It's been seriously suggested. It would provide them with a secondary income stream, increase the number of "banks" in poorer neighbourhoods (which often have a post office but no bank branches, precisely where people often need physical rather than electronic banking), and would thus replace a lot of pay-day-loan/cheque-cashing/pawnshops which do flock to poorer neighbourhoods and charge extortionate fees/interest, thus saving those communities tens of billions of dollars a year. There's about 60 million Americans who lack access to financial services who could benefit from a Postal Bank.
And, of course, the USPS was a savings bank until the '60s.
But the current Postmaster General is apparently a classic CEO, an MBA idiot who advocates branch closers, service cuts and fee hikes to "save" the post office. And Obama, of course, is terrified to take on the large banks.
even though no one is saying that the differences make anyone "superior" or "inferior" to anyone else, merely "different".
Except, you know, the author of the book being discussed, who specifically did rank races by their superiority. (Whites are genetically predisposed to civilisation, blacks to tribal living, Chinese to business, etc.)
Instead of what you said, I think it's the opposite: Whenever people object to the abuse of their research to support a racist/ideological agenda, people like you scream "That's political correctness!" without even attempting to understand what the objections are.
And if you worked for me and I found you doing this I would fire you on the spot.
"Whereas..."? "...if you tell me..."? "...I'd give you..."?
Huh, nothing, weird. It appears you think only of negative reinforcement. So if your employees double their productivity, you offer them no reward, only threats if they seek a reward.
This leaves them with three choices:
A) Automate a process, tell you. You increase their workload to compensate. Result: Same pay, same workload, plus responsibility for the automation process. B) Automate a process, don't tell you. Result: Same pay, decreased workload, small risk of getting caught. C) Don't automate the process. Result: Same pay, same workload, no risk, no extra responsibility.
Logically, employees would chose between B and C, depending on their assessment of the risk of getting caught versus the benefit in halving their workload. No employee capable of automating processes would choose A unless they hadn't personally met you yet.
Meta-result: No improvements in business productivity. Low morale.
A competent business includes, D) Automate a process, tell management. Have the increase in productivity shared. Result: Increased pay for same workload or same pay for easier workload.
Meta-result: Incentive for all employees to improve business practices. Ongoing improvements. High morale.
[I knew a guy who worked on a production line for a couple of years, suggested a single change that saved his company $1m per month in avoided waste. At the end of the year they gave him a $100 Christmas hamper. Guess how many other suggestions he shared. (Just one.)]
1: their rules on who can get the free certs seem to be varied and arbitary. I've seen reports of an opensource developer being given a free cert initially but then come renewal time told that merely having a donation button makes their site count as "ecommerce" and therefore ineligable
OTOH, at $60/yr for an unlimited C2, if you're running a project with public donations, you should be paying. Even if you're still not-for-profit, you're no longer an "individual". Surely that's a little different than my personal email server?
$13333 @ $79/hr is 168hrs 46mins 19.7 seconds. What kind of employer pays you in units of fractions of a second? Also, 168 hours a month is more than "a few hours". Hell, it's a 40 hour week.
I suspect your spam is dishonest and wish to speak to your supervisor.
By the way, you seem to have forgotten (or misunderstood) that there are multiple drive candidates being tested here. The null device producing thrust anyway indicates that the supposed mechanism of the second drive (the Cannae drive, *NOT* the EmDrive) is wrong. However, according to the inventor of the EmDrive, [...] then the supposedly-null device doesn't (dis)prove anything at all and needs no further explanation.
And this is the sort of thing that happens with all these fringe-physics/alt-physics devices. (Also conspiracy theorists.) There's no negative finding that doesn't somehow still confirm their beliefs. See Dean Drive, GIT, or the anti-gravity disc for past examples.
The NASA tests picked up seismic effects of waves on a seashore 25 miles away. It would take a ridiculously small error to create a false positive. That's why you do null tests, to check you've eliminated noise and contamination. Faffing around afterwards saying "Oh, yeah, but but, ummm, the null article is actually not a null article. Yeah! Wait, that means this is confirmation! Woo! Theory confirmed! Suck it, skeptics!" is not science.
Which is more parsimonious? That the rig picked up noise (tiny unexpected thermal effects, say) in both the test and null articles, or that Shawyer accidentally produced a null article that also produced the magic force?
Perhaps frustrated tech writers like yourself should get together to form their own group (with blackjack and hookers) which picks specific un/underdocumented FOSS projects and "bombs" them with documentation. Self-hosted if the project devs don't realise what they're getting. Gathering professionals, enthusiast volunteers, through to helpful coders.
Eventually the group gains enough reputation that you can start to make demands of projects, in order to raise the general standard of technical/project and user documentation across FOSS projects. Likewise, tutorials, courses, e-textbooks, etc.
FTFA: "The term brings to mind dystopian visions of fighters patrolling near space, but will actually revolve around protecting satellites from space debris orbiting the Earth."
Nationalisation pays the previous owner. It's a compulsory purchase, not just seizing control.
What the Russians are doing is just theft, extralegal, unconstitutional, just as they did with all the energy companies which are the only thing propping up their economy, and media companies. The method is a variation on how organised crime takes over a business, but with the backing of the courts.
Consider how the EPA has extended its mandate to include the CO2 that you exhale and incur simply by eating and making a living and soon will be carbon taxing you... too. [...] Some historic "solutions" came to light January 27, 1945...
That's cute. But parody is better when it's not so exaggerated. Even the US right wing aren't stupid enough, insane enough, to go around saying that the EPA is going to tax breathing, nor invoke Nazi death camps to condemn US environmental regulations. The premise of the joke has to at least be believable.
you just made two assumptions that directly contradict each other. Conservation of momentum follows from Newton's laws of motion.
Newton's laws also fall out of GR at non-relativistic velocities. The inventors say their device is consistent with GR.
If you assume momentum is not conserved
I'm not assuming it, if the device works as advertised, it meets the standard criteria for "reactionless", and thus it can be used to create a free energy machine.
For it not to be able to be used as a free energy machine, it must break some other tenet of physics (such as mass/inertia equivalence, non-locality, no universal frame of reference, etc.) The explanations by the inventors have mostly involved ad-hoc efforts to let it break some tenet, but somehow in a way that doesn't actually break it. "It's exchanging momentum with the inertial state of the background universe, but not by violating non-locality", "it's interacting with virtual particles, but in a way that doesn't violate CoE", "it can't be used to accelerate, only to hover, but totally doesn't violate equivalence," and so on.
There is no difference between "virtual" particles and "real" particles. They obey exactly the same physics.
Virtual particles work in a different way to regular particles, because at the beginning of a reaction the virtual particles always have net zero initial velocity (net zero momentum) WRT the device, regardless of the acceleration of the device; that means the device will have a constant force-per-watt equation regardless of velocity. With regular particles, if you accelerate, you change their velocity relative to you, that changes the force-per-watt equation. The two are not analogous.
(Read my explanation using your "swimmer" analogy.)
And this is the same regardless of what explanation you have for the "fabric" of space, virtual particles, quantum foam, M-theory. They all must have this zero-net-velocity component in order to be consistent with, not just theoretical, but observed general relativity.
Re: Virtual particles becoming "real". However, they steal that energy from something else. For example, when a virtual particle pair is split by the event horizon, the lost partner reduces the mass of the black hole. The net energy must be zero. And it must be uniform, there's no propulsive effect.
[In the case of a "drive", if you push against one partner in a virtual pair, you will be pulled back by the equal-and-opposite virtual partner. The net is zero. Even with Casimir, both sides of the gap are pulled equally. No net force.]
A particle/antiparticle pair initially has zero momentum, but they absolutely can interact with other particles, and that interaction can impart momentum to them.
But not net momentum. Not a force in a single direction.
--
Aside: Doesn't it make you curious that the more careful (and skeptical) the experimenters are with their test rigs, the smaller the measured effect gets?
Doesn't it make you curious that the supposed "null" device, designed by the same people not to produce a force, somehow produced a force on the same test rig? Isn't that what a null hypothesis is for? Doesn't Occam's razor suggest that the experimental protocol is missing an unusual but mundane effect and not a revolutionary unidirectional reactionless propulsion system?
Frankly the whole thing screams of a very technical version of those old perpetual motion devices made from magnets and moving weights and levers arranged on a wheel, which the inventor insists allows one side to experience more force than the other. No matter how many people explain why it can't work, they concoct increasingly elaborate explanations for how it must work. Look! It's turning! Oh it stopped. Well that just means it needs stronger magnets and axles with less friction. (Or in the case of EmDrive, superconducting cavities and higher-Q designs.) Or, in mathematics, like someone encountering the Monty Hall three door problem for the first time.
1. There is no such thing as a "free energy machine".
And that's why skeptics are skeptical of the claims made for the EmDrive.
2. No one is claiming this device is a "free energy machine".
Skeptics are, because all reactionless drives are free energy machines.
You have to put energy in as electricity, and you don't get more energy out than you put in.
However, the power input is constant for the thrust out (Newtons-per-Watt), therefore power input is constant for acceleration (m/s^2-per-Watt), therefore energy input is constant for delta-V (m/s-per-Joule). But the energy out (kinetic energy) is proportional to the square of total velocity (Ek=1/2mv^2). Therefore energy-in increases more slowly than the energy-out. (Energy-in is linear, energy-out is exponential.) At a certain velocity, the energy-out exceeds the energy-in, and the device can be used to power a free energy machine.
It can be hard to get your head around, you may want to actually do the maths to convince yourself. (Fortunately the maths is simple. Basic Newtonian stuff. You get to skip all the GR stuff and just use the proponent's own figures for Newtons-per-Watt.)
3. No one is claiming this device is "reactionless".
Skeptics are. It's the class of device that the EmDrive belongs to. How it actually operates is largely irrelevant. All the proposed mechanisms have the same problem. For example...
it may be pushing against space itself, somewhat analogously to how a swimmer pushes against the water they're swimming through.
Space doesn't work that way.
Say the device interacts with virtual particles, a la Casimir Effect. The physics of virtual particles is not analogous to regular particles. The net velocity of virtual particles is zero, regardless of the velocity of the EmDrive. Hence it is still a "reactionless" drive, for the purposes of physics, even if people are waving their hands and saying it "reacts" with virtual particles. It's not the sort of "reaction" that Conservation of Energy or Momentum need to balance their books.
(The faster a swimmer goes, the more drag they experience, the more power they expend to overcome that drag, the less "efficient" the "device" (this loss of efficiency increases their free-energy transition velocity, so they never reach it.) But virtual particles are always at the same speed as a quantum "swimmer", the swimmer never experiences drag. A water-swimmer can't be used as a free energy machine because they can never reach the transition velocity due to drag. But a quantum-swimmer can. If free energy machines are impossible, then so is quantum swimming.)
The same is true of every proffered mechanism for the EmDrive.
Unfortunately, even though you wouldn't have to supply propellant, you would still need to supply the energy to accelerate it.
Actually you don't. Any reactionless thruster can be turned into a free energy machine. If force-produced is directly proportional to energy-input (eg, the device in TFA gets 31uN/W) regardless of position in the universe and direction of thrust (**), then the change of velocity per unit time is also proportional to energy-input. Linear. But the kinetic energy available is proportional to the square of total velocity. There's a cross over velocity where the increase in kinetic energy is greater than the energy input necessary to produce that change in velocity. Stick a set of reactionless thrusters on a flywheel, hook the hub to a generator, spin it up until the tip-velocity passes the cross-over, and from then on it's a free energy machine. So the potato would have one set of EMdrives powering a generator, and another set for propulsion powered by the generator.
At 31 microNewtons/Watt, the required tip velocity is over 30km/s, a wee bit past material limits. But as the "Q" increases in the EMdrive (predicted for the use superconducting cavities) the cross over velocity drops below 100m/s, well within the tip-velocity of a generator flywheel.
(** An anti-gravity drive that could only act in the direction of existing gravity, and lost efficiency moving out of a gravity well or at speed within a gravity well, wouldn't be a free energy machine. And the inventors of the EMdrive have indeed created some ad-hoc explanation for why theirs loses power at speed (to which every critic screams back "relative to what!") and can thus magically only be used to hover.)
[gewalker said "mN" so I used milliNewtons. I should have checked the paper, it's 30-50 microNewtons (30-50uN). So drop the velocities by 1000. And ignore the rest.]
No, the question is how fast can it accelerate the average potato. NASA reported 30-50 mN of thrust., call it 40. The average potato is about 375 grams, call is 400 even so math is real east. F=m*a or a = F / M or 1e-7 m/sec^2.
40 mN is 0.04N
400g is 0.4kg
a = F/m = 0.04 / 0.4 = 0.1 m/s^2 not 0.0000001 m/s^2.
Therefore accelerating for 3e7 seconds (one year) results in a velocity of 3000 km/s. About 1% of lightspeed. And a distance of 330AU. You'll hit one lightyear in 19 years. Two lightyears in about 28 years, if you turn your potato around to decelerate, you'll deliver your potato to Alpha Century in 56 years. If you want to cook your potato by skimming one of the stars, it'll only take 38 years.
Alien DNA would definitely screw with my Christian belief system.
Why?
You guys survived Earth being round, the heavens not including Heaven, Earth not being the centre of the solar system, then not being the centre of the universe, humans not being the majority of Earth's history and the bible not covering most of human history, and of course not having a single major biblical event (pre-7th century BC) appear in the fossil or archaeological record.
Why would two separate creations of life suddenly throw you?
Slashdot Mirror
Because in finance they already used M to mean 1000, a la "Mille".
Example.
It's been seriously suggested. It would provide them with a secondary income stream, increase the number of "banks" in poorer neighbourhoods (which often have a post office but no bank branches, precisely where people often need physical rather than electronic banking), and would thus replace a lot of pay-day-loan/cheque-cashing/pawnshops which do flock to poorer neighbourhoods and charge extortionate fees/interest, thus saving those communities tens of billions of dollars a year. There's about 60 million Americans who lack access to financial services who could benefit from a Postal Bank.
And, of course, the USPS was a savings bank until the '60s.
Here's a report from the USPS Inspector General. (pdf)
But the current Postmaster General is apparently a classic CEO, an MBA idiot who advocates branch closers, service cuts and fee hikes to "save" the post office. And Obama, of course, is terrified to take on the large banks.
Kaatochacha was noting that "Cash-in-hand jobs" can't be read as "cash in hand-jobs done as a teenager", unlike the original comment.
[Which makes your "black economy" comment doubly unintentionally funny.]
I think you'll find it's more likely this.
even though no one is saying that the differences make anyone "superior" or "inferior" to anyone else, merely "different".
Except, you know, the author of the book being discussed, who specifically did rank races by their superiority. (Whites are genetically predisposed to civilisation, blacks to tribal living, Chinese to business, etc.)
Instead of what you said, I think it's the opposite: Whenever people object to the abuse of their research to support a racist/ideological agenda, people like you scream "That's political correctness!" without even attempting to understand what the objections are.
And if you worked for me and I found you doing this I would fire you on the spot.
"Whereas..."? "...if you tell me..."? "...I'd give you..."?
Huh, nothing, weird. It appears you think only of negative reinforcement. So if your employees double their productivity, you offer them no reward, only threats if they seek a reward.
This leaves them with three choices:
A) Automate a process, tell you. You increase their workload to compensate. Result: Same pay, same workload, plus responsibility for the automation process.
B) Automate a process, don't tell you. Result: Same pay, decreased workload, small risk of getting caught.
C) Don't automate the process. Result: Same pay, same workload, no risk, no extra responsibility.
Logically, employees would chose between B and C, depending on their assessment of the risk of getting caught versus the benefit in halving their workload. No employee capable of automating processes would choose A unless they hadn't personally met you yet.
Meta-result: No improvements in business productivity. Low morale.
A competent business includes,
D) Automate a process, tell management. Have the increase in productivity shared. Result: Increased pay for same workload or same pay for easier workload.
Meta-result: Incentive for all employees to improve business practices. Ongoing improvements. High morale.
[I knew a guy who worked on a production line for a couple of years, suggested a single change that saved his company $1m per month in avoided waste. At the end of the year they gave him a $100 Christmas hamper. Guess how many other suggestions he shared. (Just one.)]
1: their rules on who can get the free certs seem to be varied and arbitary. I've seen reports of an opensource developer being given a free cert initially but then come renewal time told that merely having a donation button makes their site count as "ecommerce" and therefore ineligable
OTOH, at $60/yr for an unlimited C2, if you're running a project with public donations, you should be paying. Even if you're still not-for-profit, you're no longer an "individual". Surely that's a little different than my personal email server?
$13333 @ $79/hr is 168hrs 46mins 19.7 seconds. What kind of employer pays you in units of fractions of a second? Also, 168 hours a month is more than "a few hours". Hell, it's a 40 hour week.
I suspect your spam is dishonest and wish to speak to your supervisor.
LOL ... fsck it, we're going to 30 dimensions. ;-)
Remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
By the way, you seem to have forgotten (or misunderstood) that there are multiple drive candidates being tested here. The null device producing thrust anyway indicates that the supposed mechanism of the second drive (the Cannae drive, *NOT* the EmDrive) is wrong. However, according to the inventor of the EmDrive, [...] then the supposedly-null device doesn't (dis)prove anything at all and needs no further explanation.
And this is the sort of thing that happens with all these fringe-physics/alt-physics devices. (Also conspiracy theorists.) There's no negative finding that doesn't somehow still confirm their beliefs. See Dean Drive, GIT, or the anti-gravity disc for past examples.
The NASA tests picked up seismic effects of waves on a seashore 25 miles away. It would take a ridiculously small error to create a false positive. That's why you do null tests, to check you've eliminated noise and contamination. Faffing around afterwards saying "Oh, yeah, but but, ummm, the null article is actually not a null article. Yeah! Wait, that means this is confirmation! Woo! Theory confirmed! Suck it, skeptics!" is not science.
Which is more parsimonious? That the rig picked up noise (tiny unexpected thermal effects, say) in both the test and null articles, or that Shawyer accidentally produced a null article that also produced the magic force?
So how does that put the burden on skeptics?
Perhaps frustrated tech writers like yourself should get together to form their own group (with blackjack and hookers) which picks specific un/underdocumented FOSS projects and "bombs" them with documentation. Self-hosted if the project devs don't realise what they're getting. Gathering professionals, enthusiast volunteers, through to helpful coders.
Eventually the group gains enough reputation that you can start to make demands of projects, in order to raise the general standard of technical/project and user documentation across FOSS projects. Likewise, tutorials, courses, e-textbooks, etc.
what a great idea! Lets blow shit up in space
FTFA: "The term brings to mind dystopian visions of fighters patrolling near space, but will actually revolve around protecting satellites from space debris orbiting the Earth."
Nationalisation pays the previous owner. It's a compulsory purchase, not just seizing control.
What the Russians are doing is just theft, extralegal, unconstitutional, just as they did with all the energy companies which are the only thing propping up their economy, and media companies. The method is a variation on how organised crime takes over a business, but with the backing of the courts.
It's Roman numerals. MM=2000. Legislators like Roman numerals, makes them look clever. But they obviously forgot how to write the 400 (CD) in $2400.
That's a pretty big bill, I guess, but with a hundred sponsors it works out at $24 each. I assume they all got hats.
Consider how the EPA has extended its mandate to include the CO2 that you exhale and incur simply by eating and making a living and soon will be carbon taxing you... too. [...] Some historic "solutions" came to light January 27, 1945...
That's cute. But parody is better when it's not so exaggerated. Even the US right wing aren't stupid enough, insane enough, to go around saying that the EPA is going to tax breathing, nor invoke Nazi death camps to condemn US environmental regulations. The premise of the joke has to at least be believable.
you just made two assumptions that directly contradict each other. Conservation of momentum follows from Newton's laws of motion.
Newton's laws also fall out of GR at non-relativistic velocities. The inventors say their device is consistent with GR.
If you assume momentum is not conserved
I'm not assuming it, if the device works as advertised, it meets the standard criteria for "reactionless", and thus it can be used to create a free energy machine.
For it not to be able to be used as a free energy machine, it must break some other tenet of physics (such as mass/inertia equivalence, non-locality, no universal frame of reference, etc.) The explanations by the inventors have mostly involved ad-hoc efforts to let it break some tenet, but somehow in a way that doesn't actually break it. "It's exchanging momentum with the inertial state of the background universe, but not by violating non-locality", "it's interacting with virtual particles, but in a way that doesn't violate CoE", "it can't be used to accelerate, only to hover, but totally doesn't violate equivalence," and so on.
There is no difference between "virtual" particles and "real" particles. They obey exactly the same physics.
Virtual particles work in a different way to regular particles, because at the beginning of a reaction the virtual particles always have net zero initial velocity (net zero momentum) WRT the device, regardless of the acceleration of the device; that means the device will have a constant force-per-watt equation regardless of velocity. With regular particles, if you accelerate, you change their velocity relative to you, that changes the force-per-watt equation. The two are not analogous.
(Read my explanation using your "swimmer" analogy.)
And this is the same regardless of what explanation you have for the "fabric" of space, virtual particles, quantum foam, M-theory. They all must have this zero-net-velocity component in order to be consistent with, not just theoretical, but observed general relativity.
Re: Virtual particles becoming "real".
However, they steal that energy from something else. For example, when a virtual particle pair is split by the event horizon, the lost partner reduces the mass of the black hole. The net energy must be zero. And it must be uniform, there's no propulsive effect.
[In the case of a "drive", if you push against one partner in a virtual pair, you will be pulled back by the equal-and-opposite virtual partner. The net is zero. Even with Casimir, both sides of the gap are pulled equally. No net force.]
A particle/antiparticle pair initially has zero momentum, but they absolutely can interact with other particles, and that interaction can impart momentum to them.
But not net momentum. Not a force in a single direction.
--
Aside: Doesn't it make you curious that the more careful (and skeptical) the experimenters are with their test rigs, the smaller the measured effect gets?
Doesn't it make you curious that the supposed "null" device, designed by the same people not to produce a force, somehow produced a force on the same test rig? Isn't that what a null hypothesis is for? Doesn't Occam's razor suggest that the experimental protocol is missing an unusual but mundane effect and not a revolutionary unidirectional reactionless propulsion system?
Frankly the whole thing screams of a very technical version of those old perpetual motion devices made from magnets and moving weights and levers arranged on a wheel, which the inventor insists allows one side to experience more force than the other. No matter how many people explain why it can't work, they concoct increasingly elaborate explanations for how it must work. Look! It's turning! Oh it stopped. Well that just means it needs stronger magnets and axles with less friction. (Or in the case of EmDrive, superconducting cavities and higher-Q designs.) Or, in mathematics, like someone encountering the Monty Hall three door problem for the first time.
1. There is no such thing as a "free energy machine".
And that's why skeptics are skeptical of the claims made for the EmDrive.
2. No one is claiming this device is a "free energy machine".
Skeptics are, because all reactionless drives are free energy machines.
You have to put energy in as electricity, and you don't get more energy out than you put in.
However, the power input is constant for the thrust out (Newtons-per-Watt), therefore power input is constant for acceleration (m/s^2-per-Watt), therefore energy input is constant for delta-V (m/s-per-Joule). But the energy out (kinetic energy) is proportional to the square of total velocity (Ek=1/2mv^2). Therefore energy-in increases more slowly than the energy-out. (Energy-in is linear, energy-out is exponential.) At a certain velocity, the energy-out exceeds the energy-in, and the device can be used to power a free energy machine.
It can be hard to get your head around, you may want to actually do the maths to convince yourself. (Fortunately the maths is simple. Basic Newtonian stuff. You get to skip all the GR stuff and just use the proponent's own figures for Newtons-per-Watt.)
3. No one is claiming this device is "reactionless".
Skeptics are. It's the class of device that the EmDrive belongs to. How it actually operates is largely irrelevant. All the proposed mechanisms have the same problem. For example...
it may be pushing against space itself, somewhat analogously to how a swimmer pushes against the water they're swimming through.
Space doesn't work that way.
Say the device interacts with virtual particles, a la Casimir Effect. The physics of virtual particles is not analogous to regular particles. The net velocity of virtual particles is zero, regardless of the velocity of the EmDrive. Hence it is still a "reactionless" drive, for the purposes of physics, even if people are waving their hands and saying it "reacts" with virtual particles. It's not the sort of "reaction" that Conservation of Energy or Momentum need to balance their books.
(The faster a swimmer goes, the more drag they experience, the more power they expend to overcome that drag, the less "efficient" the "device" (this loss of efficiency increases their free-energy transition velocity, so they never reach it.) But virtual particles are always at the same speed as a quantum "swimmer", the swimmer never experiences drag. A water-swimmer can't be used as a free energy machine because they can never reach the transition velocity due to drag. But a quantum-swimmer can. If free energy machines are impossible, then so is quantum swimming.)
The same is true of every proffered mechanism for the EmDrive.
Should I fight against online voting in our municipality?
- Yes
- Confusingly also yes
- No
- Very no
- Cowboy Neal is my "straight ticket"
Unfortunately, even though you wouldn't have to supply propellant, you would still need to supply the energy to accelerate it.
Actually you don't. Any reactionless thruster can be turned into a free energy machine. If force-produced is directly proportional to energy-input (eg, the device in TFA gets 31uN/W) regardless of position in the universe and direction of thrust (**), then the change of velocity per unit time is also proportional to energy-input. Linear. But the kinetic energy available is proportional to the square of total velocity. There's a cross over velocity where the increase in kinetic energy is greater than the energy input necessary to produce that change in velocity. Stick a set of reactionless thrusters on a flywheel, hook the hub to a generator, spin it up until the tip-velocity passes the cross-over, and from then on it's a free energy machine. So the potato would have one set of EMdrives powering a generator, and another set for propulsion powered by the generator.
At 31 microNewtons/Watt, the required tip velocity is over 30km/s, a wee bit past material limits. But as the "Q" increases in the EMdrive (predicted for the use superconducting cavities) the cross over velocity drops below 100m/s, well within the tip-velocity of a generator flywheel.
(** An anti-gravity drive that could only act in the direction of existing gravity, and lost efficiency moving out of a gravity well or at speed within a gravity well, wouldn't be a free energy machine. And the inventors of the EMdrive have indeed created some ad-hoc explanation for why theirs loses power at speed (to which every critic screams back "relative to what!") and can thus magically only be used to hover.)
[gewalker said "mN" so I used milliNewtons. I should have checked the paper, it's 30-50 microNewtons (30-50uN). So drop the velocities by 1000. And ignore the rest.]
Oops, the paper said microNewtons, it was gewalker who turned that into "mN".
40mN is a 40 milliNewtons, or 0.04 Newtons.
40uN is 40 microNewtons. So up your final result by another three orders of magnitude.
No, the question is how fast can it accelerate the average potato. NASA reported 30-50 mN of thrust., call it 40. The average potato is about 375 grams, call is 400 even so math is real east. F=m*a or a = F / M or 1e-7 m/sec^2.
40 mN is 0.04N
400g is 0.4kg
a = F/m = 0.04 / 0.4 = 0.1 m/s^2 not 0.0000001 m/s^2.
Therefore accelerating for 3e7 seconds (one year) results in a velocity of 3000 km/s. About 1% of lightspeed. And a distance of 330AU. You'll hit one lightyear in 19 years. Two lightyears in about 28 years, if you turn your potato around to decelerate, you'll deliver your potato to Alpha Century in 56 years. If you want to cook your potato by skimming one of the stars, it'll only take 38 years.
what are the odds that a rock carrying hearty earth life made it out there?
More interesting is whether a rock carrying hearty Enceladean life ever made it here.
Alien DNA would definitely screw with my Christian belief system.
Why?
You guys survived Earth being round, the heavens not including Heaven, Earth not being the centre of the solar system, then not being the centre of the universe, humans not being the majority of Earth's history and the bible not covering most of human history, and of course not having a single major biblical event (pre-7th century BC) appear in the fossil or archaeological record.
Why would two separate creations of life suddenly throw you?