Documents / Report
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 29 March 2010 and prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, is one of a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009 under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It uses a metric tensor approach from general relativity to catalog the physical effects of engineering spacetime, such as altered time, mass, light speed and antigravity. It concludes that such concepts, including warp drives, are consistent with physics, but that the energy requirements remain daunting.
“The Advance”10 pages
UNCLASSIFIED/ ;'P81il 8PPll!ltllt ~81!! SHLY craft's material properties would appear "hardened" relative to the environment owing to the increased binding energies of atoms in its material structure. Such a craft could, for example, impact water at high velocities without apparent deleterious effects. SPATIAL ALTERATION The fourth entry in Table 1 (spatial measure) indicates the size of an object within an altered spacetime region as seen by a remote observer. The size of, say, a spherical object is seen to have its radial dimension, r, scale as I/ F--;;::. In the vicinity of a dense mass F--;;:: >I, in which case an object within the altered spacetime region appears to a remote observer to have shrunk. As a corollary, metric engineering associated with an advanced aerospace craft to produce this effect could in principle result in a large craft with a spacious interior appearing to an external observer to be relatively small. Additional dimensional aspects, such as potential dimensional changes, are discussed below in "Refractive Index Effects." VELOCITY OF LIGHT /CRAFT IN SPACETIME-AL TE RED REGIONS Interior to a spacetime-altered region, the locally measured velocity of light, v;_ = c, is given by the ratio of (locally measured) distance/time intervals for a propagating light signal, as expressed in Equation (6) above. From a viewpoint exterior to the region, however, the observed coordinate ratio measurement can yield a different value v~ greater or less than c as given by the fifth entry in Table 1 (velocity). As an example of a measurement less than c, one speaks of light "slowing down" as a light signal approaches a dense mass (for example, a black hole.) In an engineered spacetime in which g 1111 >I, lg 11 I c. Given that velocities in general in different coordinate systems scale as does the velocity of light-that is, v ➔ -.} g 00 /- g 11 v -for exotic propulsion an engineered spacetime metric can in principle establish a condition in which the trajectory of a craft approaching the velocity of light in its own frame would be observed from an exterior frame to exceed light speed-that is, exhibit motion at superluminal speed. This opens up the possibility of transport at superluminal velocities (as measured by an external observer) without violation of the velocity-of-light constraint within the spacetime- altered region, a feature attractive for interstellar travel. This is the basis for discussion of warp drives and wormholes in the GR literature (References 2-6). Therefore, although present technological facility is far from mature enough to support the development of warp drive and wormhole technologies (Reference 22), the possibility of developing such technologies in the future cannot be ruled out. In other words, effective transport at speeds exceeding the conventional speed of light could occur in principle, and therefore the possibility of reduced-time interstellar travel is not fundamentally ruled out by physical principles. 8 UNCLASSIFIED/ ,!FQA: QFFI&I.«1k 1!181! 8HLV
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 17 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.