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MasterCaneman -> RE: I think I have a way to straighten out politicians in DC (11/7/2013 12:37:08 PM)
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ORIGINAL: jlf1961
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ORIGINAL: MasterCaneman
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ORIGINAL: jlf1961
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ORIGINAL: MasterCaneman
...And avoids the unsightly six-hundred mile diameter crater and worldwide ejecta shower and nuclear winter that exterminates all higher-order life on Earth as we know it...
I did say there might be some ecological side effects that would be problematic.
And since we have no way to banish people off planet to some distant star system with an earth like planet as colonists....
Hmmm, unless I'm wrong, according to Pournelle, the Alderson Drive should be coming along any day now. Unfortunately, with the Soviet Union history, the chances of a the Co-Dominium occurring are somewhat reduced. I do predict that within thirty years, we'll launch a true interstellar probe, and who knows? Maybe some egghead will have a Newtonian moment and figure out a shortcut to the stars. Stranger things have happened, and the math for it already exists. But, returning to the original intent of this thread, D.C. stands in the way. They don't want space travel to occur for the simple fact that a new frontier means that people can escape from the slavery it imposes on them. Only when it suits their needs, wants, and desires will it be allowed to advance. To quote Col. Corso: "Everything you've seen in Star Trek and Star Wars we can do already. The powers-that-be choose not to promote those technologies for reasons unrelated to technical issues."
Actually, Physicist Miguel Alcubierre has worked out a theory that will work under the current laws of physics for warp drive, it just depends on a rather unique power source, dark energy, or a pet black hole, or maybe harnessing the energy of a star generating a gamma ray burst at the exact instant the burst is generated.
It was postulated that everything in the movie 2001 could have been built by the end of the 70's if all the money had not been spent on the Vietnam war. But would that have kept Pan Am from going out of business?
I tried to call up the NASA white paper on this subject, but it's a dead link now, so I reverted to the Wikipedia article, from which I quote, "...Chris Van den Broeck of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, in 1999, tried to address the potential issues.[18] By contracting the 3+1-dimensional surface area of the "bubble" being transported by the drive, while at the same time expanding the three-dimensional volume contained inside, Van den Broeck was able to reduce the total energy needed to transport small atoms to less than three solar masses. Later, by slightly modifying the Van den Broeck metric, Serguei Krasnikov reduced the necessary total amount of negative energy[disambiguation needed] to a few milligrams.[1][13]
In 2012, physicist Harold White and collaborators announced that modifying the geometry of exotic matter could reduce the mass–energy requirements for a macroscopic space ship from the equivalent of the planet Jupiter to that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft (~700 kg)[5] or less,[19] and stated their intent to perform small-scale experiments in constructing warp fields.[5] White proposed changing the shape of the warp bubble from a sphere to a doughnut shape.[20][21] Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warp can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more.[5] According to White, a modified Michelson-Morley interferometer could test the idea: one of the legs of the interferometer would appear to be a slightly different length when the test devices were energised.[19].."
The math is sound, much of the technical expertise and hardware is extant, all that remains is the desire, dedication, and most importantly of all, the money to begin the initial steps. Even if they build a functional drive tomorrow, we're still a century away from actualization because we (as a species) need to really learn how to exist in deep space. Any such vessel would, by necessity, have to be huge in order to justify the expense needed to construct and crew it. To do so, it would require a substantial amount of on-orbit infrastructure and resource extraction from native sources rather than from Earth itself. Planetary Resources has already started this process, but it will take a few decades before it becomes economically feasible to think along these lines.
This is why I personally feel that nationalized space agencies have outlived their usefulness. They're too beholden to the ruling party/electorate and the pawns of patronage and other forces. While I am loathe to even utter this, an organization like the UN would be better suited for humanity's long-term presence in space, rather than national governments or business. In the US, the two and four-year election cycles are the forces most responsible for our current piddle-party in NEO we call a space program. Virtually everything up there is only to serve issues and agendas down here. Even better would be a non-governmental organization totally independent of any business or government control (within reason, of course). Think of the Knights Templar in space, if you will. It would prove a nice counterpoint to fiction as well.
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