“Star Trek” makes faster-than-light travel look easy, but according to new calculations by Italian physicists, a warp drive could easily create a black hole that would incinerate any passengers on a space craft and then suck Earth into a black hole.
Oh, well, back to the drawing board.
The physicist wasn’t named “Gaetano Marano”, by any chance…?
Hey, my bike has Gaetano derailleurs. Mr. Marano is a real renaissance man. Must be some kind of black hole technology
The temperature 10^32 degrees Kelvin sounds bad, but it’s a dry heat…
Not quite warp drive, but where was it said that a drive capable of achieving any appreciable fraction of c would just happen to also be a directed energy or particle beam weapon that could fry the Earth?
I recall reading that calculations regarding the energy required to warp space sufficiently for interstellar travel would at the very least be equivalent to converting the mass of Jupiter (or some low multiple) into energy. Probably not something you want to have done within the vicinity of the solar system.
Oh BTW Rand, that pun hurt.
Nemo Says:
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:48 pm
“The physicist wasn’t named “Gaetano Marano”, by any chance…?”
No, if it was Gaetano the article would have simply explained how he figured out that warp drive wouldn’t work long before Star Trek came out and then link to a MS Paint drawing of the Earth being sucked into a black hole, “You see, thisa proves it”.
FTL travel, Earth in black hole…hmm…flight to the suburbs without the urban blight!
Well, if it “easily” creates a black hole, let’s build one just for the energy production capability of the black hole…
;P