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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."
Well, I don't know about the hyperdrive, but I clicked on the hyperlink in the article and I was immediately on page 2! Amazing!
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.
I would say that I would be very surprised if any propulsion of the sort noted here will be put into production in my life time. But I also have no doubt that we will at some point, discover a way to permit us to distant stars.
We wont find this breakthrough if we dont look for it. As long as the false and impossible ideas are shot down, whats the harm in listening to these wild ideas?
Afterall, some day, someone my actually be on to something. It would be a shame to disregard the idea just because it sounds impossible on the face of it.
END COMMUNICATION
Here's what people said about other blue sky ideas:
You will fall off the edge of the world.
Man cannot fly!
I can go on, but I'll just leave this as a quote from someone else.
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. Arthur C. Clarke
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2006/03/12/busines s/news/20_27_233_10_06.txt
Charging customers to send them into space is a lofty goal for any business owner, and perhaps particularly in an area whose economy draws much of its strength from the availability of cheap land.
But that's the goal that Bill Sprague has set, and he even said that he chose Temecula largely because of its low cost of living relative to the coastal cities where his aerospace suppliers are based.
Sprague is building a 52-foot rocket. By October 2007, he hopes, passengers with $250,000 to spend will be able to ride it to the edge of outer space, where the curve of the Earth is visible and where the planet's gravity is slightly weaker than at the surface.
"If they look in any direction except at the Earth, they'll see black," Sprague said. "It'll be just the sun sitting in a sea of blackness. The stars will be visible."
Cool article, although the fact the rocket parts are only valued at $3mil right now would make me concerned about riding in it.
As an experimentalist, it's refreshing to see someone making such a comment.
The owls are not what they seem
The problem I see is that while it may be possible to break the light barrier without breaking causality and using up infinite amounts of energy (and getting infinite mass), we ourselves may be keeping us from discovering it. He's right; this needs non-mainstream thinking. Creativity is severely dampened by this-is-impossible cries. Some might see a challenge in it to disprove this, but even then, the fact that it is considered impossible is cemented in the mind, thereby having an impact on creativity. Also, the fact that sometimes, the scientific community behaves like the church condemning heretics (just read the part with the difficulties getting a hearing about this exotic propulsion concepts), and that consequently, there are MANY crackpots in these "forbidden zones" which create an enormous noise, do not make things really easier. This might be too complicated for an innovation made by some weird genius in his basement, but the powers that could handle it might be too narrow-minded.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
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...
Disclosure: I am a neuroscientist.
I think the most likely way we're going to get intelligence to other stars is to send AI computers, since they wouldn't mind the long wait. Even if creating AI is hard, if Moore's law holds, in 50 years we'll be able to simulate every neuron in a whole human brain on a computer in real time, so even if we don't understand intelligence, we'll be able to reproduce it. And if biological life is so important to you, send some frozen embrios (or info about their DNA on hard drives, and stock chemicals for building embrios from scratch) and artificial wombs with the computers too - let them build a colony, then defrost their kids.
Far-fetched? In my opinion, it's much more likely than being able to keep whole humans happy on a 100 lightyear trek. Yes, Moore's law might not hold up, but I predict we'll be able to upload brains before sending our fragile bodies intact to distant stars.
Patrick
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.