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Let’s say you have true Superman-style flight, able to move through the air without any discernible means of propulsion. In fact, I’ll take it a step farther and offer up the explanation that perhaps your body contains a nested warp bubble that makes you a human Alcubierre drive. When you go up, up, and away, you waste no propellant mass and don’t “accelerate” in any traditional sense. In theory you could achieve relativistic or even superluminal speeds but we wanna keep this to in-atmo flight for the time being, so that’s a no-go.

What could the esoteric applications of this look like? Would a person simply being moved by such a warp bubble still experience the effects of acceleration since the bubble isn’t totally enclosing their body? What could you do with an ability like this if you could also alter the size of the bubble or create other bubbles outside your body?

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  • $\begingroup$ That does explain how superman can decelerate in an instant the falling damsel in distress without her splattering all over his arms. $\endgroup$
    – Ash
    Oct 2, 2020 at 19:15
  • $\begingroup$ Finally, we are freed from the tyranny of elevators! $\endgroup$
    – user535733
    Oct 2, 2020 at 19:18
  • $\begingroup$ Wouldn't that kill you if part of your body was in the warp bubble and part of it wasn't and you were moving? Because if that boundary was discrete, whenever blood crosses that boundary it would have an infinte acceleration or deceleration as it came up to speed. Or would it not? It's kind of a paradox which is to be expected with reactionless motion. $\endgroup$
    – DKNguyen
    Oct 2, 2020 at 20:08
  • $\begingroup$ Actually, that sounds like perpetual motion to me. So he could just sit next to a machine with the warp bubble extended and the machine straddles the border and harnesses the force that is produced from nothing to produce power. $\endgroup$
    – DKNguyen
    Oct 2, 2020 at 20:33
  • $\begingroup$ @DKNguyen The force is not produced from nothing. Any warp bubble requires an energy source. If there is no energy source, then it is fictional physics anyway, so perpetual motion doesn't matter. $\endgroup$
    – cowlinator
    Oct 2, 2020 at 22:50

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You could destroy entire planets just by moving. You would actually be one of the single most powerful beings and extremely dangerous. Why this is has to do with a posited problem of the Alcubierre drive, which basically states that your warp bubble would accumulate particles in transit and then release them with tremendous energy, presuming you approach the speed of light.

Notice that this would happen to the planet you happen to be on, so if you require atmosphere to live you probably want to keep your speed way, way down.

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