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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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IIRC- and take this with a grain of salt because my most advanced science class was geology for nonscience majors- every hypothesized FTL drive leaves some kind of telltale signature at the end, too. So even aliens that figured out how to make an alcubierre drive work give off a telltale signature that we should have picked up if they’re anywhere in the neighborhood.

An Alcubierre Drive has a nasty tendency to accumulate all the space dust/debris the vessel encounters along the way, which is eventually liberated eventually, as you need to smooth out the bubble of warped space-time at the end of your journey.

So the braking resembles the blast from a relativistic shotgun, I don't recall figures on the magnitude of the energy released, or carried by the projectiles, but it's probably not a good idea to point it at anything inhabited. Maybe dumping it into a star might work. Either way, I suspect we would notice if it happened anywhere important within the orbit of Pluto.

Yeah, that’s what I was referring to, but I think krasnikov tubes and the fringe-but-math-works hyperspace theories also suggest there’d be some weird anomalies at the exit- and wormholes are a weird and noticeable anomaly.