What are the options for getting into space more efficiently and cheaper (building and maintenance costs aside) than...

Yeah but then you have to land on Mars. Fuck that planet.

>atmosphere is too thin for aero braking
>too thin for parachutes all the way down
>too thick for rockets only

It is the worst of every possible aspect.

Keep the good stuff in orbit and just launch your fuel to it

Space is a shit, it's almost like God doesn't want us up there.

Isn't it more about not having to carry enough fuel to go back from Mars to Earth rather than using Mars as a stop to other places?

...

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Give me one reason this shouldn't work

Gravity

There's a certain elegance to that, the Earth certainly revolves and rotates fast enough.

because the movement is relative to the magnets and the plate

I'd say a combination of anti-gravity tech and chemical rockets. Anti-grav gets you far enough off the ground that the rockets can easily send you off to another celestial body. But it would only work in our solar system. Barring generation ships or discovering FTL, I doubt we'll ever get out of our solar system.

Even then this hinges on getting anti-grav to actually work. We just don't understand enough, AFAIK, about gravity to even think about controlling it.

Space elevator basically will never work. To my understanding there is no material that can be used that will not collapse under its own weight. Maybe anti-grav could solve that, read a HFY story where that happened. But again, the big thing would be controlling gravity.

Anti-grav is fundamentally equal to FTL and time travel. You can't have the first without the second and the third.

Which is great if you think about it, but also makes it implausible at best.

Orbital rings work better than space elevators. No special material is needed. The issue is it would cost in the order of trillions to build i the first place, unless you use robots and industries on the Moon to do so. Once build, a ticket to space would cost no more than travelling in a plane.

I don't think we'd need anti-grav to have FTL. FTL isn't an issue of weight, it's an issue of mass. At least to my understanding. Because even if something WEIGHS 100 lbs on Earth, their MASS is a completely different matter and are the main reason why we cannot break E=MC^2. On the other hand, anti-grav is just removing the effect of gravity, something that affects WEIGHT, not MASS.

I can see how FTL could affect time travel. If you can break the FTL barrier then you could observe any event at any point in time as the event is happening. At least if you have good enough sensory equipment.

Mass Effect was so elegant because of this. That series just said "We can remove mass from the equation" and ran riot.

This is basic consequences of special/general relativity.

>I can see how FTL could affect time travel. If you can break the FTL barrier then you could observe any event at any point in time as the event is happening. At least if you have good enough sensory equipment.
It's not a matter of observation. It is a matter of space time and light cone. The speed of light is the speed of information and cause and effect. If you travel faster than the speed of light, you effectively travel faster than cause and effect. Go back to where you started and you'll find you went 10 years in the past.

>I don't think we'd need anti-grav to have FTL. FTL isn't an issue of weight, it's an issue of mass. At least to my understanding.
Gravity is caused by deformation of space time (itself caused by mass and energy). If you can create an anti-gravity device, it means you can generate negative mass and/or energy: an deformation that is effectively the inverse of the usual gravitational deformation.

If you can generate negative mass and/or energy, you can effectively shape the space-time exactly as you want. That includes FTL Alcubierre bubbles, wormholes, or literally anything you want.

Exactly why I was so excited when we found the Higgs Boson. For those who don't know, the boson proves the Higgs Field Theory which states that there is a field that gives certain particles mass. I did a bit more digging and the sad thing is that as far as I can tell, it doesn't effect the particles necessary for us to ignore E=MC^2.

> The speed of light is the speed of information and cause and effect
To a certain degree you are correct, but I don't think that equals being able to change the past. Even if you're able to travel faster than light, I do not think that means you can actually travel through time outside of technicalities like observing the past.

>Gravity is caused by deformation of space time
Source? That doesn't jive with anything I know of physics. As I understand it, the gravity causes the distortion, not the other way around. IE black holes slowing time.

As for anti-grav generating negative mass/energy, going by my understanding of gravity, I'd say anti-grav is generating negative energy. And that's being generous with the definition of energy.

Gravity IS the deformation of space-time. It neither is caused by nor causes it. They are one and the same. Exactly what causes the deformation is the holy grail of the Standard Model right now.

There's no proff that the graviton is a real particle. So far, we get away without it because gravity is only significant in massive objects and we use relativity to calculate it. We need more work on quantum gravity to integrate gravity into quantum physics.

>To a certain degree you are correct, but I don't think that equals being able to change the past. Even if you're able to travel faster than light, I do not think that means you can actually travel through time outside of technicalities like observing the past.
You don't think, but the equations are savage. And trivial, too, so you should definitely check them out. Wrap your mind around time cones and Lorentz transformations, and ask yourself what happens when you travel faster than c. It's conceptually difficult, but really simple once you take the right path.

Time travel for > c is a natural and trivial consequence of special relativity we know and understand since basically 1906. Another way of seeing it, though very flawed like all dumbed down comparison, is such: time slows down as you approach c, and stops when you travel at c. What happens when you travel faster than c? It effectively goes in reverse.

That is why you shouldn't use your common sense in science.

>Source? That doesn't jive with anything I know of physics. As I understand it, the gravity causes the distortion, not the other way around. IE black holes slowing time.
The space time metric of GR is determined by the matter and energy content of space time. There is no "gravity" in GR. "Gravity" is what we see happening when space time is curved by mass and energy.

"Anti-gravity" is curving the space time backward using either negative mass or negative energy. If you can curve the space time backward, you can literally create any and all structure inside the space time. Alcubierre drives, wormholes, or even slices of space time, though the name of that particular structure escape me at the moment.

Ah, so a case of us having similar messages that happen to shoot past each other.

Now I'm curious about your source on this cluster fuck. What did you read that lead you to think that gravity is caused by a deformation of space-time?

For myself, I'd have to quote a couple editions of Scientific American (? I think, it's been a while since I read those articles) that implied, to me, that gravity is what causes the distortion.

True and something I was going to mention before your post. Had to take a quick look at a couple things to make sure I wasn't getting everything backwards.

That's definitely something I'll have to research and think about. Do you have a source to get me started? Because as I see it, even if you travel faster than C, that doesn't mean that you've ignored time. It simply means that you can move to a physical point in the current time where you are able to observe the past. IE, if I moved a light year way from Sol within a day, I could observe our past as it happens. But hey, I could be wrong. I'd like to see your sources so I can take a deeper look into this.

>black holes slowing time.
I thought it was the reverse given the whole sister paradox thing where the one on the planet ages faster proving higher gravity means faster time flows

Kind of. What I was trying to say was that the closer to a black hole (or other gravity producing object) you get, the slower time travels.

Here's a simple explanation:physics.stackexchange.com/questions/25759/how-exactly-does-time-slow-down-near-a-black-hole

>I'd like to see your sources so I can take a deeper look into this.
My sources are any good first grade textbook about Special Relativity. Again, it isn't really something objectionable. It is a natural, well understood, logical, and trivial consequence of Special Relativity.

I guess PBS did an okay job at it: youtube.com/watch?v=HUMGc8hEkpc

They not only slow down time. Once you pass the Event Horizont, space and time switch places. Inside a Black Hole, you can go back amd forwards in time, but distances go always forward getting closer and closer to the singularity.

>mfw still don't understand why it isn't possible

Grandfather paradox is musunderstood. Time is not universal. C is invariant for all observers. The closer an objects gets to C relativily to you, the slower times passes for such object relatively to you. This is true in reverse. They see you as the one whose time is getting slower. This is the paradox, you see each other as getting slower. The paradox is solved by the one that changes velocity slowing down or speeding up.

There are a couple of super structure ideas, space elevators, launch loops, skyhooks. In principle they all sound great, you can explain them on the back on an envelope.

Unfortunately they all have hundreds of highly specialized problems and reply on extreme stability. In reality hoisting a few hundred tonnes up a 400km wire is kinda fraught with mechanical dangers, and the energies released in a failure and insane.

What's more likely is gradual and unsexy improvements in rocket technology to get out of atmosphere and extreme improvements in vacuum propulsion once you're in orbit.

Rather than having an economy based upon lifting tonnes of stuff into orbit, we're more likely to start constructing devices out of the gravity well. Seriously getting off of Earth is really hard, moving about in space is easy in comparison

HOWEVER
With about 4% of the US budget the yanks put men on the moon in the 60s, if you've ever driven in a car from the 60s you'll realise that's impressive.

Its an easy cop out, but if you had another space race, or an external factor, and zero fucks given about the environmental implications, imagine what the Yanks and the Chinese could do with say 10% of the world's government expenditure

I think people overstimate the damage. Launch loopes are said to have the same energy as a nuke, so does the light a farm gets over a day.

Newton says you forgot your apple.

While the magnets are pulling up the metal plate, the plate is just as equally pulling down the magnets. These two forces are equal and opposite, connected through you, so you don't move at all. You are simultaneously pushing the metal plate back down and lifting the magnets up. Therefore, the only force in effect is gravity,

What the fuck am I doing explaining this to an user.

youtube.com/watch?v=kKKM8Y-u7ds

In the immediate future, Laser Launch Facilities might do the trick.