Bah!
Sorry, article author, but any true science fiction fan will already have figured that at near-lightspeed the blue-shifted cosmic background is coming on as gamma rays.
The rest of your article then follows as "Well, duh!"
Sorry, sci-fi fans: pretty much anyone who's imagined what a near-light-speed spacecraft would look like has got it wrong, because they've forgotten its interaction with photons. Not only that, but according to a couple of scientists working for Raytheon, it doesn't matter whether Einstein's proposition that you'll never …
Step 1 ) Turn yourself into pure energy.
Step 2) Travel at the speed of light.
Step 3) When arrive at destination, turn yourself from energy back into mass.
Step 4) Profit.
From your your own point of view you 'jumped' from point A to point B.
The only difference is that the place you jumped into was 'shifted' in time by XX.
I prefer Ly Tin Weedle's approach.
The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possibly queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.
“Our calculation for what an observer on Earth could detect predicts a very unusual signature that is unlikely to be caused by any naturally occurring object in the known universe,"
But there are naturally occurring relativistic objects in the form of cosmic radiation. So why do we not detect such a signature?
Or is this how Raytheon were hoping to detect incoming aliens at UK borders?
Since we don't know anything about its properties, I'm going to decide for the purposes of this post that it will cause all normal matter and photons to bend around it like water going around a ship. Just as scientifically valid as the people saying "deflector dish".
Everyone knows that the big bang started in a parallel universe and burst into ours, where there was nothing to start with. There are an infinite number of parallel universes of different sizes, scales and shapes. To travel great distances in our universe is just a matter of popping over to another universe that has a different scale and temporal flow, travelling a short distance and them popping back into our universe st the distant destination. No near-light speed needed, no deflectors, no cryogenic chambers, no Bussard Scramjets, no wormholes. All you need is a sidestep! We don't have these yet but something else might!
I create a Dark Matter energy field around my space ship, won't that allow me to slip seamlessly through all other particles and photons without interaction?
Ref: article the other day on two galaxies smashing together and DM passing seamlessly through with no interaction.
If you are interested in rocket design and the problems with space travel such as the one mentioned in this article then get yourself to Winchell Chung's Atomic Rockets website:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php
Prepare to be somewhat depressed when you are repeatedly told "no, you can't do that" however.
Look, I'm trying to navigate at faster than the speed of light, which means that before you see something, you've already passed through it. Even with an IQ of 6000, it's still brown-trousers time.
Okay, the article was about relativistic speeds less than the speed of light, but I still like that line ;-) And it still applies in a way -- by the time you've detected CMBs, at relativistic speeds they've already done their damage.
And there will always be some wacko genius who just goes around them.
For instance: right here on El Reg
NASA tests crazytech flying saucer thruster, could reach Mars in days
So you are smarter than NASA?
No, but I'm not stupid enough to believe that all of physics from the ground up needs to be rewritten because some idiots didn't pay attention in class when error bars were explained.
quantum entanglement
Amazingly, that kind of thing can be tested anywhere, consistently and we have the math to describe it (even if it did take von Neumann to write the primer). That "NASA" retardation, not so much.
Obviously the technology that we have no real understanding of would be completely baffled by something we do understand... Take that stupid aliens!!! and when they do get here they will be completely overwhelmed by the common cold too, because invading aliens would never see that coming... Or they might invade our water planet when they are in fact allergic to it...
I find it fascinating how 'fizzysists' decide that something isn't possible, because it isn't part of the Standard Model.
Quite apart from the fact that black holes shove the Standard Model up their infinite cavity, it's just ridiculous and very.. well, human, to think that if WE don't know how it's done - then it can't be done.
Space flight was deemed impossible because humans could not possibly withstand the rigors of space.
The Horseless Carriage was deemed impossible because noone could think of how to make something move without oats.
If only these men of science would just try to figure out HOW to do something, rather than spend time telling us why it CAN'T be done, we'd be living on Mars by now...
I calculated just these subjects a decade and change ago.
Blue shifted radiation from the direction of travel would be hard gamma radiation. Re-emission of the absorbed gamma would cause everything from RF through pair production, with plenty of gamma being re-emitted. Exhaust energy would range from IR through RF.
Use a small black hole as a nose cone. Or a confined plasma? Or howabout negative refractive indices? Can you negatively refect gravity (a wave is a wave)? Maybe just fling a wormhole and use it when it's close enough. Pre-ship blobs of quantum entangled matter and then change their state from HQ later to match a desired material form?
Of course it's far easier just to ditch the physical manifestation and send data. That's all everything is at the end of the day. You only need physics for your 'hypervisor'. Then you could use needle-thin vessels and assemble yourself at the end of the journey (whichever of your vessels survives the journey). Maybe use gravity and laser manipulation to induce amino-acid assembly in some remote planet's atmosphere then wait until they're able to pick up the phone and then 'call collect' e.g. the film Contact
I had this discussion with some folks on the LHC forum; the upshot was that the Wow! signal just might have been the radio leakage from dropping out of FTL.
Assuming an Alcubierre-like hypertime drive which uses superdense rotating normal matter in front to locally accelerate the expansion of the Universe for propulsion.
It could be that a Gen 0 (ie Phoenix) FTL might generate a certain RF pulse signature but an entire fleet of ships dropping out would have to do so sequentially or bad things would occur.