Tractor beams, pressor beams, and stressor beams within the context of general relativity

TL;DR

This paper explores how advanced civilizations could theoretically formulate tractor, pressor, and stressor beams within general relativity, highlighting their connection to warp drives and the inevitable energy condition violations involved.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for formulating tractor, pressor, and stressor beams via reverse engineering spacetime metrics within general relativity, extending concepts from warp drives and wormholes.

Findings

Tractor and pressor beams can be modeled by modifying warp drive concepts.

Violations of classical energy conditions are unavoidable for these beams.

The formulation is theoretical and considers capabilities of advanced civilizations.

Abstract

Both traversable wormholes and warp drives, concepts originally developed within the context of science fiction, have now (for some 30 odd years) been studied, debated, and carefully analyzed within the framework of general relativity. An overarching theme of the general relativistic analysis is unavoidable violations of the classical point-wise energy conditions. Another science fiction trope, now over 80 years old, is the tractor beam and/or pressor beam. We shall discuss how to formulate both tractor beams and/or pressor beams, and a variant to be called a stressor beam, within the context of reverse engineering the spacetime metric. (While such reverse engineering is certainly well beyond our civilization's current capabilities, we shall be more interested in asking what an arbitrarily advanced civilization might be able to accomplish.) We shall see that tractor beams and/or pressor beams can be formulated by suitably modifying the notion of warp drives, and that, as for wormholes and warp drives, violations of the classical point-wise energy conditions are utterly unavoidable.