I have a sneaky suspicion that when we finally find a way to travel outside of our solar system in the course of a normal human life span, accelerating through space at near relativistic speeds will basically be the ships impulse power and not our main mode of travel. Going THROUGH space-time takes too long for any kind of deep space exploration and WARPING space-time itself with an Alcubierre drive would require the use of exotic matter or expert manipulation of dark energy (which we don't currently possess). Maybe I'm just completely stoned right now, but what if the way forward is going OUTSIDE of space-time and bypassing the need to deal with the speed of light, causality and the Principle of Locality altogether. If all points in a Virtual World are equidistant with respect to the source of the simulation, than a deeper reality that is the source of space-time would be at the exact same distance to every point in the universe. Similar to how two separate pixels on a computer screen can simultaneously interact with each other at a distance (because they’re both connected and equidistant to their source, the physical hardware), maybe the reason why entangled particles are able to interact simultaneously across vast distances because they're both connected and equidistant to their source, the deeper reality. Which might also explain why we have to use the language of statistics and probabilities to describe a sub-microscopic quantum state, these particles are just vibrating in and out of this deeper reality, jumping all over the place. Oh wait, my high is coming down and I just realized that accessing this hypothetical deeper reality would be WAY MORE DIFFICULT than either brilliantly engineering ultra-relativistic ships or somehow getting our hands on negative mass for the warp drive. It'd be like software code trying to escape the computer that runs it without any outside help. Here I am theorizing over hypothetical type 3 civilization technology while we're still using fossil fuels for energy. I'm getting way ahead of myself. I love this channel so much. I normally binge this channel when my mind is racing too much and I trying to fall asleep, but this channel is on a whole different level when marijuana is involved.
Enjoyed this. How about an episode on the structure of the Milky Way? I'd love to see a deep dive into that, particularly with emphasis on the spur that our solar system is part of.
5:35 As time slowed down, the rate of time speed that you have to react to an emergency speeds up. To you, you have less time to do something about the danger.
You have the best collection of graphics ever for your videos. And I have been a sub for a few years at least. I don’t care if it’s “PC” to say so but I love your speech impediment. It’s part of your appeal and I wouldn’t change a syllable ❤️
I was just thinking about this topic like 5 minutes ago ! I was just hoping somone would more detailed explained relativity at close to light speed Issac ur chanel has actually improved ita been a while sorry im runningb back to JMG though
Well, if the thing wasn't also massively expensive to build or operate, I can see nations and possibly non-state entities busting out to colonize distant locations that most folks back here wouldn't even know about (and the whole idea would be untraceable escape, for some), even with otherwise existing tech...an almost instant human diaspora. Especially if the thing is FTL *enough* to easily leave the galaxy / local group / red-shift horizon... (Could that be a partial Fermi Paradox solution? Civilizations get FTL, then rapidly spread *too thinly* to easily detect?)
@@stardolphin2 Presumably any instantaneous FTL system, that was that practical and economic to run would also be used for long distance communication. No need for giant radio wave beacons if you just have a portal you can send them through.
@@PunishedRalph Oh, well, If we're talking something Stargate-ish, then yeah, just run fiber optic cables through them. One still has to establish the other end though. And about that... Physicist Kip Thorne himself (who, among other things, was an adviser on 'Contact' and 'Interstellar') once wrote that *if you could* produce a wormhole with both connected ends here, you could take one of them away in a ship at large fractions of c, and not only could you transfer people and supplies (and even fuel?) back and forth between ship and Earth *while in transit,* but because the moving wormhole is tied to the reference frame of the ship, it will 'arrive' in the ship's shortened time-dilated time (which could be just a few years), and not the longer, near-lightspeed time (which could be a few thousand years)... That's *effectively* FTL, without a ship traveling *actually* FTL...and you've still got that wormhole leading back home with you, at your destination.
Seeing the speed of light as a physical limit depends on the fact that most divulgation of the underlying science (including this one) omits a very important detail: the computations indicating that traveling at the finite speed of light require infinite energy are performed on a stationary frame of reference. In simple words, 300km/sec (circa) is the maximum speed at which we observe objects moving with respect to us. The reality is that (if you set aside for a moment the problem of particles hitting you with enormous energy), you can travel at any speed, and the quantity of energy needed to accelerate from 0 to 1m/s is the same you need to accelerate from 1e9 m/s to 1e9+1. HOWEVER, this happens not in a pure space, but in a space-time universe. As you move in space you move also in time, and when you move fast this begins to be noticeable. So, you can reach Proxima in a few years, days, minutes or seconds; indeed, the light arrives there in zero time, as it travels at an infinite speed -- traveling at a comfortable constant acceleration (for the first half of the trip, and then deceleration for the second half) of 1G, you can get there in less than 3 years. The problem is that NOW, Proxima is in a space-time 4e16 meters AND 4.2 years away. NOW, Proxima is ALREADY at another time coordinate. C is the constant of how time varies in space-time per space-distance unit, at constant gravity. In other words, it's not the light that travels at 300,000 km/sec: the time of a point 300,000 km distant from you is one second away. The Einstein equations allow to move the so called "proper time" of a traveling object into the space-time frame of reference of an object taken as "stationary". They tell you "what you see coming at you", rather than what what it actually is. So, when you reach Proxima, no matter how much time you spent to get there, the time at the final destination will be the initial time difference plus the integral of the time you spent at each point in space -- given constant gravity during the trip, of course. In our example of traveling at constant 1G of acceleration/deceleration, the elapsed time registered on Proxima or Earth since your departure will be somewhere in the ballpark of 7 years, while your proper time would be about 2.7 years. While this is explained often as "time dilation", the proper explanation of this effect is simply that wherever you're going, you're reaching a place that is also distant in time, not just in space, and when you're there you are at the time of that place, plus the time you spent going there (a bit more b/c of the time you spent in all the points in space to get there). --- This also implies that any object traveling "faster than light" is actually traveling in time. Suppose to have a warp drive that lets you break the C constant; now, you could be there in one hour of your proper time and 10 days of local time, or in 10 years of your proper time and 1 day of local time; it doesn't matter. For the sake of exposition, let's say that your warp drive is set so that your proper time is the same as the "rest of the universe", like in Star Trek, and that it takes 1 day of warp drive to arrive in Proxima. But the time at Proxima is NOW 4.2 years away. To get there in 1 day, you actually need to travel at a more-than-infinite speed, and be there before NOW, 4.2 years (minus one day) ago. Or in other words, suppose you shoot a laser the moment you leave Earth; to see it shine at Proxima, you need to wait for 4.2 years after you arrive. Now imagine the round trip: you leave Proxima 1 day after your arrival (the ray of light has just started is voyage), and shoot another ray of light; in 1 day you get back to Earth. But... to see the first ray of light you should have waited 4.2 years in Proxima, and to see the second ray you now have to wait 4.2 years on Earth... This means that you're back 8.4 years (minus 2 days) before you leave! Traveling "faster than light" is not impossible because you need infinite energy to reach 300,000km/s; it's impossible because the light travels at an infinite speed (and indeed, to reach it, you need an infinite energy). To travel "faster than light", you need NOT to travel, but to find a way to reach a place in a previous time -- or in other words, a warp drive is effectively a time machine.
@@bradysmith4405 This requires a bit of epistemological explanation. Relativity (SR/GR) thinking process is as follows: 1. let's suppose time is a 4th dimension. 2. If that is the case, then we can derive these equations to transform space-time coordinates in local coordinates (reference frame shift). 3. Make predictions using those equations. 4. Verify them experimentally. 5. As the results are verified, it is at least possible that (1) holds true. In other words, 1 is sufficient, but not necessary for 4. There may be other causes. If that is true, that is, time is NOT a dimension and there isn't such a thing as a space-time, and the abstraction simply matches the mathematics that describes a different underlying reality, then it would be theoretically possible to manipulate time. For example, quantum gravity (gravitons) and time elementary particles (tachyons, chronotrons) have been hypothesised with different degrees of speculation. If any of those alternative explanations turns out to be true, then the "time as dimension" hypothesis falls, meaning that time can be seen, or simplified as, a dimension of a space-time continuum, but being a 4th dimension is NOT the ultimate underlying reality of time. However, traveling faster than light would still be a form of time travel. For example, with "stargate" like portals, connecting two distant regions of space and synching their time as if they were near, would require that at least one of the two ends of the portal must be in a "time bubble", away from the surrounding time flow. That would violate GR, but even that would require that at least one of the two ends of the portal is a "time machine", "freezing" one of the two ends out of the local flow of time.
@ I was thinking more along the lines of speeding up the time flow or at least the upper limit for information flow. Something where to an outside observer you’d be moving faster than regular light but in your altered state light would just be moving faster than normal.
saw this video on my feed and thought 'idk, not in the mood for science' and hit refresh on the page, instantly I regretted it and raced the mouse cursor against my laggy pc, in a fraction of a second, I clicked the video. Just as the screen refreshed... GASP! Did it work? Where will we end up?! ... a few moments later and I see, we're here! yay
Impediment im-shmediment! Come on now! You are a Public Speaker! You are a Lecturer! You Sir, are an Orator of considerable renown! Clearly, your way of speaking no longer impedes you. Therefore, I will continue to argue, as I have for some years now: You do not (any longer) have a speech impediment! And I loved the Brandon Liew! I’m sure all of the channel OGs did! Excellent Video as always! And thank you! 😎👍🏽👍🏽
there was a physicist named robert enzmann who proposed a ship called the echolance, which uses nuclear reactors to power a particle accelerator for propulsion. the speed of the ship is over 90% light speed.
I imagine that the advantage of ad free subscription is that you have to keep the subscribers happy instead of every sponsor who can be pushed into taking away their sponsorship of you by a powerful opponent of you or what you said.
With regards to C (the speed of Causality) being impossible reach by thrust, is because the speed for the atoms at the back of your ship can tell the next set to move forwards is C
I have seen a new in a youtube channel about a lab experiment that demostrated a stable configuration of antiprotons replacing electrons orbiting helium nucleous in a superfluid state. If confirmed, we can be at a new era of antimatter storage. Antimatter generation problem still remains.
Interesting ideas and concepts. One issue I frequently think of, though, is how to communicate. What good is being able to travel near, at, or faster than the speed of light if we have no way to communicate what we find there, aside from radio? Even if the actual on board travel time to a system 10 light years away is under a year, it would take 10 years for you to get there, for the people left behind, then another 10 years for Earth to hear about whatever you discover.
And the fun part of spending the first normal speed mass colony. .they have the situation of either that is top of sciences or....we figured out faster than light by 30 generations when they get to target system
Timestamps (Powered by Merlin AI) 00:05 - Traveling near light speed is extraordinarily challenging and currently unachievable. 02:45 - Ultra-relativistic speeds enable significant kinetic energy and time dilation effects. 05:31 - Rocket equation limits speed; alternatives exist for faster spaceships. 08:11 - Exploring efficient propulsion for ultra-relativistic space travel. 10:43 - Antimatter enables advanced propulsion techniques for fast interstellar travel. 13:15 - Exploring advanced propulsion methods for rapid interstellar travel. 15:49 - Exploring advanced propulsion methods for ultra-relativistic spaceships. 18:20 - Ultra-relativistic speeds face significant challenges from particle collisions. 20:46 - Exploring the future of space habitats and agricultural orbital farms.
Some fun thoughts here; We might accomplish luminal space travel via a machine resembling the "mass relays" of Mass Effect or the "heighliners" of the new Villeneuve variety. The ship would be "collapsed" into a single "superparticle" containing all of the information of the ship's state, plus a programmed trajectory and a decay factor. The particle would travel at light speed until the decay causes it to expand into the original ship. This way the ship could be aimed at it's destination with a decay timed to cause it to emerge at the desired location. It would seem like instantaneous teleportation for the ship and it's crew. With this kind of system, we could easily get around the Solar System, and possibly even launch from the surface of planets, especially airless ones. It would be feasible to send probes, and even manned vehicles to nearby star systems, within reason considering that the time delay would still quickly become cumbersome. No worse than radio communication, but tough to run a company or government across that distance. Robotic mining machines probably wouldn't care, and could just start sending useful material back home straight into a safe parking orbit. Say, I wonder if ancient aliens built our astroid belt that way? ;) Given the crushing effects of wormholes and the necessity for exotic matter to build them, it doesn't seem like we could ever just fly through a naked wormhole Stargate-style. But, we might still achieve SUPERluminal space travel by combining wormholes with luminal travel and passing through as "superparticles". However, there are concerns that there could be a kind of "conservation of time" effect that prevents wormhole travel from being faster than light, or if it IS faster than light, one finds themselves trapped in a different era of time from the one they originated in such as depicted in the science of Orion's Arm wiki.
Kinetic energy being the reason that some particles, which would normally decay by the time it took them to cross the diameter of an atomic nucleus, can reach detectors a meter away from the collision that created them... blew my mind. But then how do they actually know the half-life of those transient particles? Doesn't a detector kinda interrupt the decay process? Did someone a long time ago do an experiment with varying detector distances or is it just inferred based on theory? Anyway. Cool explanation. Long-time fan of the channel!
🎶 Now the speed of C is a wall they say, when you're pushing the speed of light. And it cuts you off from your yesterdays, pushing the speed of light. But you know someday you're gonna win that race and run back the years to your starting place, and you’ll stay awhile, before you're back in space, pushing the speed of light! 🎶
Great video! Curious if there are enough new discoveries to re-visit the interstellar highway? Ever since I saw the original I've only found the highway concept in "Pushing Ice". Once the routes to the nearest multi-dozen stars you could have entire book series in that setting.
I loved the concept from heroic age anime, Of the star way. A column of space that links 2 stars together through gravitational pull on each other. Where time inside of that point speeds up rapidly compared to the outside universe allowing you to travel without breaking the laws of physics at what would appear to be insane speeds allowing you to traverse the Distance between those 2 starsAt near light speed but appear to be going several times the speed of light speed to the outside universe.
17:41 Talk about a flex when you can reference a (as of this writing) 7 year-old-episode that was so well done it still works just fine as a primer on using lasers to push light sails around the galaxy. Back in the mid 90s, I played with this concept in an online email team called the Lunar Institute of Technology (LIT) and I called it the Trade Winds concept. I doubt I'm the first to think of it since Robert L. Forward did so much foundational work (his out-of-print Starflight Handbook is still inspirational). Anyway, what brought me to this episode is I'm trying to come up with a LitRPG-type sci-fi story because I'm constitutionally incapable of using fantasy tech in my science fiction stories. At that, I still want the tale to break as few rules as possible. Thanks as always Isaac for what you do!
we need a video on what a space battle with 2 ships going 60% speed of light would look like from the Bridge with a window. the delays, any distortions, red/blue shifts, etc.
Now the big ships fly to a hundred suns By pushing the speed of light And they want good men for the deep space runs Pushing the speed of light And the pay is good, and you're young and strong And you tell yourself that it won't be long So you sign on board, hear the drive's deep song Pushing the speed of light Pushing the speed of light And you've left behind you the world of men With no way in space to go home again When you're pushing the speed of light Pushing the speed of light Now it's two months out and it's two months back When you're pushing the speed of light Twenty years on your homeworld's track Pushing the speed of light And your friends are gone and your lovers too And there's damn-all left that you can do And you try to lie, but you know it's true Pushing the speed of light Pushing the speed of light So you sign back on for another run Of pushing the speed of light And you swear to God that your pushing's done Pushing the speed of light But that one run turns into four or five And your heart beats time to the humming drive And there's nothing left keeps you alive But pushing the speed of light Pushing the speed of light Now you've spread your seed with the star drive's flame By pushing the speed of light Left sons behind you to carry your name Pushing the speed of light And you watch them age, and you watch them die As you race the light-wind across the sky And the gods are silent when you ask them, Why? Pushing the speed of light Pushing the speed of light Now, the speed of c is a wall, they say When you're pushing the speed of light That cuts you off from yesterday Pushing the speed of light But you know someday you're gonna win that race And fly back the years to your starting space And you'll stay awhile 'fore you're back in space Pushing the speed of light Pushing the speed of light And you've left behind you the world of men With no way in Hell to go home again When you're pushing the speed of light Pushing the speed of light Lyrics by Julia Ecklar
an idea for an episode: what if we develop a tech so efficient, we can generate "usable" electricity just from the light that hits us from the stars that are lots of light years far away from us. think a super efficient solar pannel but that can get some 1000W/h per 10m² from the light emited by all the stars far away in the space that bounces on it.
A friend figured out the best sunlight speed was about 0.7 c. This maximized speed while minimizing the relativistic effects. So for example a 16 year (your time) journey at this speed would only cause about a one year lag in your aging, so your friends would only age about 17 years.
It's impossible up until we figure it out. One day kids will be taking field trips to Alpha Centauri in the morning and will be back on time for dinner. #Warp 9
Nothing can move faster than light speed? Dear Isaac, you have clearly never seen how fast I or other watchers click when I see a new video upload from your channel.
High speed with close encounter to any pieces of material that gets in the way of your spaceship possesses real problems for your spaceship. Would definitely require a forcefield to provide protection for spaceships to travel at high speeds through the universe.
Back in the 90's, Marshal T. Savage proposed that interstellar colonization would be something done only by star systems relatively well along int K2 development, and having silly amounts of energy and infrastructure capacity. His suggestion was using what amounts to coil guns on the scale of whole star systems to launch interstellar ships. First would go a series of heavy robot transports at ~10% of lightspeed. The people would go on substantially smaller 'clipper; ships at something like 60% of lightspeed once the robot freighters send back messages that they got there safely and the startup equipment is going to be ready and waiting for the people to use. He was also pretty sure that planets, no matter how good they might be, would be the last places you'd start up colonies on, given that resources are likely to be far more easily obtained in space.
Relativity remains uncertain around the edges. The simultaneity answer to the ladder paradox is dubious while galaxies, including half the universe as full of them, moving away from each other, and always have been, in a perfectly symmetrical situation, would observe each to have slowed time- yet this is impossible. Similarly all travel seems to need some sort of ether- Arthur says 'travelling close to light speed' etc- but _relative to what_ ? The answer seems to be relative to all objects in the universe- which are visible (by necessity).
Your speech impediment makes your pronunciation much more interesting. You say "lazors" and I fking love it. I wish this was the correct pronunciation.
I just read an interesting article about relativistic effects on the viscosity of fluids. That might have real implications for animals or humans or anything alive really
1:12 I think you mean "last year." Unless, of course, you are time-traveling. Edit: Ohhhh, I just realized that this used to be a nebula exclusive. Doh
16:16 The problem is that gravity is weird. I don't think we have the whole picture yet. Also, the universe don't have to curve to human sensibilities. But, it is still weird negative mass doesn't seems to exist. I also feel the same about magnetic monopoles. But, I do hope we understand it better.
This may seem like a stupid question, but if driving our ships through space by laser etc is the best way to go, why not just have a laser in the front of the spaceship aimed at a sail in front? A small nuclear reactor would be able to power it for an extremely long time. Slowing down would just be a matter of bringing the sail back, flipping around and redeploying the sail and laser again.
Can we some how thru motion sideways reduce the mass of a object similar to a rifled bullet traveling faster and further enhanced by its spin . Does bullet weight more at rest than in flight or are they the same ?
Finally something I can sit through well I'm sitting in surgery recovery. Your a champ bud and thanks for taking my mind off this tube sticking out of my lungs
Feel better bro!
Hope the surgery went well and you recover swiftly
Get well soon
Ugh, here's hoping for a quick recovery, glad the episode helped distract you for a bit :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA the speed of light is variable, u find a large enough gravity source u can walk faster than it. also gravity travels faster than light we are just a visually biased species.
Why have I never heard that 'you gotta push your kinetic energy in addition to your mass energy' explanation before?! Makes things so much clearer.
Thanks.
“Rocket equation” if you wanna go more in depth.
Even worse leaving the atmosphere.
@@jackhand4073 I always counted fuel as part of the mass, so lifting/moving/accelerating the fuel needed to move more was all part of the M part of the equation.
Realizing that at those speeds you also have to worry about the E side just 'clicked' things for me.
@@Jcewazhere Good stuff man. It kind of grows on itself. I think it's exponential but not sure if that's right. "Just add more fuel! but hang on we need more fuel to lift that fuel"
That's where the logarithmic part of the rocket equation comes in, it's the fuel.
I'm a physicist and that description doesn't make much sense to me.
Have you never heard of the concept of 'relativistic mass gain'? It makes a lot of sense. Energy equals mass, so with more kinetic energy, your mass increases.
Physicists eventually stopped talking about relativistic mass gain because there are still some flaws with this explanation.
I knew the OMG particle was nuts but having it contextualized like that was mind-blowing. Like WHAT?! What EVEN COULD have launched that thing?
💥
a software error
@@chupacabra304
Yes, but which one? 😁
@@ivoryas1696 an insanely big one I would have to guess 😅
Like … beyond hard to comprehend
Most Likely got slingshotted by a spinning blackhole.
I think it’s ironic that out of all sci-fi franchises Avatar is the one which has spaceships slower than light. It takes them nearly 7 years to reach Alpha Centauri stated in the movie. And if you look up the behind the scenes design, it takes months to accelerate and months to decelerate and only reaches 70% light speed at its max. Which of course is still way beyond what we know how to do but as far as sci-fi goes it at least sticks with known physics.
Yeah they use antimatter fusion drive.
You forgot about the Alien franchise
@ no I didn’t because the alien franchise has much faster than light travel. The star system they arrive at is over 30 light years from earth but they’re only an 11 month trip from earth. And in aliens it only takes them a few weeks with the Suloco (and that’s not relativistic time, it was a rescue mission). They don’t explicitly state in the movie what their drives are but it’s supposed to convert the ship and crew into tachyons
and then they get beaten by ground-locked space-monkeys...... anyone sensibel would have thrown their junk out of the airlock on turnover point.
@@bradysmith4405 The Avatar ship has a 50 megaton per second energy output, enough to glass entire countries in a minute or so. Way over out heads, even carbon nanotubes can't make magnetic cages big and strong enough for it to work, not by a factor of 1000.
3:06 a very assertive German right there 😀
NEIN,NEIN,NEIN....
Genau.
Good one 😂
I wanted to make that joke... 🤣
I was thinking it was a suprise to hear a German having a meltdown but in a calm and deadpan way on this channel
Good to see that the nebula exclusives do eventually get released for free
Yep, I'd meant to do them one year later but it works out to be just abut 1 3 months since the nebula ones all come out at the top of the month and then arrive here usually on the last Sunday in place of the livestream I used to do.
I appreciate Isaac sounding out every "nine" in the speed of the OMG particle
That particle came from a huge void in space.
he missed one
One space pebble hitting your ship, even at 1% of light speed, is going to make a very big Boom indeed
Thus why these ships have to be aerodynamic, likely with an assist from an EM shield as a supplement, not forgetting that regolith makes good shipskin.
Ionizing radiation and a magnetic field which accelerates matter perpendicular to the nose axis of the ship can get out the way some smaller objects. Scouting robot ships would be needed for larger objects.
What about plasma-shields?
@nikmontecristo3683 not as a direct protection no. But creating something providing a direction of flow for prticles. I think at these speeds, Bernolli's gas laws would come into effect again. Be fun to see that.
@ not ideal if the force will translate down to the ship.
That's why laser sails are amazing, the beam acts as a detector and snowplow.
I read a sf story once, where people using relativistic ships to travel to Earth colonies in other solar systems had a city dedicated to them on Earth. Civilizations and cultures would change around it, but the city itself was maintained and kept unchanging so the travelers would have a familiar home to return to after their long journeys. I always thougth it was an interesting concept, although I don't know if it could actually be implemented in reality.
Already does this is how Amish live no cars tractors live off the land
Its a neat idea though I imagine Earth would be changing too, maybe it would a dedicated one to the Earth they left?
@@isaacarthurSFIA Yes. As described in the story, the city was built on Earth. It would at time be in the center of a vast megalopolis, other times it would be surrounded by wilderness, and anything in between. As Earth changed and evolved around it, the city would remain untouched and ready to welcome its occupants whenever they came home. I wish I could remember the title of the story.
Fusion ships for interplanetary travel
Black hole ships with plasma shields for interstellar travel
Btw would love to see a video on what technology can be achieved with plasma
How is that plasma shield gonna work? I am not saying it wont, i just never heard of it before. And how are you gonna make that black hole for your starship?
We don't necessarily need fusion ships for interplanetary travel per se. It depends on which destinations in the solar system we're willing to reach in reasonable time spans.
I'd also like to read how you envision 'plasma shields' for black hole ships and what you'd want to use them for, though I kinda guess what you probably have in mind.
Personally, I envision future spaceships could use their nuclear drive designs (fusion or otherwise) to generate their own artificial magnetospheres. From that point on the next logical step is for the next gen designs to even generate their own plasmaspheres entrapped in said magnetospheres (basically a cold plasma region partially surrounding the ship, just like it does around Earth).
In principle this would be useful to deflect and absord incoming solar wind and cosmic rays.
Fiction: i want to reach light speed
Science: Nein! Nein! Nein! Nine! Nine!
Hold my beer.
German science is the best in the world!
@@VisiblyPinkUnicorn Stroheim, is that you?
I would really like to see an episode about interplanetary ships that can reach ~0.1% the speed of light (300km/s). It would be interesting to hear about the technologies that would allow that, the considerations for optimal acceleration G's (1G for 8 hours to accelerate and then 8 hours of 1G to decelerate towards destination?), whether waiting for a "window" for planets to get closer to one another or just fly whenever you want, the effect on space tourism or settlement, etc.
0.1%c is a little bit more realistic, if you do a high g thermal deceleration at the surface of the target.
Never. You'd be at about 1 MW (kinetic energy gain) per second per kg. Your ship would arrive as an ionized plasma. Lower accelerations result in nozzle or electrode errosion. Physics limits us to only about 50 km/s delatV for single stage engines if extremely lucky. You need a laser sail and wait.
Always a pleasure to learn from Isaac Arthur
Man these episodes get better every time. The animations just out of this world. I'd love to know how the space scenes are created to this standard. Amazing! Merry Christmas Mr Arthur.
Any civilization that has the capability for "timely" interstellar flight has to face all the same obstacles. We've either been visited, or we haven't. If we've been visited, the obstacles are "just" a matter of engineering. If we haven't been visited, maybe that's why.
This is why the Warp Drive is so interesting, because there's no pushing involved.
UAP reportedly do posses this tech and can dial it to fly the sub light speeds and change directions almost instantly.
Too bad nobody is gonna share the blueprints because no one needs crazy neighbor
@@Alex-wg1mbSource: Trust me bro.
@@ImBarryScottCSS Source is Bob Lazar. Whatever you think of him.
That is not a credible source, no matter what I think of him.
@@ImBarryScottCSS we are late tech civilization and am pretty sure that Earth has some neighbors.
*This was a heck of an episode!*
I must have rewound some parts 3 or 4 times. And your humor is fantastic. Thank You, Isaac.
This just seems like a list of reasons why, one way or another, we're not, practically, travelling anywhere at all: until - and if - we develop a way to totally bypass directly interacting with space-time, altogether.
More of a reason why we have to find a swetspot between the challenges of going faster and the challenges of keeping the ship and crew alive and on mission.
@isaacarthurSFIA Well, yes. That's the other - and, I would say, far more significant - thing.
"Faster"? A worm is faster than a snail - and, in my view, that's the order of terms we'll have to stare in the face, probably for centuries. Either we get to FTL, or we're going to be missing all the parties. So, until that branch of sci-fi stops being quite so stubbornly sci-fi, I say we should focus on supporting Life.
Speaking _generally,_ [I do love your work], I see a lot of energy expended on different math for the hypothetical warp drive that somebody might make 3 thousand years from now, if they find a dark matter or a tachyon to charge it up with. Of course - that's all nice: I just wish I saw as much energy devoted to the issue of sustaining Life.
As far as we know, there's nothing for us to breath, nothing for us to drink and nothing for us to eat - anywhere, but here. If we want to go on a little trip off this world, we're going to have to take all that with us, or make it on the way; and/or find a way to reliably put ourselves into hibernation and wake ourselves back up again.
Personally, I think all that piece has a higher priority.
@@isaacarthurSFIAsafety third.
Alpha Centauri doesn't seem so bad with an anti-matter drive tho. And we can already make anti-matter, albeit in tiny quantities. It's still years in space, but we'll have to get used to that anyway with today's propulsion just to travel around the solar system.
@ArawnOfAnnwn "Doesn't seem so bad"?.... _What_ anti-matter drive are you referring to?
You talk in these casual terms like someone just needs to come back from lunch and we'll be ready to get in with the launch ...... do you know how much anti-matter has been produced by the human race?
A raisin weighs about 1 gram. Humanity had produced the equivalent of 15 BILLIONTHS, of a gram, of antimatter - that's 0.000,000,015, of a gram....
Nobody, is firing up the antimatter drive, any time soon - maybe in a few centuries and that's an if.
If we send anyone anywhere interesting, we're never going to see them again, anyway - so we may as well give more thought to working out a way to freeze and thaw people while we we're waiting for someone to burn through all the energy in the solar system trying to make a few atoms-worth of antimatter.
spending this much time on science fiction lore is some dedication
This is going to be one of those ‘Isaac Bite’ episodes I wish we talked more of.
Honestly, I can settle on 99.99%+ of Light Speed so long as Isaac episodes can be pinged to my subscription box at 100% the speed of light 😌
would the time dilation make the new episodes arrive faster then you can watch them?
Always happy to listen to Mr Isaac Arthur talk about our possible future
When studying university physics in the 1970’s I used to think about antimatter and limits of propulsion. Noone else seemed to write about this then. This video seems to cover all the options. Bravo
Targeting Stellasers: Solar Laser Array Propulsion Sail System: (10% speed of light) for solar system travel is spot on IMHO.
After slowing down, one could turn on the nukes for local system travel.
Definitely can vizulize this type of solar system travel in future.
For Fun : Two SYC-FI examples:
1) Starwars - millenium falcon (HyperSpace Travel) = Stellaser sail system.
2) Startek: = impulse power (nuke for local travel).
Saved this vid along with many other of your vids, Thanks Isaac Arthur. 😊
Another great episode. Episodes that are easy to absorb and engaging throughout, are always bangers!
Man even the end credits are getting better on this channel I love it.
5:04 Mind officially blown by this explanation of how the particles can be measured post collision. Literally been a good five years since I’ve been so tripped out about physical science.
Future production note: 15:47 You really should have flipped the small diagram (bottom left) so the arrows for neg- and pos-mass circles matched the main gravitational dipole diagram.
As a nebula lifetime member, I still enjoy these on TH-cam.
These videos are so useful for my future lore, thank you so much for this interesting content!
20:25
Honestly, I don't really pay attention to it unless you mention it. 😅 (Which is better than before, when I didn't notice _even _*_when_* you mentioned it).
I think it's just been "fine" for years now that it's now just recieving incremental improvements here and there. Not to trivialize your progress, just figured I should remind you how easy it is for your fans to ignore...
-I -_-also -_*_-then-_*- remembered this is probably the 1000th or so comment you've had "reminding" you, but figured I had gone on too long to pull back now... 😬-
Brilliant. That certainly is a tour de force - it has insight, clarity, depth, reasoning and enthusiasm !
Have liked, saved and subscribed.
Love your accent as well 👍😊
Big thanks
Miles
That altered explanation of why it gets so hard to accelerate is actually something I'd never heard before and the universe just clicked in a way it hadn't before.
To solve your dust issue, there is also the possibility of having long vacuum tubes where spaceships travel at relativistic velocities. You briefly mentioned this option in your intergalactic travel episode. In addition there is also the option of launching spaceships off relativistic launch rings, which are a few lightyears in diameter. This has the advantage of being able to store the kinetic energy in rotational energy and gain/give it to other ships. It would be similar to how a skyhook is like an orbital battery.
I don't think that would work. First, how would you get the few atoms or molecules sucked out of the tube? A pump does not work in those conditions. Second, the tube would quickly end up with *more* stuff in it than the space around it, because spaceships will inevitably leak or shed as they go through the tube. Also, cosmic rays would knock particles off the tube itself, many of which will end up inside the tube.
@@FLPhotoCatcher You use lasers to clear out the inside of the tunnel.
@@danielhall271 No. The lasers would just knock off more atoms from the inside of the tube. Besides, vaporizing things just changes its form, it does not make the atoms disappear.
@@FLPhotoCatcher you could send a lid shaped cylinder down the tube to push out any atoms floating in there
@@FLPhotoCatcher lasers are how we create vacuums more empty than outer space in Earth based laboratories.
Awesome video!
Like you I was disappointed when I found that it is unlikely that warp drive and other forms of FTL are unlikely.
I think the lighthuggers from Revelation Space are arguably one of the best depictions of ultra relativistic travel in fiction.
Anti-matter rockets seem like a logical candidate for ultra relativistic travel.
Maybe the first stellar pioneers will get to other systems using antimatter and built stelasers and laser highways for larger ships to follow.
😂
@@RandomGuy-lu1enthat’s still an issue, and even if we can fix a lot of issues we will not be immortal.
@UpperDarbyDetailing technically I don't think we can know immortality is impossible or even that 50,000 years old is impossible--which is functionally immortal. With enough technology complementing the body, I don't see why it can't be
@ yeah, I mean, it’s not impossible in the sense that “nothing is impossible”. I just think it’s functionally impossible. Just the fact that viruses and bacteria will continue evolving with us is an important point. Though I can see getting to a point where it’s not a good evolutionary path for them to infect humans, or perhaps a good path would be to infect humans, but become functionally irrelevant to us.
I think there’s a limit to the upper end for biological life, and I don’t think uploading the mind into a cybernetic body or computer system is possible either. Hopefully I’m wrong.
@@HedonisticPuritan-mp6xv Your premise that we always seek technology to solve problem is incorrect. We’ve been doing “pure science” for hundreds of years. Even today it can be hard to get funding for these projects as there’s no obvious end result, but we often find a result afterwards. X-Rays were discovered in this manner for example.
How does give a planet a magnetosphere? There are three (hypothetical) methods that have been proposed that I have heard of:
The brute force method is to simply drill down to the core and use nuclear bombs to melt the core, which should then begin rotating or the planet will rotate around it and the drag between planet and core create a magnetosphere.
The most elegant is probably to build a magnetic field generator and deploy it at the planet’s L1 Lagrange point to act as an “umbrella” and block the solar wind that way. This has the added bonus of not creating Van Allen radiation belts in the planet’s low-mid orbital paths.
My favorite is number three: build an orbital ring and mount magnetic field generators on it to create a field around the planet. (Search “Isaac Arthur orbital rings” for more info)
Great presentation as usual. Thanks for great experience.
A friend of mine came up with the idea of a the perfect starship drive in the form of a sphaleronic ramscoop. Basically, you heat any old baryonic matter past the electroweak energy, and use the reactions made possible by that to propel yourself. It only needs to carry enough fuel to get up to speed, after which it can feed entirely from the interstellar/galactic medium, or even the CMB once it’s blueshiftsd into the pair-production range
Maybe it's the ganja I'm smoking on right now, but I have a sneaky suspicion that when we finally find a way to travel outside of our solar system in the course of a normal human life span, accelerating through space at near relativistic speeds will basically be the ships impulse power and not our main mode of travel. Going THROUGH space-time takes too long for any kind of deep space exploration and WARPING space-time itself with an Alcubierre drive would require the use of exotic matter or expert manipulation of dark energy (which we don't currently possess). Maybe I'm just completely stoned right now, but what if the way forward is going OUTSIDE of space-time and bypassing the need to deal with the speed of light, causality and the Principle of Locality altogether.
If all points in a Virtual World are equidistant with respect to the source of the simulation, than a deeper reality that is the source of space-time would be at the exact same distance to every point in the universe. Similar to how two separate pixels on a computer screen can simultaneously interact with each other at a distance (because they’re both connected and equidistant to their source, the physical hardware), maybe the reason why entangled particles are able to interact simultaneously across vast distances because they're both connected and equidistant to their source, the deeper reality. Which might also explain why we have to use the language of statistics and probabilities to describe a sub-microscopic quantum state, these particles are just vibrating in and out of this deeper reality, jumping all over the place.
Oh wait, my high is coming down and I just realized that accessing this hypothetical deeper reality would be WAY MORE DIFFICULT than either brilliantly engineering ultra-relativistic ships or somehow getting our hands on negative mass for the warp drive. It'd be like software code trying to escape the computer that runs it without any outside help. Here I am theorizing over hypothetical type 3 civilization technology while we're still using fossil fuels for energy. I'm getting way ahead of myself.
I love this channel so much. I normally binge this channel when my mind is racing too much and I trying to fall asleep, but this channel is on a whole different level when marijuana is involved.
Enjoyed this. How about an episode on the structure of the Milky Way? I'd love to see a deep dive into that, particularly with emphasis on the spur that our solar system is part of.
How great, I love the physics tweaking episodes!
Wait isn't this video supposed to come out in 24th november?😅
I have questions about this 🤨
@paparoo9924 what is that question?🤔
Only from your frame of reference
Time is relative
The fuck
Excellent vid.
This is the first ever I get how relativistic speed works with time. Thanks man 😊😊
You are very welcome, and I'm very glad to hear that
5:35 As time slowed down, the rate of time speed that you have to react to an emergency speeds up. To you, you have less time to do something about the danger.
You have the best collection of graphics ever for your videos. And I have been a sub for a few years at least.
I don’t care if it’s “PC” to say so but I love your speech impediment. It’s part of your appeal and I wouldn’t change a syllable ❤️
I was just thinking about this topic like 5 minutes ago !
I was just hoping somone would more detailed explained relativity at close to light speed
Issac ur chanel has actually improved ita been a while sorry im runningb back to JMG though
I do wonder how society would function with instantaneous FTL maybe you'll talk more about that in the upcoming hyperspace video.
Well, if the thing wasn't also massively expensive to build or operate, I can see nations and possibly non-state entities busting out to colonize distant locations that most folks back here wouldn't even know about (and the whole idea would be untraceable escape, for some), even with otherwise existing tech...an almost instant human diaspora.
Especially if the thing is FTL *enough* to easily leave the galaxy / local group / red-shift horizon...
(Could that be a partial Fermi Paradox solution? Civilizations get FTL, then rapidly spread *too thinly* to easily detect?)
@@stardolphin2
Presumably any instantaneous FTL system, that was that practical and economic to run would also be used for long distance communication. No need for giant radio wave beacons if you just have a portal you can send them through.
@@PunishedRalph Oh, well, If we're talking something Stargate-ish, then yeah, just run fiber optic cables through them.
One still has to establish the other end though.
And about that...
Physicist Kip Thorne himself (who, among other things, was an adviser on 'Contact' and 'Interstellar') once wrote that *if you could* produce a wormhole with both connected ends here, you could take one of them away in a ship at large fractions of c, and not only could you transfer people and supplies (and even fuel?) back and forth between ship and Earth *while in transit,* but because the moving wormhole is tied to the reference frame of the ship, it will 'arrive' in the ship's shortened time-dilated time (which could be just a few years), and not the longer, near-lightspeed time (which could be a few thousand years)...
That's *effectively* FTL, without a ship traveling *actually* FTL...and you've still got that wormhole leading back home with you, at your destination.
@@PunishedRalphAnd in a worst case scenario where you can make matter travel FTL but not pure energy, you can always ship your data around!
This is an excellent video.
Seeing the speed of light as a physical limit depends on the fact that most divulgation of the underlying science (including this one) omits a very important detail: the computations indicating that traveling at the finite speed of light require infinite energy are performed on a stationary frame of reference.
In simple words, 300km/sec (circa) is the maximum speed at which we observe objects moving with respect to us.
The reality is that (if you set aside for a moment the problem of particles hitting you with enormous energy), you can travel at any speed, and the quantity of energy needed to accelerate from 0 to 1m/s is the same you need to accelerate from 1e9 m/s to 1e9+1.
HOWEVER, this happens not in a pure space, but in a space-time universe. As you move in space you move also in time, and when you move fast this begins to be noticeable.
So, you can reach Proxima in a few years, days, minutes or seconds; indeed, the light arrives there in zero time, as it travels at an infinite speed -- traveling at a comfortable constant acceleration (for the first half of the trip, and then deceleration for the second half) of 1G, you can get there in less than 3 years.
The problem is that NOW, Proxima is in a space-time 4e16 meters AND 4.2 years away. NOW, Proxima is ALREADY at another time coordinate. C is the constant of how time varies in space-time per space-distance unit, at constant gravity. In other words, it's not the light that travels at 300,000 km/sec: the time of a point 300,000 km distant from you is one second away.
The Einstein equations allow to move the so called "proper time" of a traveling object into the space-time frame of reference of an object taken as "stationary". They tell you "what you see coming at you", rather than what what it actually is.
So, when you reach Proxima, no matter how much time you spent to get there, the time at the final destination will be the initial time difference plus the integral of the time you spent at each point in space -- given constant gravity during the trip, of course. In our example of traveling at constant 1G of acceleration/deceleration, the elapsed time registered on Proxima or Earth since your departure will be somewhere in the ballpark of 7 years, while your proper time would be about 2.7 years.
While this is explained often as "time dilation", the proper explanation of this effect is simply that wherever you're going, you're reaching a place that is also distant in time, not just in space, and when you're there you are at the time of that place, plus the time you spent going there (a bit more b/c of the time you spent in all the points in space to get there).
---
This also implies that any object traveling "faster than light" is actually traveling in time.
Suppose to have a warp drive that lets you break the C constant; now, you could be there in one hour of your proper time and 10 days of local time, or in 10 years of your proper time and 1 day of local time; it doesn't matter. For the sake of exposition, let's say that your warp drive is set so that your proper time is the same as the "rest of the universe", like in Star Trek, and that it takes 1 day of warp drive to arrive in Proxima.
But the time at Proxima is NOW 4.2 years away. To get there in 1 day, you actually need to travel at a more-than-infinite speed, and be there before NOW, 4.2 years (minus one day) ago. Or in other words, suppose you shoot a laser the moment you leave Earth; to see it shine at Proxima, you need to wait for 4.2 years after you arrive.
Now imagine the round trip: you leave Proxima 1 day after your arrival (the ray of light has just started is voyage), and shoot another ray of light; in 1 day you get back to Earth. But... to see the first ray of light you should have waited 4.2 years in Proxima, and to see the second ray you now have to wait 4.2 years on Earth...
This means that you're back 8.4 years (minus 2 days) before you leave!
Traveling "faster than light" is not impossible because you need infinite energy to reach 300,000km/s; it's impossible because the light travels at an infinite speed (and indeed, to reach it, you need an infinite energy). To travel "faster than light", you need NOT to travel, but to find a way to reach a place in a previous time -- or in other words, a warp drive is effectively a time machine.
What if we could figure out what time actually is and manipulate it so that information can move faster than it normally does in time?
@@bradysmith4405 This requires a bit of epistemological explanation.
Relativity (SR/GR) thinking process is as follows:
1. let's suppose time is a 4th dimension.
2. If that is the case, then we can derive these equations to transform space-time coordinates in local coordinates (reference frame shift).
3. Make predictions using those equations.
4. Verify them experimentally.
5. As the results are verified, it is at least possible that (1) holds true.
In other words, 1 is sufficient, but not necessary for 4. There may be other causes.
If that is true, that is, time is NOT a dimension and there isn't such a thing as a space-time, and the abstraction simply matches the mathematics that describes a different underlying reality, then it would be theoretically possible to manipulate time.
For example, quantum gravity (gravitons) and time elementary particles (tachyons, chronotrons) have been hypothesised with different degrees of speculation. If any of those alternative explanations turns out to be true, then the "time as dimension" hypothesis falls, meaning that time can be seen, or simplified as, a dimension of a space-time continuum, but being a 4th dimension is NOT the ultimate underlying reality of time.
However, traveling faster than light would still be a form of time travel. For example, with "stargate" like portals, connecting two distant regions of space and synching their time as if they were near, would require that at least one of the two ends of the portal must be in a "time bubble", away from the surrounding time flow. That would violate GR, but even that would require that at least one of the two ends of the portal is a "time machine", "freezing" one of the two ends out of the local flow of time.
@ I was thinking more along the lines of speeding up the time flow or at least the upper limit for information flow. Something where to an outside observer you’d be moving faster than regular light but in your altered state light would just be moving faster than normal.
Dude you are generating Andy Weir level content for free. Thankyou👏
saw this video on my feed and thought 'idk, not in the mood for science' and hit refresh on the page, instantly I regretted it and raced the mouse cursor against my laggy pc, in a fraction of a second, I clicked the video. Just as the screen refreshed... GASP! Did it work? Where will we end up?! ... a few moments later and I see, we're here! yay
Impediment im-shmediment! Come on now! You are a Public Speaker! You are a Lecturer! You Sir, are an Orator of considerable renown! Clearly, your way of speaking no longer impedes you. Therefore, I will continue to argue, as I have for some years now: You do not (any longer) have a speech impediment!
And I loved the Brandon Liew! I’m sure all of the channel OGs did! Excellent Video as always! And thank you!
😎👍🏽👍🏽
Appreciate ya. Thanks for sharing.
there was a physicist named robert enzmann who proposed a ship called the echolance, which uses nuclear reactors to power a particle accelerator for propulsion. the speed of the ship is over 90% light speed.
I imagine that the advantage of ad free subscription is that you have to keep the subscribers happy instead of every sponsor who can be pushed into taking away their sponsorship of you by a powerful opponent of you or what you said.
With regards to C (the speed of Causality) being impossible reach by thrust, is because the speed for the atoms at the back of your ship can tell the next set to move forwards is C
21:00 Silent Running?
Now there's a weird movie from the past :) I can never decide if its very good with some plot and production flaws or a glorious trainwreck :)
Nice reference, I remember the robots Hewey, Duey, and Luey. One of the first movies I watched on TH-cam.
I have seen a new in a youtube channel about a lab experiment that demostrated a stable configuration of antiprotons replacing electrons orbiting helium nucleous in a superfluid state.
If confirmed, we can be at a new era of antimatter storage.
Antimatter generation problem still remains.
Interesting ideas and concepts. One issue I frequently think of, though, is how to communicate. What good is being able to travel near, at, or faster than the speed of light if we have no way to communicate what we find there, aside from radio? Even if the actual on board travel time to a system 10 light years away is under a year, it would take 10 years for you to get there, for the people left behind, then another 10 years for Earth to hear about whatever you discover.
And the fun part of spending the first normal speed mass colony. .they have the situation of either that is top of sciences or....we figured out faster than light by 30 generations when they get to target system
At least it hedges our best. What if we DON'T figure out ftl by then?
@lgjm5562 then that generation ship gets to its location without anyone already there due to speed limits
Great stuff as usual.
I appreciate that :)
Timestamps (Powered by Merlin AI)
00:05 - Traveling near light speed is extraordinarily challenging and currently unachievable.
02:45 - Ultra-relativistic speeds enable significant kinetic energy and time dilation effects.
05:31 - Rocket equation limits speed; alternatives exist for faster spaceships.
08:11 - Exploring efficient propulsion for ultra-relativistic space travel.
10:43 - Antimatter enables advanced propulsion techniques for fast interstellar travel.
13:15 - Exploring advanced propulsion methods for rapid interstellar travel.
15:49 - Exploring advanced propulsion methods for ultra-relativistic spaceships.
18:20 - Ultra-relativistic speeds face significant challenges from particle collisions.
20:46 - Exploring the future of space habitats and agricultural orbital farms.
Some fun thoughts here; We might accomplish luminal space travel via a machine resembling the "mass relays" of Mass Effect or the "heighliners" of the new Villeneuve variety. The ship would be "collapsed" into a single "superparticle" containing all of the information of the ship's state, plus a programmed trajectory and a decay factor. The particle would travel at light speed until the decay causes it to expand into the original ship. This way the ship could be aimed at it's destination with a decay timed to cause it to emerge at the desired location. It would seem like instantaneous teleportation for the ship and it's crew.
With this kind of system, we could easily get around the Solar System, and possibly even launch from the surface of planets, especially airless ones. It would be feasible to send probes, and even manned vehicles to nearby star systems, within reason considering that the time delay would still quickly become cumbersome. No worse than radio communication, but tough to run a company or government across that distance. Robotic mining machines probably wouldn't care, and could just start sending useful material back home straight into a safe parking orbit. Say, I wonder if ancient aliens built our astroid belt that way? ;)
Given the crushing effects of wormholes and the necessity for exotic matter to build them, it doesn't seem like we could ever just fly through a naked wormhole Stargate-style. But, we might still achieve SUPERluminal space travel by combining wormholes with luminal travel and passing through as "superparticles". However, there are concerns that there could be a kind of "conservation of time" effect that prevents wormhole travel from being faster than light, or if it IS faster than light, one finds themselves trapped in a different era of time from the one they originated in such as depicted in the science of Orion's Arm wiki.
Kinetic energy being the reason that some particles, which would normally decay by the time it took them to cross the diameter of an atomic nucleus, can reach detectors a meter away from the collision that created them... blew my mind. But then how do they actually know the half-life of those transient particles? Doesn't a detector kinda interrupt the decay process? Did someone a long time ago do an experiment with varying detector distances or is it just inferred based on theory?
Anyway. Cool explanation. Long-time fan of the channel!
🎶 Now the speed of C is a wall they say, when you're pushing the speed of light.
And it cuts you off from your yesterdays, pushing the speed of light.
But you know someday you're gonna win that race and run back the years to your starting place, and you’ll stay awhile, before you're back in space, pushing the speed of light! 🎶
Yup. A sophont has to be leaving some stuff to travel that way.
Great video! Curious if there are enough new discoveries to re-visit the interstellar highway? Ever since I saw the original I've only found the highway concept in "Pushing Ice". Once the routes to the nearest multi-dozen stars you could have entire book series in that setting.
I loved the concept from heroic age anime, Of the star way. A column of space that links 2 stars together through gravitational pull on each other. Where time inside of that point speeds up rapidly compared to the outside universe allowing you to travel without breaking the laws of physics at what would appear to be insane speeds allowing you to traverse the Distance between those 2 starsAt near light speed but appear to be going several times the speed of light speed to the outside universe.
17:41 Talk about a flex when you can reference a (as of this writing) 7 year-old-episode that was so well done it still works just fine as a primer on using lasers to push light sails around the galaxy. Back in the mid 90s, I played with this concept in an online email team called the Lunar Institute of Technology (LIT) and I called it the Trade Winds concept. I doubt I'm the first to think of it since Robert L. Forward did so much foundational work (his out-of-print Starflight Handbook is still inspirational). Anyway, what brought me to this episode is I'm trying to come up with a LitRPG-type sci-fi story because I'm constitutionally incapable of using fantasy tech in my science fiction stories. At that, I still want the tale to break as few rules as possible. Thanks as always Isaac for what you do!
we need a video on what a space battle with 2 ships going 60% speed of light would look like from the Bridge with a window. the delays, any distortions, red/blue shifts, etc.
A very bright flash up and down the visible and EM spectrums, I would suspect. "Oh look, mommy, they rammed each other"
An Alastair Reynolds book has a very long section dedicated to a ship chasing another ship at close to C. Very fun to read ngl
@@aryamankaushik4173 but how convenient you leave out the title of the book. How can you be sure he got the description correct?
Now the big ships fly to a hundred suns
By pushing the speed of light
And they want good men for the deep space runs
Pushing the speed of light
And the pay is good, and you're young and strong
And you tell yourself that it won't be long
So you sign on board, hear the drive's deep song
Pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light
And you've left behind you the world of men
With no way in space to go home again
When you're pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light
Now it's two months out and it's two months back
When you're pushing the speed of light
Twenty years on your homeworld's track
Pushing the speed of light
And your friends are gone and your lovers too
And there's damn-all left that you can do
And you try to lie, but you know it's true
Pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light
So you sign back on for another run
Of pushing the speed of light
And you swear to God that your pushing's done
Pushing the speed of light
But that one run turns into four or five
And your heart beats time to the humming drive
And there's nothing left keeps you alive
But pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light
Now you've spread your seed with the star drive's flame
By pushing the speed of light
Left sons behind you to carry your name
Pushing the speed of light
And you watch them age, and you watch them die
As you race the light-wind across the sky
And the gods are silent when you ask them, Why?
Pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light
Now, the speed of c is a wall, they say
When you're pushing the speed of light
That cuts you off from yesterday
Pushing the speed of light
But you know someday you're gonna win that race
And fly back the years to your starting space
And you'll stay awhile 'fore you're back in space
Pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light
And you've left behind you the world of men
With no way in Hell to go home again
When you're pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light
Lyrics by Julia Ecklar
Haven’t come across Filk music before. Thanks for posting 👍🏼
Inertial mass is changeable? What is the theoretical science involved in that? Source? Please? I really gotta see this.
Last time i was this early, it was before i left.
There was a bussard ramjet episode last month? I feel like I missed woodstock, man.
th-cam.com/video/MCMiguu_WQI/w-d-xo.html&pp=ygUUYnVzc2FyZCByYW1qZXQgaXNhYWM%3D
an idea for an episode: what if we develop a tech so efficient, we can generate "usable" electricity just from the light that hits us from the stars that are lots of light years far away from us. think a super efficient solar pannel but that can get some 1000W/h per 10m² from the light emited by all the stars far away in the space that bounces on it.
It's like watching an engineering documentary about savage hulks ("galaxy's edge")
A friend figured out the best sunlight speed was about 0.7 c. This maximized speed while minimizing the relativistic effects. So for example a 16 year (your time) journey at this speed would only cause about a one year lag in your aging, so your friends would only age about 17 years.
@7:05 Suggestion for the graphic: Should have been red, maybe... crimson? _Ganymede and Titan, yes sir I've been around..._
It's impossible up until we figure it out. One day kids will be taking field trips to Alpha Centauri in the morning and will be back on time for dinner. #Warp 9
In another universe. Not in this one sadly
Nothing can move faster than light speed?
Dear Isaac, you have clearly never seen how fast I or other watchers click when I see a new video upload from your channel.
High speed with close encounter to any pieces of material that gets in the way of your spaceship possesses real problems for your spaceship. Would definitely require a forcefield to provide protection for spaceships to travel at high speeds through the universe.
I will just goe with the idea that we simply have not found a way to get universal speeding ticket for going faster than lightspeed
Few ever mention the problem of hitting something, even something extremely small, while travelling at tremendous speed in not-really-empty space.
Back in the 90's, Marshal T. Savage proposed that interstellar colonization would be something done only by star systems relatively well along int K2 development, and having silly amounts of energy and infrastructure capacity. His suggestion was using what amounts to coil guns on the scale of whole star systems to launch interstellar ships. First would go a series of heavy robot transports at ~10% of lightspeed. The people would go on substantially smaller 'clipper; ships at something like 60% of lightspeed once the robot freighters send back messages that they got there safely and the startup equipment is going to be ready and waiting for the people to use. He was also pretty sure that planets, no matter how good they might be, would be the last places you'd start up colonies on, given that resources are likely to be far more easily obtained in space.
The Future of Medical Technology? pls
Relativity remains uncertain around the edges. The simultaneity answer to the ladder paradox is dubious while galaxies, including half the universe as full of them, moving away from each other, and always have been, in a perfectly symmetrical situation, would observe each to have slowed time- yet this is impossible. Similarly all travel seems to need some sort of ether- Arthur says 'travelling close to light speed' etc- but _relative to what_ ? The answer seems to be relative to all objects in the universe- which are visible (by necessity).
Under 10 second crew
Your speech impediment makes your pronunciation much more interesting. You say "lazors" and I fking love it. I wish this was the correct pronunciation.
I just read an interesting article about relativistic effects on the viscosity of fluids. That might have real implications for animals or humans or anything alive really
1:12 I think you mean "last year." Unless, of course, you are time-traveling.
Edit: Ohhhh, I just realized that this used to be a nebula exclusive. Doh
Isaac Author: "first, you need to calculate the ratio of kinetic energy to mass energy by speed..."
Me: FTL drive go brrrrrr.
It's funny that the universe is so big. So big that it's basically impossible to go anywhere.
16:16 The problem is that gravity is weird. I don't think we have the whole picture yet. Also, the universe don't have to curve to human sensibilities. But, it is still weird negative mass doesn't seems to exist. I also feel the same about magnetic monopoles. But, I do hope we understand it better.
Video with the most nines in history.
We need a serious breakdown of slowing down in a new solar system (after solar-sailing to relativistic speed).
Posted 16 seconds ago. Oldest comment : 2 weeks ago. dafuq?
Light spped relativistic shenanigans
It's been on nebula for a year?
What can I say... crazy things happen to time when you get close to the speed of light 😂
Some comments don't age well 🤷♂️
@@yourbuddyunityou made my day
This may seem like a stupid question, but if driving our ships through space by laser etc is the best way to go, why not just have a laser in the front of the spaceship aimed at a sail in front? A small nuclear reactor would be able to power it for an extremely long time. Slowing down would just be a matter of bringing the sail back, flipping around and redeploying the sail and laser again.
100 x more speed that today would still take longer than 1 hour to get us to Mars.
Can we some how thru motion sideways reduce the mass of a object similar to a rifled bullet traveling faster and further enhanced by its spin . Does bullet weight more at rest than in flight or are they the same ?
17:15 space trains seem pretty cool in my opinion...
Light speed is a kind of suspended animation