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Nitrogen Fullerenes - Powerful Chemistry
wildsurf writes "A post in sci.energy points to recent confirmation of the stable existence of N60 , through supercomputer simulation. Large-scale synthesis of this material could form the basis for tremendously powerful rocket fuel. Here is an in-depth article on the subject. What would you do with a few million liters of this stuff?"
Here is a better press release than the one listed with the article.
Given current physics, yes. Just wait a while though, and we'll get Zero Point Energy working. Evidently there may be enough energy in a 1 cm^3 vacuum to boil all the worlds oceans. Much more energy than antimatter, and you don't have to take it with you, as vacuum is rather abundant.
The problem with zero-point energy is that it's at the zero point.
It's not the amount of energy bound within a system that tells you how much you can extract - it's how far above the lowest possible energy state your system is in. You can make a pretty solid argument for vacuum - even boiling with zero-point energy - being at the lowest achievable energy state ("otherwise it would have decayed to a lower state already"). If you can't make vacuum decay to a lower energy state, you can't extract any of the zero-point energy. If you _can_ make it decay, then why hasn't any of the *vast* expanse of vacuum in the universe decayed already? This would be very, very noticeable.
An analogy would be to look at chemical energy. By classical mechanics, you should be able to draw a near-infinite amount of energy out of a single hydrogen atom, just by moving the electron closer to the nucleus; the Coulomb potential well is infinitely deep (or at least far deeper than electrons normally sit, even if you assume a nucleus with measurable size). But we know that in practice the best you'll get from changing states in a hydrogen atom is about 13.6 eV (arbitrarily-close-to-free outside the potential well to the ground state, at about -13.6 eV).
The ground state (-13.6 eV) is as far as you can send an electron down into the potential well, even though the well is a lot deeper than -13.6 eV.
Similarly, by the fact that the vacuum near us hasn't decayed, you can make a pretty strong argument for the observed state of vacuum being the lowest reachable state.