The size of the entire universe is unknown, after all, the universe has been expanding. According to the equation of cosmic expansion, it is currently about 93 billion light-years in diameter, so despite all the advances and innovations that modern technology has brought, science has not really found a way to reduce the time required for interplanetary travel. As of today, the vast expanse of the universe is still curious, the infinitely extending outer space seems to have no end, even if it is only an important part of the cosmic space, it will take many generations of people to approach the discovery and make greater progress according to the current speed that modern technology has provided us.
Excitingly, all of this could change for some time to come, and Elon Musk and his spacex team may have just cracked the lightspeed code, as a scientist may have found a way to travel at the speed of light. It's a huge and shocking process, and once a technological breakthrough is achieved, the physical world as we know it may change dramatically, and our laws of physics will be completely shuffled.
This is not an exaggeration, around the 20th century, with the advent of high-altitude balloon flight, human beings began to explore the physics of space. Since then, our space dream has not been realized. There are two specific reasons that limit our exploration of the universe. The first is current space technology, which to date is still quite limited. For example, NASA's Juno holds the record for the fastest spacecraft ever flew at 74 kilometers per second, and if we send the probe to the nearest star to Earth, even at Juno's speed, it will take us 17151 to get there.
Obviously, this speed is unrealistic on the scale of the universe and completely meaningless. In addition, no one has yet invented a spacecraft capable of accelerating at this speed and being capable of carrying people, and it can be said that the current state of space exploration is still a bottleneck. According to NASA, getting to and from Mars will take about 21 months for the most advanced spacecraft, just imagine how long it will take to reach planets farther away from Mars, and to achieve this, we desperately need space technology upgrades.
Musk has been publicly expressing his dream of building a permanent settlement for humanity on Mars. His vision includes schools, financial trading systems and a large number of job opportunities. For all of Musk's accomplishments, we know he's not a man of empty words, especially when it comes to technology. In fact, SpaceX was founded by Musk in 2002, not just for the space transportation revolution, but also for human immigration. Making life more planetary is Musk's goal, musk firmly believes that humans must do this to protect our species from a devastating cosmic catastrophe that could eventually lead to our extinction, and indeed settling on another planet is the only way to ensure our survival, so speed breakthroughs become key.
Excitingly, the concept of a light-speed engine proposed by a scientist would hopefully break this deadlock, which Dr. David Burns from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama calls a screw engine. Dr. Burns conceptualized the idea and published a paper on NASA's Technical Report Server to explain this particular concept, so what is a screw engine? What exactly does NASA intend to do with such a technology? How does this seemingly defying the laws of physics come about? What kind of technology will be behind the manufacture of such an engine? What type of propellant will the engine use?
With the current laws of physics, it seems impossible for a light-speed engine to achieve, and the principle of conservation of momentum shows that momentum remains constant without any external force, which is why space rockets use blasting propellant to provide enough thrust to fly in the other direction. Space technology as we know it so far has never violated the laws of physics, so it's still questionable whether a propeller engine will be the first to do it.
Engineers say the spiral engine could theoretically accelerate to 99 percent of the speed of light without the use of propellant, but instead use microwaves to generate thrust, which are reflected inside a closed chamber, a model that ignores the law of conservation of momentum and some other basic scientific concepts. But so far, all successfully launched rockets have followed the law of conservation of momentum, in layman's terms, in layman's terms, in order to make an object move, it is first necessary to push it away from it by using fuel and the plane pushes itself off the ground and pushes upwards, which is why the spiral engine is beyond our current understanding of physics.
At the moment, the person in charge of the project has not revealed all the information about the project, nor how they intend to make the thruster work, or what components are needed to make it work. Of course, this mysterious drive has aroused great interest in space technology, and although it may not have been as successful as David Burns said, this time it has found the impossibility of breaking the speed of light engine, so how does the spiral engine work?
In this engine, you can imagine a box containing a rod on which a ring can slide, and now imagine a spring in the box that pushes the ring in one direction as it slides in one direction in the box. When the ring reaches the end of the box, the box also recoils in the other direction. It will bounce backwards, which will also change the direction of the box's recoil. This is proof of the third law of motion, which states that each action has an equal and opposite principle of reaction force that will prevent the box from swinging back in the same way, and if the mass of one side is greater than that of the opposite direction when the ring slides in one direction, it will push the box in the previous direction with greater thrust, so the action in this case will exceed the reaction that causes the momentum.
But Einstein's special theory of relativity states that objects increase mass as they move toward the speed of light, an effect that must be taken into account in particle accelerators, and a simple operation of the Burns concept is to replace the ring with a circular particle accelerator, in which iron rapidly accelerates to the speed of relativity in a single stroke and then decelerates in another process of generating momentum, an implementation that requires the accelerator to be shaped like a spiral, requiring 200 meters long and 12 meters in diameter in the actual experimental chamber, in addition, To produce a thrust Newton, 165 megawatts of energy is required. Of course, this is only theoretical data, and it is undeniable that the emergence of the spiral engine has broken the physical convention, but why is our space exploration not breaking the norm?