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Discussion on: What is your million dollar question?

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kspeakman profile image
Kasey Speakman

What is the missing medium of travel for space?

In terrestrial travel, the environment provides the medium of travel. Ground vehicles use the terrain. Airplanes use air. Watercraft use water. The way we currently travel in space, we not only have to bring our own fuel but also our own road, so to speak. I have long wondered if there was something latent to space that spacecraft could "push off of". Space is by definition an empty vacuum, but I'm thinking more along the lines of ambient radiation or energy fields. If I had another life to live as a physicist I might research that further.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

Temporal fabric.

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Kasey Speakman • Edited

I feel like this is a sci-fi reference I am unaware of. ☺️ I wasn’t thinking of FTL drives.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Oh, I am absolutely serious. It is something of a reference to "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine l'Engle, wherein a character described a means of jumping through space by "wrinkling" the time fabric (called "tessarects" in the book).

However, recent physics research, including the fact that we picked up on the "sound" of two black holes colliding, is further strengthening the idea that there is some sort of medium (or "fabric") that could carry the (gravitational) waves generated by the collision.

You also have to understand, I'm one of those weird people that doesn't see time as linear, but rather as composed of the higher dimensions (above third).

So, in short, to jump space, you have to use time.

Ergo, temporal fabric.

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Kasey Speakman • Edited

I was going a little more mundane than that. For example local stars or other phenomena producing low-level energy fields (e.g. magnetic, electrical, something-undiscovered) that we could use for sub-light travel in a similar fashion to mag-lev trains. For example, the research on spacetime compression seems to fit about what I would expect (and also a temporal fabric). But I have my doubts about that specific theory.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Honestly, I think we can agree. I think temporal fabric is the medium needed, but the technology necessary to act on it would require us to actually work/build/design in higher dimensions, which may not actually be possible for us to do. (If you think about it, you can only move in as many dimensions as you can directly perceive.)

But then again, we never thought we'd fly, so we shall see.

My thought is, for that to even be possible, we need to figure out how to create artificial gravity fields, as that is clearly a force acting within the temporal fabric.

Ahem Welcome to theoretical science according to dev.to!