Hacker News Reader

Comment by distract8901 | Hacker News Reader

It's been really weird seeing all these warp drive and antigravity people crawling out of the woodwork in response to this result.

I have never heard of antimatter proposed for anything other than an energy source/storage. Not even in the oldest SciFi stories. Where did this idea even come from? It seems to have just appeared from nowhere as a way to feel bad about an otherwise inconsequential result.

Very strange

View on HN

Not weird, just irrational. If warp drives were possible, aliens might be traveling to us before we'd invent them. That doesn't seem to be the case. There are a lot of explanations for that, including a few that involve conspiracy theories where this did in fact happen but we are being kept in the dark about it. But the easiest one would be that it hasn't happened because it isn't possible. Faster than light travel not being possible, it's unlikely for there to be a coincidence of any other intelligent species to exist within tens/hundreds of light years of our tiny little corner of the universe exactly at the moment where we hit enlightenment, steam machines, and rocketry in the time frame of about 250 years. Never say never of course but it does sound astronomically unlikely when you put it like that.

In the absence of any nearby aliens to travel to, what exactly is the value of traveling at warp speed to some desolate bit of universe? We'd get nowhere a lot faster is about the most positive thing you could say about that. Most sci-fi is premised on the notion that we're not alone and that there is this wealth of interactions (good and epically bad) to be had on the far side of any worm hole that we travel through at warp speed. But we have zero proof of that nor a way to travel in such a fashion. Or even the confirmation of the possibility of being able to do so. Fantasy and reality are not really aligned here.

idk about that ~ there certainly is a lot of UAP talk in the news. where there is smoke, there is fire

Theoretical warp physics -- the real kind, like Alcubierre, not the Wesley Crusher kind -- proposes that a source of negative mass would be critical to the creation of a warp field.

Antimatter as part of an energy storage system for propulsion is still a good idea. They'll just have to look elsewhere for that property, or modify the theory to work on different principles. Eric Lentz is working in that direction and doesn't think negative mass/energy is needed.

>Theoretical warp physics -- the real kind, like Alcubierre, not the Wesley Crusher kind -- proposes that a source of negative mass would be critical to the creation of a warp field.

Well, yes, that's always been the crucial missing component from Alcubierre's design, but I've never seen anyone suggest antimatter would have negative mass or energy before now. The talk has always been about some hypothetical exotic matter

But we've seen anti matter and we already _know_ it doesn't have negative mass.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com