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From: Geoffrey A. Landis <geoffrey.landis@lerc.nasa.gov>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.science
Subject: Re: Star Drives - Catalogs
Date: 9 Sep 1996 13:35:35 GMT
Organization: Ohio Aerospace Institute at NASA Lewis Research Center
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Odder star-drives:
The time-travel drive
(a): you move from A to B at a speed nearly, but just slower, than light.
 When you get to B, you just time-travel back to the instant you left A,
resulting in a net transit time of zero.
(b) You have a time machine that moves in time but not in space.  Since
the Earth and the sun move, all you have to do is travel to such a time
when a desirable planet is, er, was/will-be, where the Earth is now.

and a variant, the alternate-worlds travel drive:
(c) travel to an alternate universe where the planet you want to go to
occupies the space that the Earth occupies in this Universe.

There's Catherine Asaro's complex-space starflight:
You can't go past the speed of light, because the factor
1/SQRT(1-v^2/c^2) goes to infinity.  However, you can detour *around* the
speed of light by simply acquiring an imaginary component to speed, v=
v(real) + ai

And the quantum mechanics stardrive:
Perfectly measure your velocity with a precision of delta-p.  Then your
position becomes uncertain, you could be anywhere within a distance
x=hbar/delta-p.  Look around you and figure out where you are [but *not*
with quantum precision this time, please!].  If it's not where you want
to be, try again.

Last, and finally, there's the metaphysical travel approach:
Die on the planet you wish to leave.  Reincarnate on the planet you wish
to go to.

____________________________________________
Geoffrey A. Landis,
Ohio Aerospace Institute at NASA Lewis Research Center
physicist and part-time science fiction writer