Star Trek warp drive is a possibility, say scientists: To boldly go and fuck up things elsewhere too?
Interesting news from the always fascinating world of science:
Two physicists have boldly gone where no reputable scientists should go and devised a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light. The advance could mean that Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive are now no longer the exclusive domain of science fiction writers.
Dr Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy have come up with a new twist on an existing idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics. In their scheme, in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, a starship could “warp” space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it.
So, now we may be getting warp speed space craft to fool around with.
That’s wonderful news, of course but my mother always told me I had to eat my vegs before I could have any dessert – and I do feel the same about this new technology.
When you look at planet earth, and you see we still haven’t developed any safe and clean energy programmes, we still have famines and plagues, we still fight our wars over territories and resources, and we still haven’t outgrown our childish racial prejudices, and still haven’t found a way to peacefully deal with the various religious differences we have…
… well, if you consider all that, I would suggest we should see this whole new warp drive thing as a variant of that same veggie & dessert principle.
So, maybe we should first try to fix all those (mostly silly) earthly problems before we boldly go and fuck up all those other places as well.
Anyway, if we will be heading out to all those unknown destinations, saying hello to the rest of the universe and to all who may be out there, I do hope that humanity’s representatives will dress a little bit better than the old star ship Enterprise crew did.
I never really got that whole ‘Let’s boldly go to a pajama party’ thing…:
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August 16th, 2008 at 15:37
The Telegraph is occasionally phased by these new fangled horseless carriages so the story is a little off. There’s various FTL theories and stuff in development, a couple of them are viable, and warp drive could well be the one. In a sci-fi book I’ve yet to write I used two, hyperspace and wormholes, just for the hell of it (and its important to the plot)
But i digress. For any technology like this to work we will probably need a new, extremely powerful, power source. Said source would have many applications and would probably be able to be used to clean up our bedroom that we’ve left in a mess because we’ve been partying for 10000 years. The technologies for that kind of thing are far in advance of the FTL stuff. I’m pretty sure with a clean fission reactor we could scrub the atmosphere, purify the sea and produce an abundance of food using various tech that’s in the works.
If you don’t already, check out grinding.be A lot of art and stuff, but also cutting edge technology snippits.
August 16th, 2008 at 21:16
Thanks for the comment and the grinding.be tip; I’d never heard of them.
A new, extremely powerful power source… As I once mentioned in another post: It’s a pity we can’t harness the rain as we can with solar energy. If we could Holland, England and especially Scotland and Ireland would have reached the stars by now.
Harnessing human folly & arrogance though, now that would be a powerful source indeed,
J.