Beam me up, Scotty!Follow

You may have seen the articles today about the latest estimates of earth sized planets in our galaxy at 17 billion. I dig this stuff. I really do. In following one of the links, I stumbled on an old article on Gizmodo from back in September, and I don't know how I missed it back then.

http://gizmodo.com/5942634/nasa-starts-development-of-real-life-star-trek-warp-drive







Wow. I've read lots of theories and speculation regarding warp engines and such, but it's all mostly sci-fi. It's interesting to know that the math is already being figured out and there are people actively working on the technology. It's staggering, to me, to think that perhaps in 20 years, we'll be able to travel to Alpha Centauri and and beyond in months, or even a few mere weeks. If you ask me, more funding should be directed at this type of research, rather than building more interplanetary robots. If FTL is possible, and we can figure it out... the implications are amazing.

Further down in the article:



I am also very excited about this, though I cannot help but feel there will be unexpected results. What they are doing sounds more like inter-dimensional travel with the *side effect* of traveling long distances in our own.

While that's all well and good, where does this "exotic matter" come from? Can we manufacture the 500 kilograms needed?

I feel the same way about fusion power. Based on the designs they were talking about on a special once, I suspect all that's really stopping us is lack of relatively high temp superconductors, but who can say when we'll figure that one out? Still hope it's in the next 15-20 years.

Neat stuff but have they proven that this exotic matter actually exists? (exotic matter is a very loose term that refers to, well, anything that doesn't fit within standard physics models)

A lot of these sci-fi-esk theories require some form of exotic matter for them to work. It's not a matter of getting 500kg of the stuff, it's a matter of whether the stuff can even exist off of paper. It's like saying, "It's entirely possible to walk on the ceiling at will, all we need is 30 anti-gravity floor panels and to figure out this other, unrelated, minor physics problem." I mean, all you need to do is violate a half dozen accepted laws of physics. I'll just head down to the anti-physics store and grab those panels. Should be done by lunch right?

I'm all for it, but let's make sure the exotic matter is actually possible before we start applying it to other science (maybe they have?).

Oh, not at all. If you want to look for tiny warp bubbles look for tiny warp bubbles but don't tell people "We're looking for tiny warp bubbles because if we find them we can turn on our magic physics breaking exotic matter machine and fly across the universe." It's purposeful misdirection of the facts to make this sound cooler than it really is.

This research doesn't get you warp drives if the power required is theoretically impossible to generate, which is the case without "exotic matter" which is just a fancy way of saying "we don't know how to do this so we'll just make up some "thing" that has the properties we would need to make it work the way we think it would if it wasn't for this pesky 'physics' thing."

I'm not saying it's not possible, I don't know, maybe it really is possible to make a magic physics breaking exotic matter machine. I think the research is definitely worth doing, but they are making this out to be something it is not which is disturbing coming from scientists.

http://xkcd.com/678/

I think once we get to the point that there are commercially viable business opportunities in space we're going to see a space boom like we couldn't imagine. There's no unsolvable technical reason we can't populate the solar system using current knowledge we just don't have enough of a reason to do it at the moment. The second we do everyone and their mother is going to be developing space tech.

If you can build a smelter and factory in space and have the capability to rope asteroids you really have no limits to what you can accomplish given enough time. We're really not that far off of that.

They should make a sort of redneck version of polo from that.

So like polo but instead of horses they'll all ride bulls.

Bulls are more fun because there'd be goring of players and the challenge of not falling off.

Although the chance of a stampede happening and killing half the audience is somewhat of a downside.

At the very least it'd rake in the cash on pay-per-view TV/streaming.

Now I want to send someone to Mars to go get him, like right now.

I hate you SO HARD right now for linking this.