CSflim

I think that the folded space travel that was refered to was travelling through the already curved three dimensional space, not actually going to the effort of curving it (I have absolutely no idea how such a thing could be done).

Travvling through curved space can be explained by expanding on the analogy of the curved earth.

Place your fingers on two distant places on a map. Now draw a straight line between them, and measure the distance. (Remember that a straight line is defined as the shortest distance between two points). This measurement is the disatnce between the two points in two dimensions.

Now find the same two places on a globe. Now imagine joining these two places by an imaginary perfectly straight line. Not a line going over the surface of the the globe, but like a spike going through the globe. Now measure the distance between the locations. This is the distance between them in two dimensions. Both are straight line distances, but the former is confined to two dimensions.

The straight line in three dimensional space is shorter than the one in two dimensional space, hence if we were to burrow straight through the earth, we could concievably arrive at our destination much more quickly, given that we are travelling a shorter distance. (For obvious reasons this isn't possible due to the slowness of drlling).

Now extrapolate our findings. We can see that our two dimensional map can be curved into a three dimensional globe. Now imagine that we curve our three dimensional space around back onto itself. Now take two points in space, very far apart. It is concievable that the straight line drawn in three dimensional space between the two points is longer than the line drawn in four dimensional space*, if the three dimensional space is curved. If we could figure out a way to travel in the fourth dimension, then it is concievable that we could "burrow" to different points in space.

This is what I believe is refered to as "Warp Speed" by Star Trek, and many other science fictions shows and films.

*Bear in mind that I don't mean Time. Many people confuse this point, saying that the fourth dimension is time. Time is A dimension, not necessarily the fourth. When I refer to a fourth dimension, I mean a fourth spacial dimension. In this case you could consider time to be "the fifth dimension" but ultimately it doesn't really matter too much.

This of course raises the ultimate paradox. Could we use this technique to travel faster than light? Asuume that we have the technology to travel at a speed close to that of light. If at the moment of our departure we shone a light beam in the direction of our destination, then tunneled through the fourth dimension, could we arrive before the light reached us? Of course the answer is no. But how? We can only assume that any travel in the fourth spacial dimension will also have major implications for our travel through the dimension of time. We are not just taking a shortcut throught space, we are also traveling through time.
So in other words, we would presumably arrive at our destination some time after our light beam reaches it. So we are still slower then light, so our "burrowing" has proved useless? Have we still taken the same length of time to reach our destination that it would have taken had we travelled straight at a speed less than light? Well yes and no. Time is relative remember. As far as you are concerned, you would get there faster. The clock on board your ship would measure less time, "proving" that you went faster than the speed of light . But as far as an outsider is concerned, you would have traveled less than the speed of light. HIS clock confirms it. Of course putting your clocks side by-side would reveal that you had in fact travelled through time!

Others hypothesise the existence of wormholes. The idea that these tunnels already exist, waiting for us to pass through them. There are various takes on the presence of wormholes, which, while mathematically sound, have no real evidence in their favour. they are still purely speculative at best.

If you understand how gravity manifests itself by distorting three dimensional space, you can imagine that something as massive as a black hole could cause a wormhole. If the disortions we so great that it actually "broke through on the other side". Again there is conjecture that black holes represent "one-way" wormholes, sucking matter into themselves, with the exits being White holes, which spew matter out of themselves. Personally I don't buy it. Sounds too much like cheap science fiction to me.

Film & T.V. Science Fiction always portrays wormholes as huge gaping vortices, similar to miniature black holes. But more (imho) sensible scientific conjecture suggests that tiny wormholes could exist, and that their existence would be very transient. Not much good for transporting the several tons of metal that make up our spaceship then!

I am not familiar however with how an ion drive is supposed to work. I have, like everybody else, heard the phrase being bandied about in sci-fi films galore, but I am curious to see how they are proposed to work. Is there any real science behind them, or are they purely fiction?

What happens to light if it is shone into a worm hole? Does IT travel faster than...um...light?

EDIT: Christ! thats a lot! I didn't mean to write so damn much! Appologies!

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