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Old 05-08-2018, 11:49 PM   #1
Derrick_rp
 
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Default Total Conversion Power And FTL

I'm creating a setting with total conversion power, i.e. the ability to convert matter directly into energy. I'm wondering if someone who understands physics better than me can tell me, with that amount of power available, what's the most realistic way to achieve FTL travel? Wormholes? Alcubierre drive?
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Old 05-09-2018, 09:34 AM   #2
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Default Re: Total Conversion Power And FTL

How does your Total Conversion work? I once envisioned a setup that started with wormhole technology and leveraged that into Total Conversion by positing a precise duplicate of the main world, save only for the fact that matter was antimatter and vice versa. Wormhole technology was used to connect the two, and the “precise duplicate” nature was such that whenever matter from this universe was sent into the wormhole, an exact mirroring of antimatter was sent in from the other side. The matter and antimatter would collide in the center of the wormhole, mutually annihilating and converting to photons, half of which would emerge in the matter universe and half in the antimatter universe. From either universe's perspective, the result looked like “matter in, energy out”: Total Conversion.

The wormhole technology could also be used to connect different parts of the same universe, thus allowing for FTL communications (in this setup, I assumed that making a wormhole large enough for elementary particles to go through was feasible, but that making one large enough for macroscopic objects to traverse was prohibitively expensive).

Anyway, “realistic” FTL concepts almost always depend on some sort of negative energy density, something that Total Conversion doesn't really help produce. The problem isn't that there isn't enough energy available; is that the energy that's available is of the wrong type.
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Old 05-09-2018, 09:58 AM   #3
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Total Conversion Power And FTL

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Originally Posted by Derrick_rp View Post
I'm creating a setting with total conversion power, i.e. the ability to convert matter directly into energy. I'm wondering if someone who understands physics better than me can tell me, with that amount of power available, what's the most realistic way to achieve FTL travel? Wormholes? Alcubierre drive?
Total conversion probably doesn't lead to either wormholes or Alcubierre Drive directly. You'd have to develop a way of producing exotic matter like negative mass or neutronium which might require mega-energy.

The hypothetical FTL methods you mention actually have more math than science associated with them. Science needs math but math doesn't actually have to have science in return.

So what you probably need most is math becoming science.
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Old 05-09-2018, 11:14 AM   #4
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Default Re: Total Conversion Power And FTL

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Originally Posted by Derrick_rp View Post
I'm creating a setting with total conversion power, i.e. the ability to convert matter directly into energy. I'm wondering if someone who understands physics better than me can tell me, with that amount of power available, what's the most realistic way to achieve FTL travel? Wormholes? Alcubierre drive?
Power is not directly related to achieving FTL, though the method used for total conversion may have other applications (if you have both matter to energy and energy to matter, you might have teleportation).
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Old 05-09-2018, 11:30 AM   #5
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Default Re: Total Conversion Power And FTL

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Originally Posted by Derrick_rp View Post
I'm creating a setting with total conversion power, i.e. the ability to convert matter directly into energy. I'm wondering if someone who understands physics better than me can tell me, with that amount of power available, what's the most realistic way to achieve FTL travel? Wormholes? Alcubierre drive?
The same as with any other power source.

As far as we know in light of current physics, it simply can't be done. Of course it's always possible that we're wrong about something Important (it's certainly happened before) or that our grasp is incomplete (nearly certain, though whether that incompleteness would allow FTL is guesswork).

The origin of the energy doesn't make much difference in the context of whatever means your fictional characters have to get around c. It might be that it takes so much energy that only something like total mass conversion is practical to power it, of course.
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Old 05-09-2018, 01:50 PM   #6
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Default Re: Total Conversion Power And FTL

A total conversion powerplants output is going to be directly related to the following factors:

1. Amount of matter that it can destroy (probably want to list this in 'per hour' so that it remains consistent with conventional powerplants) (e=mc^2 is litterally your conversion for that)- e = joules, m = kilograms, c = speed of light in a vacuum.
2. Efficiency of energy capture (it is probably not 100% efficient, but achieving 90% should not be impossible, as that's what we get from atomic powerplants and steam engines)
3. Energy overhead of the powerplant (It likely costs your powerplant something to do whatever its doing to destroy matter, again list this in hours)

Frankly, you can set these to whatever you like because so much is unknown.
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Old 05-09-2018, 01:56 PM   #7
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Default Re: Total Conversion Power And FTL

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As far as we know in light of current physics, it simply can't be done.
Of course, the same can be mostly said of total conversion power (in theory, take a small black hole and feed it mass at the same rate as it decays due to hawking radiation, but there's no apparent means of turning that into a usable power source).
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Old 05-09-2018, 02:14 PM   #8
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Default Re: Total Conversion Power And FTL

No apparent means? As in no practical way yet conceived, or no theoretical means?
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Old 05-09-2018, 02:21 PM   #9
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No apparent means? As in no practical way yet conceived, or no theoretical means?
There's no way of holding the black hole in place, and it's not clear whether such small black holes can be fed. Also, it's small enough to generate particles other than photons.
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Old 05-09-2018, 02:58 PM   #10
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Default Re: Total Conversion Power And FTL

I'm partial to wormholes myself. I usually work them in a way that you're not actually traveling faster than light, you're just taking a shortcut across an Einstein-Rosen Bridge (or a rainbow bridge). :)
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