Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Hyperdrive and Space Propulsion

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the to-the-moon-alice dept.

Interested reader writes "MSNBC has an article covering the recent Space Technology and Applications Forum in New Mexico, which included a frontier physics session on hyperdrive, wormholes, and other blue sky ideas. The idea is a revival of NASA's long-dead (and heavily criticized) Advanced Propulsion Project."

2 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Prior Art by erichill · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm afraid Roddenberry and Company were a bit late themselves. The term "hyperdrive" was used in Forbidden Planet in 1956. And according to this article, the idea of FTL through "hyperspace" goes back to a John W. Campbell story from 1934.

    --
    Credo sim. - I think I am.
  2. Re:why the speed of light is not a barrier to brea by Wire3117 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Your opinion is yours. but it sounds awfully like the 19th century opponents of trains. "ooh the human body cannot sustain speeds in excess of 20 mph, it's just unnatural". Railway travel (general) "I see what will be the effect of it; that it will set the whole world a-gadding. Twenty miles an hour, sir! - Why, you will not be able to keep an apprentice boy at his work! Every Saturday evening he must have a trip to Ohio to spend a Sunday with his sweetheart. Grave plodding citizens will be flying about like comets. All local attachments will be at an end. It will encourage flightiness of intellect. Veracious people will turn into the most immeasurable liars. All conceptions will be exaggerated by the magnificent notions of distance. -- Only a hundred miles off!--Tut, nonsense, I'll step across, madam, and bring your fan'...And then, sir, there will be barrels of port, cargoes of flour, chaldrons of coal, and even lead and whiskey, and such like sober things that have always been used to slow travelling -- whisking away like a sky rocket. It will upset all the gravity of the nation...Upon the whole, sir, it is a pestilential, topsy-turvy, harm-scarum whirligig. Give me the old, solemn, straight forward, regular Dutch Canal - three miles an hour for expresses, and two rod jog-trot journeys -- with a yoke of oxen for heavy loads. I go for beasts of burden. It is more formative and scriptural, and suits a moral and religious people better. -- None of your hop skip and jump whimsies for me." Source: From the Western Sun of Vincennes, Indiana, July 24, 1830, as quoted by Seymour Dunbar in A History of Travel in America, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1915, Vol. III. p. 938. http://www.foresight.org/News/negativeComments.htm l Just keep your horse then...