If there are people in the world who dare to challenge the laws of physics, musk must be one of them. Musk's success is not accidental, in fact, before you think of a crazy idea, he has already started to act, and this is Musk.
In fact, Elon Musk and NASA already have plans to challenge the laws of physics with their latest developments, and although the probability of failure is as high as 99% in the eyes of most people, they believe that as long as there is a 1% chance of trying. It is understood that NASA is about to create a near-light engine that challenges the laws of physics, of course, this is only an engine concept at present, it can accelerate to 99% of the speed of light without using any fuel, It only takes 1.3 seconds to reach the moon and 14 minutes to reach Mars, which sounds like something in a science fiction movie, but it is what NASA engineers are working on, and if it succeeds, then it will have the potential to challenge the laws of physics that have remained unchanged for thousands of years, but in comparison, what is more curious for us ordinary people, if it can't use propellant, what will it use as fuel? Will humans be able to travel in a flying machine with this thruster? These questions are currently on the minds of most people.
Since its birth for centuries, human beings have dreamed of crossing astronomical distances to reach so-called extraterrestrial destinations and see more civilizations. In our consciousness, every star we see in the night sky is a sun, like our sun, and may have its own solar system planets, and may even have life, but even the nearest star is four light-years away, and the distant distance separates us from these mysterious places. While NASA's Juno mission achieved the fastest flight speed ever built by a human-built spacecraft, at 74 kilometers per second, even if it were to reach the nearest planet at that speed it would still be a major problem, after all, it's space, it's so big that even if we travel as fast as we can, it will take years for us to reach the nearest star.
Elon Musk's private spaceflight company, Spacex, was founded with the idea of creating life, claiming that if a catastrophe occurs on Earth, such as a giant asteroid hitting Earth in 2016, relocating humans to other planets such as Mars could save humanity. Elon Musk says history will have two paths to choose from, one of which is for us to stay on Earth indefinitely until eventual extinction. Another option is to become a space civilization and a multi-planetary species, and he believes that the second path is the right path. In fact, Musk often expressed his desire to develop a settlement on Mars, but it would take a long process and a terrifying amount of money to make this fantasy a reality. Our current limitations of technology and the laws of physics are two limiting factors for space travel, and our advances in areas such as laser navigation, nuclear power rather than chemical propulsion, production and control of antimatter or dark matter could lead to a game-changing technological breakthrough, and they seem to be close together.
Another desire of humanity at the moment is to find solutions to major problems, and that is speed. David Burns, an engineer from NASA, claims he has built an engine that accelerates to 99 percent of the speed of light without fuel, and he has released it under the name of a propeller engine to NASA's technical report server. Spiral engines take advantage of the changes that can occur in a spiral drive at relativistic speeds approaching the speed of light in a vacuum. It has not yet been professionally reviewed, but this theory has aroused people's curiosity, what exactly is the spiral drive?
Some professionals say that screw-driven engines may violate the principles of physics, but screw-driven engines are also possible to develop fast and light engines. The screw drive is an RF resonant cavity thruster concept, which is said to produce thrust from the internal reflection of microwaves, violating the law of conservation of momentum and other fundamental laws, so the device is also called "impossible drive" by the media. The explanation of how the spiral drive works is beyond what one knows about physics, perhaps it interacts with the vacuum energy of space quantum time, but space quantum time does not allow anything to be able to push it, perhaps it is a completely new physics, as the spiral drive test shows, there is no official design for such a device.
But Professor Burns, who studies the field, revealed the basic theory of spiral drive, depicting a box with a heavy object hanging from a rope and spring bounces at both ends. If the weight is moved back and forth, that is, the weight swings back and forth, this will shake the entire box in a vacuum. However, if the swing of the weight grows in only one direction, it will provide a stronger thrust in that direction, creating thrust. According to the concept of conservation of momentum, this is not possible. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, the concept of conservation of momentum holds that the momentum of a system remains constant without any external forces. Objects increase mass as they approach the speed of light, which must be taken into account in particle accelerators. In fact, Burns's concept was such that a circular particle accelerator was used instead of a ring, in which ions rapidly accelerate to relativistic speeds in one stroke and decelerate rapidly in another stroke. Burns argues that it is more appropriate to use particle accelerators for lateral and circular motion, in which case the accelerator forms a spiral but has relativistic errors. According to special relativity, in this case, objects increase in mass as their velocity approaches the speed of light. If you replace the weight with an ion and replace the box with a loop, the ions may flow faster at one end and more slowly at the other. The spiral engine, because it is spiral-shaped, similar to a stretched spring engine, is more likely to accelerate the ions within the circumference to the relativistic speed, then change its speed, and then change its mass to a certain extent, and then the engine generates thrust by moving the ions back and forth along the direction of motion.
According to scientists, the spiral engine requires a very large internal structure, 200 meters long and about 12 meters in diameter, to produce 1 newton of thrust, which requires 165 megawatts of energy, which is the size of the force required to accelerate the mass of one kilogram per square second, comparable to the output of a power plant. In the late 1970s, an American inventor named Robert Cook invented an engine that was said to convert centrifugal energy into linear motion. By the beginning of the 21st century, a British inventor named Roger Shaw had proposed electromagnetic drives, showing that microwaves could be converted into thrust. Neither idea has been proven, and both ideas are widely considered impossible due to violations of basic physical rules. Conservationists at the Technical University of Dresden tested electromagnetic drives and said that spiral engines are most likely to suffer the same problem.
However, I personally believe that with the rapid development of aviation technology, if there is an engine close to the speed of light in the future, it is not impossible, after all, the development space of science and technology is too large. All of our sci-fi fantasies have the potential to become reality, and the screw engine isn't impossible, what do you think of Elon Musk's near-light engine? Can it really be achieved? Feel free to leave your thoughts!