E8 Theory That Unifies Quantum with Relativity... Maybe

Started by SGOS, September 10, 2019, 02:13:45 PM

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trdsf

Quote from: Unbeliever on September 15, 2019, 05:52:14 PM
Here's another link, see if it works:

https://agenparl.eu/the-good-kind-of-crazy-the-quest-for-exotic-propulsion/

Thank you, yes!  Interesting article; NASA has been looking at weird technologies for a while.  I'm trying to find the episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage where they spoke with Dr Robert Frisbee, who had been in charge of JPL's advanced propulsion concepts section.  He made an interesting point: even a towering genius like Da Vinci, who himself strove for flight, could not imagine what form aircraft eventually took, even the earliest ones.  The British Interplanetary Society tried to imagine interstellar craft in the 1930s, and even the 1960s work of Dyson and Bussard et al. may be miles away from what the final designs of interstellar spacecraft look like because we don't really know all the problems to be overcome yet.

Really, we're only working on the most obvious one right now -- how the hell do you move something fast enough to travel huge distances without having to tug along a couple comets that can be electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen and recycled into rocket fuel, and how do you stop at the destination rather than flashing through so fast you only have time to take three blurry photos.

So yes, to ever get out of our planetary back yard, a program like NIAC is a great place to start.  Regardless of whether they get a useful drive in the next five or ten or twenty years, they're going to learn something interesting out of what they're funding.
"My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." -- Barbara Jordan

Unbeliever

I don't think anything they're currently working on will rival the Alcubierre drive, but if we take baby steps we might eventually get far.
God Not Found
"There is a sucker born-again every minute." - C. Spellman