Faster Than Speed of Light in 100 Years?

At the end of the sixties Kubrick predicted that in 2001 we would have made settlements on the moon, but something like this didn't happen till now. Anyway this is the sci-fi realm, the realm of productive fantasy, everything is possible.

Yeah, just wish it was something a little closer to reality. Engines have been on the drawing board that could get us to Alpha Centauri in 40 years, and I'm guessing in "hyper-sleep" we wouldn't really age.

This particular matter has cropped up on quite a few occasions. What you clearly don't know is that you can already travel 36 light years in 2 years subjective time using today's technology. You just need enough power. At speeds [i]approaching[/i] the speed of light, say 99% or thereabouts, the time that you experience on a ship will be dramatically less than elapsed time on Earth, because of the effects of relativity. The only thing stopping us doing this [b]now[/b] is lack of engine power.

How much time they had been travelling was answered with "..36 hours.." as part of the entire explanation David makes to Vickers.. She doesn't react to that statement...so maybe,,there are other errors(to the human mind) that indicate that we are actual watching story taking place on a similar ...but not exactly ..on the planet we all Earth. When we were watching the movie in a theater..all the audience buzzed a bit at the "..36 hours.." comment..

@Indy John David answers with, and I quote, "2 years, 4 months, 18 days, 36 hours, 15 minutes". @zzplural When approaching the speed of light you gain mass, which in turn takes more power to gain speed. It would take an infinite amount of energy to reach light speeds with current technology. If you look up theories such as the one (I can't remember the name) whereas you move space around you instead moving through it, to avoid this dilemma. Maybe some type of anti-matter engine could do so, but as stated in Prometheus, they use an ION propulsion engine.

Yes, David did say this. And the script writer stated that it was deliberate, to indicate David was "showing off". Probably to assert his superior intelligence. Although mass increases with speed (from the point-of-view of Earth), you will not notice this onboard the ship. To the crew, the mass of the ship will be no different, no matter how fast it is travelling. Everything happening locally will appear just as it would in Earth orbit. You don't need to get anywhere near to the speed of light for the effects of time dilation to become dramatic. As I mentioned before, 99% of c will do very nicely for a [i]Prometheus[/i] type mission. It's just an energy problem. Anti-matter would do, but there are other feasible possibilities that don't rely on notions such as warp drives of any kind. Edit: ION stuff... NB, although today's ion engines deliver feeble amounts of thrust for years on end, again it's an energy problem only. If some technology were developed that had enough power to spit out huge numbers of ions approaching the speed of light, that would work very nicely as an interstellar engine. If you could approach an acceleration of 1 gee, you would be up to speed within a year and wouldn't even need a gravity generator - that comes for free!

As mass approaches infinity, so does the so does the fuel requirements. And that's just one problem. Don't forget about inertia. It just isn't going to happen with conventional tech. Something extraordinary would have to occur in science to enable ships to travel normal space/time in this fashion. Right now, it's not even science fiction, it's fantasy. I love the movie but that's all it is, a movie. Prometheus could never have traveled that fast but it sure is fun to think it could.

@Indy John David answers with, and I quote, "2 years, 4 months, 18 days, 36 hours, 15 minutes". @zzplural David's response may lead to a clue. Notice he says "18 days, 36 hours, 15 minutes". If the ship maintains a standard day as 24 hours shouldn't he reply "19 days, 12 hours, 15 minutes"? So maybe the ship runs on something other than a standard day which would affect how the passage of time is measured. Just a thought.

Project Orion, which could be built today if funds permitted, could maybe accelerate a ship to 10% the speed of light. "In theory, a large number of stages could push a vehicle arbitrarily close to the speed of light". D.F. Spencer and L.D. Jaffe. "Feasibility of Interstellar Travel." Astronautica Acta. Vol. IX, 1963, pp. 49–58 Maybe not so fantastical, especially when we've got 80 years to figure out the technology! @OldGuy: Spaights already cleared up the mystery. It was just David trying to be a smart-ass.

@OldGuy: Spaights already cleared up the mystery. It was just David trying to be a smart-ass. Really .... that's what I get for missing meetings and failing to read everything before posting.

".. So maybe the ship runs on something other than a standard day which would affect how the passage of time is measured...." Yes I understand your thinking.. What if everything we find out in the movie is based our experience,,,,,except for the 24 hour day? The one time feature that we as humans know and believe..and follow... I know I am bit fanticizing,here..but this one 'error' could indicate that other parts of the presentation may not be all true... Sort of gets back to 'it's all a dream.." The writer maybe right,,,,

David may have been being an smart ass, but the fact remains. In the beginning at the Isle of Skye in Scotland when Shaw finds the cave paintings, it is 2089. When Weyland makes his holographic recording he dates it, "22 of June, 2091". Then as the ship approaching its destination, the date is December 21st, 2093. All these dates and times correspond to the first one, this shows they are using Earth time to keep track. I never caught David's 36 hour comment, nice find. That being said, I believe they traveled their distance of approximately 35 light years in David's said time of just over 2 (Earth) years. @zzplural I do understand that time slows the faster you travel. But some technology leap made in this movie set within less than 100 years. If traveling at the the speed of light, it would take them 35 years to travel the 35 light years. Which they clearly do much quicker, as I believe they are still keeping time relative to Earth's. I'm not a physicist or anything, but now I really want to figure out just how much time slows relative to speed lol. All in all it's just a movie, but I'm fascinated with one day humans visiting another star. They should have set the movie on Alpha Centauri B's planet since it's just over 4 light years away, opposed to 35. Although I think that was only very recently thought to be possibly Earth-like.

"..When Weyland makes his holographic recording he dates it, "22 of June, 2091". Then as the ship approaching its destination, the date is December 21st, 2093..." It is curious that even in today's world we can't agree on a standard Date format..

[quote=Indy John][i]It is curious that even in today's world we can't agree on a standard Date format..[/i][/quote] Even 100 years into the future lol.

@crys: Special Relativity is weird stuff. Hard to do it justice in a few sentences, but in a nutshell time is not absolute. If you and I were sitting in the pub drinking beer, our watches would pretty much keep pace with one another. But if I went off in a super-fast spaceship rocketing away at a good fraction of the speed of light, our watches would not keep pace. Here's the bit that's almost paradoxical: I could carry on drinking my beer and looking at my watch in my spaceship, and everything would look perfectly normal in my cabin. BUT... On my return to Earth, I might have aged a few weeks and you might be near the end of your life! That's what someone once called the two twins paradox. The nearer you get to the speed of light, the more pronounced the effect becomes. In the most extreme of circumstances – the speed of light itself – no time passes at all. In the real world, only massless entities such as photons can travel at the speed of light. In fact, they have no option but to travel at the speed of light. I find it amazing that a photon emitted in a galaxy 13 billion years ago can be detected by the Hubble Space telescope, and yet from the photon's perspective it started and ended its journey in the same instant of time. For the Prometheus, a little more than 98% of the speed of light means that 2 years on the ship equate to about 35 years back on Earth.

"For the Prometheus, a little more than 98% of the speed of light means that 2 years on the ship equate to about 35 years back on Earth." Doesn't special relativity require that anything moving at near light speed would require infinite energy and infinite mass? Thats always been part of the problem in sci-fi - how to resolve the distance/speed/time issue. And yes, photons have no mass and no energy source :)

@zzplural It's some pretty amazing stuff that's for sure. I've been hearing theories now about light's speed not even being constant. That it was faster near the beginning of the Big Bang. So many strange things out there. Maybe humans in Prometheus had found a way to travel through the String theory. But I think throughout time the Large Hadron Collider will begin answering more and more of these questions. @OldGuy Yeah, when reaching the speed of light you gain infinite mass requiring infinite energy. That's why I think something like the Alcubierre drive was used.

@OldGuy: No, it doesn't. It requires progressively more energy to go faster and faster the nearer to the speed of light that you get, but unless you wanted to actually travel [i]at[/i] the speed of light, the energy would not be infinite. That's why the Large Hadron Collider uses a lot of power to accelerate particles to within a tiny fraction of the speed of light.

It's not fantasy anymore. Go to io9.com and read about NASA's present, REAL WARP DRIVE. They are really creating it right now, and the speed they anticipate reaching isn't just 99% of the speed of light, or the speed of light itself, it is TEN C!

"...I find it amazing that a photon emitted in a galaxy 13 billion years ago can be detected by the Hubble Space telescope, and yet from the photon's perspective it started and ended its journey in the same instant of time...." Can the human mind ever grasp the reality of exisitance in the time frame and distances our known world,??? Maybe we are just our own Gods and can travel..create,,and even discuss the subjects at this site,,because,,well just because we can..

I seriously doubt we will be even near to the speed of light as for faster - naa not in 100 years it is sooooo complex! But this part of the film was no were near as bad as the character problems! Yes its crazy 13.7 billion light years to the edge of our visible universe. And thats a theoretical 93 billion light years across currently and expanding very fast :O . And most scientists think the visible universe is a tiny fraction of the actual universe - or it may in fact be infinite :O !

And our story takes place in a small part of the known universe,,in a small potion of it's timeline..with so far ... a limited of charactors..each sort of reflect a facet of the human experience....plus Engineers.. robots and Xeno related creature What is crazy is trying to find the meaning of life,,who created us,,in a 2 hour film! Saying all of that,,not in nthe next 40 years,,will we see a speed of light transport system.....but before 2100 we will.....and rimwe travel will be a common occurance,, Why not?