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Hyperdrive and Space Propulsion
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."
that they're planning to conquest other worlds instead of fixing the one they live in :-/
Kuwait's largest oil field has peaked and is now in decline,
And...
there is serious speculation that Saudi Arabia's giant Ghawar oil field is either at peak or is very close,
And...
Global warming is clearly a fact,
And...
The antarctic is melting off at an uncomfortable clip not to mention Greenland
And...
Population growth continues unabated
And...
The freakin' idiots in TFA want to go merrily galumphing about the galaxy like a bunch of wide-eyed disease ridden nuclear weaponed kindergartners. All they need to do is SNEEZE on a foreign planet and they could wipe the whole place out and turn it into one giant slimy stromatolite. That's my idea of being a good will ambassador. As if we have enough stored solar power (petroleum) to fuel such silliness.
On a daily basis I battle the darkest nihilists - whether of the Olduvai Theory Peak Oil variety or the Eco-Catastrophe Variety. And when a clueless bunch of science geeks go prancing about like some fourth grade ninnies playing "Star Trek" and cheerfully yapping about the intricacies of hyperdrives, when most of the world can barely feed itself and the privileged fat few use Microsoft Windows... well... it makes the case of the doom-mongers that much stronger.
Hyperdrive, my ass. It's this same inane idiocy that cut jillions out of the NASA science budget so we can send some space cowboys somewhere they don't really belong.
RS
Of course I fully expect the clueless technological fan boys who all to often spend their sad empty lives begging for mod points will give me a -1 Flamebait, regardless of the fundamental merits of my argument.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Speed of light this! Expansion of humanity that! Materials and resources, the other.
These horrendously low-falutin' ideas about conquest and congestion of other planets (or worlds) are A. socially unfeasible, B. practically impossible, and most importantly C. disasterously myopic.
For the moment, let me get down to tabling A and B. They've been hashed and rehashed many times. Let me get down with the nitty gritty with C. The con job here is that "physical space is important". In no uncertain terms, physical space is increasingly irrelevant. And when I say "information space", I'm not talking about some Jason Lanieresque vision of virtual reality terminals. Try surfing wikipedia these days.
Human information space is increasing in size at a nauseatingly rapid rate, and undergoing immense topological transformations that are simultaneously completely
physical in character (that are subject to the investigations of physicists) but the
retranslation into purely physical terms is so expensive that it is more efficient simply
to think of it as a separate space.
To summarize:
physical space exploration: let's go faster and farther and take over as much of the territory as possible! Yay us! Emphasis on "take over". Makes you wonder if the speed of light is a kind of natural sanity reasons (from an anthropic principle perspective): if you are building a territory for algorithms to live in, and you have little colonies, you want the barrier to communication/contact between them to be high enough so that when the time comes around that they're ready to get in contact with other self-aware entities, you don't want the first action to be to blow the other up!
informational space exploration: more interesting.