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NASA Studying Energy Shields for Spacecraft
Shafe writes "SPACE.COM posted an article concerning enhanced shielding technologies research for futuristic spacecraft en route to Mars. One particularly interesting goal is essentially an energy shield known as a 'multipole electrostatic shield' that would deflect both radiation and micro-meteoroids. We're one step closer to Star Trek: shields up!"
I bet all these engineers were just big geeks that loved sci-fi and when the problem comes up, they fall back to what they know: Star Trek!
;)
It really never amazes me when they think up something out of a Roddenberry or Asimov story. They are good ideas, just not possible at the time.
Technically, nothing is impossible....given time
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
My other question is what sort of energies are we talking about here since protons are fairly massive? I would guess in the 100+ GeV range (ie. particle accelerator size). Any thoughts or better links?
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
- Amounts of energy comparable to the entire output of the Sun. (And the corresponding efficient equipment to handle it without your spaceship suddenly resembling a sun.) Probably impossible (remember, this energy generation has to fit inside the bubble; even if we could do it in general we could never fit it in a spaceship.)
- The ability to directly control gravity, with, to date, absolutely no evidence that it is possible with anything other then black-hole-sized quantities of mass... and black holes still are just general suckers, you can't direct their gravity like you'd need to.
- Negative mass. Much hypothesized, probably impossible in macroscopic amounts. (It's one of the more possible out of this list, but that's not saying much.) You need this for the negative gravity needed to stabalize these spacewarps; it's impossible to build a stable field with any sort of hole in the middle out of pure attractive, inverse-square based fields. (Actually, it's impossible with inverse-square fields in general; you have to have a matter shield in the mix if you want a hole (a charged hollow sphere has a hole on the inside of the sphere), but what shields against gravity?)
- The ability to control all of this not just "in general", but extremely tightly, to create a high distortion outside of the ship without utterly destroying the inside of the ship with gravity fields or tides in the millions of Gs range or more.
A thing that requires multiple other most-likely impossible things is itself impossible, even if you can sort of make the math work.(Am I absolutely sure such space warping can't be used for travel? Technically, no. Then again, I'm not absolutely sure that when I drop this apple, it will fall to the ground, either; there's an ever so small chance that it won't, even under conventional QM as I understand it. But unless something really strange opens up at the string theory level, with as I said, no reason with current evidence to believe that it will, you're not getting any of this. You're welcome, as so many Slashbots are wont to do, to post an angry reply saying "How do you know this is impossible? We broke the speed of sound, didn't we?" (Which itself betrays a serious misunderstanding of history, reason why left as an exercise for the reader.) But be aware, the evidence is on my side; FTL has reached the point where we need something magical to make it work, and I don't hold my breath waiting for magic.)
But teleportation is another impossible thing we've conquered through a basic discovery in quantum physics.
You're entitled to your opinion so I won't jump on the rest of your post like I kind of want to.
However, note that teleportation in the conventional sense remains impossible. AFAIK, to date, only single photons have been "teleported" (actually, their quantum state was transferred which still doesn't match most people's mental model; there was still a photon on one end and a photon on the other), and the way in which it was done strongly indicates the impossibility of teleporting anything macroscopic... or for that matter, microscopic. In theory, it's just an "engineering problem"; in reality it's an insurmountable one.
Teleportation, as most people use the word, is more unlikely seeming now then it was fifty years ago. Which brings me to the other nit I'll pick...
I guess what I'm saying is that there is more we don't know than we do know,
Yes, but what we do know increasingly keeps making the probability of ever having certain things continue to recede. More knowlege isn't bringing us closer, it's showing us the uncrossable chasm in increasing detail.
Sure, maybe there's this little string flung across it somewhere, but we've searched more and more of it and we keep finding no such string. Eventually, you have to conclude that it either isn't there, or even if it is, it's so delicate as to be useless.
It's a case of the infinity fallacy: "If we knew an infinite amount of stuff, we'd know how to do X." (A similar argument is often made for "a really, really lot".) But that's a fallacy; an infinite set can still not contain certain elements. The infinite set of all odd numbers does not contain 2, no matter how many of them you examine. To me, it's looking more and more like "how to travel FTL" or "macroscopic teleportation" or a number of other sci-fi concepts ("science-fiction forcefields" (as opposed to the real things, of course, which are entirely different), "time travel" (again in the science fiction senses)) simply isn't in the set of things you can know about the universe, so looking harder isn't going to help. We've been looking harder, and we haven't found any meaningful loopholes to date. The number of places those things can hide is shrinking.
(After all, we're not searching the entire set of knowlege about the universe, which you seem to imply; the fact that I don't know the weather on a planet on the other side of the galaxy does nothing to make FTL possible. The vast sum of knowlege is entirely irrelevant. We're searching a rather narrow domain, and we're running out of places to look.)