New Test Suggests NASA's "Impossible" EM Drive Will Work In Space
125 replies, posted
[QUOTE=cartman300;47642188]Comfort. Imagine buzzing with such a vehicle over rocky terrain.[/QUOTE]
[t]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/HZ-1_Aerocycle_flown_by_soldier.png[/t]
yes comfort....nothing like a wizzing blade underneath you to sooth the mind
[QUOTE=Fish Muffin;47640580]Too late for tall ships, too early for star ships.[/QUOTE]
But also too late for black plague, most of the world living under the rule of absolutist monarchies where citizens are just a level above slaves, hopefully too late to experience wide swept drafts into global scale wars or wars that last for decades. Also, probably too early for crippling depletion of natural sources, severe pollution and desert spreading making vast areas uninhabitable and inhospitable, energy crisis making free personal travel infeasible...
Whenever you feel like you don't get enough adventure, realize that at the age of coveted "tall ships", statistically, you would probably spend your 40 years of life expectancy doing hard labour in the village where you were born and probably not even get to read a book about the ships since you couldn't read.
If you get a mid-range job anywhere in the west, you can save up and sit onto a comfy plane that's nowhere near as likely to get you killed as the ships back then, and takes you to destination of your choosing anywhere in the world.
It might feel cheap and not like a real adventure, but remember how much adventuring can you do with relatively little resources, while still relatively very safe. Meanwhile back then, adventuring was only for the very few lucky ones who had a monarch to sponsor their shenanigans, and even then their life expectancy was often like two or three trips.
Also consider that right now, you can go and buy a beef steak for reasonable amount of money, and cook it on real oil, siding it with real vegetables and enjoy it fresh. Quite feasible predictions for the future show that we are looking at global hunger in foreseeable future, and while I myself am an advocate of adapting to cheaper, more ecological food sources, be it adapting the menu with things like insects or be it moving onto synthetic proteins altogether, it probably won't be anything like having a good slab of meat that used to run around on the open field.
Adventures of both future and past are being romanticized a lot, but there's tons of adventure waiting for you right on your doorstep, and for all you know, your own personal opportunity might be bigger than of the generations before or generations after you.
[QUOTE=Electrocuter;47641668]We already smash atoms going close to light speeds against each other and nothing has been destroyed by it.
Everyone feared the LHC would create a black hole.[/QUOTE]
I wasn't really saying that that's what was going to happen, more of a hypothetical. If what I said was possible, then it's not like we would really have time to care about it.
[QUOTE=paul simon;47642372]um if slowly pushing the enemy away one by one by attaching spooky devices on them is your plan of attack then maybe[/QUOTE]
I dunno man, a projectile that is going close enough to the speed of light can destroy the entire earth. It might take a while to get it as far as neccesary for it to accelerate at such speed, tho.
[QUOTE=greendevil;47642852]Just because we've never seen a physical phenomenon happen doesn't mean it can't.
I've always been really skeptical about definitive physical "laws". Where do we get the nerve to be so sure?[/QUOTE]
Laws are physical relationships dervived to be true in their various fields, and assumed to be true in most others. They can be proven false but we have shown pretty thoroughly that conservation of mass is one of the most true laws there is
[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;47639369]God damn. It's so hard to want to make any sort of comment until this thing is sorted out because the journalism on it is absolutely the worst:
[url=http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/nasa-says-emdrive-does-work-it-may-have-also-created-star-trek-warp-drive-1499098]Nasa says EmDrive does work [B]and it may have also created a Star Trek warp drive[/B][/url]
No. No one with a decent reputation thinks this is a warp drive. A lot of this shit is coming up in forum posts and whatnot, not peer-reviewed results that have been critiqued and responded to by experts (and that's largely because no one working on the drive has any idea why it "works").[/QUOTE]
So when do we get visited by Vulcans?
[QUOTE=Sableye;47644329]They can be proven false but we have shown pretty thoroughly that [B]conservation of mass is one of the most true laws there is[/B][/QUOTE]
Mmmno... Mass is not conserved. Mass-energy is conserved. See electron-positron annihilation. It starts in a state with positive mass and ends in a state with zero mass.
Would be freaky if we are actually messing with some force or physical law that we have no understanding about.
[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;47644387]Mmmno... Mass is not conserved. Mass-energy is conserved. See electron-positron annihilation. It starts in a state with positive mass and ends in a state with zero mass.[/QUOTE]
Ya but in general you put mass into a system and get equal mass out even if there's a chemical reaction
You also put energy into a system you expect when you account for all the resistances and energy types that can occur to get the same energy out before you get into quantum physics
[QUOTE=Sableye;47646164]Ya but in general you put mass into a system and get equal mass out even if there's a chemical reaction
You also put energy into a system you expect when you account for all the resistances and energy types that can occur to get the same energy out before you get into quantum physics[/QUOTE]
But conservation of energy is always true, even in quantum mechanics. It's not always true that if you put mass into a system you get an equal mass out. Again, you can have massless final states of massive particle interactions. There's even mass loss in radioactivity even if the radiation is massless.
My one hope for the future is that all the super high tech sciency bullshit ends up having the cheesiest, most obvious and tacky names ever.
[QUOTE=Ganerumo;47650669]My one hope for the future is that all the super high tech sciency bullshit ends up having the cheesiest, most obvious and tacky names ever.[/QUOTE]
Someday, real life will reach Geordi La Forge levels of technobabble.
We built this?
[QUOTE=Pilotguy97;47639429]Thousands of office clerks must be sacrificed daily just to keep the EMDrive functioning.[/QUOTE]- virgin blood is best,
- goat blood must be no older than 3 days,
- entrails must be removed and apportioned either before death, or no later than 30min
- candles must be sorted by tallest in back to shortest in front - never the other way around!
Most Important - pentegrams should be drawn from the center to the outside and left to right
[QUOTE=Awesomecaek;47643450]
It might feel cheap and not like a real adventure, but remember how much adventuring can you do with relatively little resources, while still relatively very safe. Meanwhile back then, adventuring was only for the very few lucky ones who had a monarch to sponsor their shenanigans, and even then their life expectancy was often like two or three trips.
[/QUOTE]
Not to mention life on a tallship was shit.
First of all, you're probably working there because you're a criminal trying to get away, or you're a poverty stricken peasant. You're not going to be a captain unless you manage to not die after decades of working as a deckhand. I hope you like beef soaked in salt because that's all you'll eat for months. I hope you're okay with being wet and salty for months. You'll be bathing and washing your clothes in saltwater. You're a shit-tier laborer so you'll live in the worst part of the ship- the forecastle. It moves the most in the waves so you'll get sea sick often. It's also subject to flooding because it's in front of the bulkheads. You're bathroom will be the railing of the bow, and you'll spend your days climbing up and down the mast, pulling ropes, and scrubbing wood.
Oh but you'll get to see the world if you don't die of starvation, thirst, piracy, getting lost, sinking, falling overboard, scurvy, getting injured, insubordination, and many other things.
[QUOTE=OvB;47651072]Not to mention life on a tallship was shit.
First of all, you're probably working there because you're a criminal trying to get away, or you're a poverty stricken peasant. You're not going to be a captain unless you manage to not die after decades of working as a deckhand. I hope you like beef soaked in salt because that's all you'll eat for months. I hope you're okay with being wet and salty for months. You'll be bathing and washing your clothes in saltwater. You're a shit-tier laborer so you'll live in the worst part of the ship- the forecastle. It moves the most in the waves so you'll get sea sick often. It's also subject to flooding because it's in front of the bulkheads. You're bathroom will be the railing of the bow, and you'll spend your days climbing up and down the mast, pulling ropes, and scrubbing wood.
Oh but you'll get to see the world if you don't die of starvation, thirst, piracy, getting lost, sinking, falling overboard, scurvy, getting injured, insubordination, and many other things.[/QUOTE]
Most people are salty anyway, at least living on a tall ship would just make it reasonable is all.
Just make sure the ship doesn't have a LAN for Dota-clones, otherwise everyone would be struck down by hypernatremia.
where were you when we figured out how to sail across the universe
Wonder what it'd be like to discover a planet and encounter actual sentient life in it's early development
and conquer the shit out of them.
[QUOTE=mcgrath618;47642200]Space. The final frontier.[/QUOTE]
The sky calls to us;
If this EMdrive also ends up somehow being the way to develop warp drives that's a little too insane to think about, I doubt that will happen though. The drive itself is enough of a thing to try and rationalize being real
Let's calm down we are talking about all this sci-fi galactic space travel when we aren't even cool enough to have flying cars yet.
There so much sensationalism in all of this I just can't get my excite level to surpass my level of skepticism
If nothing else this being totally confusing and ambiguous may get the funding needed for further tests so people can actually figure out how this works.
[QUOTE=Eva-1337;47652655]Wonder what it'd be like to discover a planet and encounter actual sentient life in it's early development
and conquer the shit out of them.[/QUOTE]
It'd probably be like the Columbian Exchange, except the spider-folk would be falling off their castle walls rather than merely shivering under their diseased blankets. Or maybe not, since Earth germs would probably be incompatible with their biology, but they'd still be using bows and arrows against the lightning, especially when they haven't even seen the heat ray yet.
And there'd be one hell of an outcry back home unless the people's voice gets crushed beneath authoritarian jackboots.
Is this the same as electron propulsion? If so didnt this happen like a few months ago? Not the sketchy test but the confirmation in a real vacuum? Maybe I'm confusing this with something else but i thought i saw this in like February or march
[QUOTE=greendevil;47642852]I've always been really skeptical about definitive physical "laws". Where do we get the nerve to be so sure?[/QUOTE]
Well, when the technology you use every day is implicitly based on the assumption that what we call 'laws' are, in fact, correct, demonstrating their accuracy in the real world, pretty much. By all means, you can posit that relativity isn't true- but you better have a good explanation for why geostationary satellites that take relativistic effects into account on their internal clocks stay accurate. The various conservation laws are even more fundamental and rigid than that.
It's theoretically possible that there's a loophole in the laws of physics we've yet to understand, but this guy hasn't identified anything that stands up to scrutiny and, being an engineer with no formal scientific education, really doesn't have the qualifications to be questioning basic laws of physics. More than that, the chances that our understanding of physics is fundamentally flawed in such a specific way that our observations are correct yet loopholes exist are much, much, much lower than the chances that an amateur is just wrong. Popular science journalists loves crackpot science because it sounds cool and they love the narrative of underdog vs the stodgy institution, but we see this all the time (dozens of perpetual motion machines claimed since 2000, for starters) and inevitably they're proven wrong.
When Shawyer submits to an academic journal and undergoes peer review, I may start being optimistic. Until then, it's sensationalist junk.
[QUOTE=cody8295;47653062]Is this the same as electron propulsion? If so didnt this happen like a few months ago? Not the sketchy test but the confirmation in a real vacuum? Maybe I'm confusing this with something else but i thought i saw this in like February or march[/QUOTE]
I assume you're referring to ion engines, but this isn't the same concept - not that I really understand how this is supposed to work, but ion engines [I]do[/I] have propellant.
[QUOTE=kweh;47650997]
Most Important - pentagrams should be drawn from the center to the outside and left to right[/QUOTE]
What does this mean?
[QUOTE=Krinkels;47653606]What does this mean?[/QUOTE]
Means y'all be summoning the devil the wrong way!
[QUOTE=Eva-1337;47652655]Wonder what it'd be like to discover a planet and encounter actual sentient life in it's early development
and conquer the shit out of them.[/QUOTE]
It would be too easy for us unless they are on the beginning of the industrial revolution, then we would have a fight on our hands.
Assuming we bring or rapidly manufacture guns and ammo, and nuclear weapons because we can't travel the galaxy without a few in the trunk
[URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtVXAugaSm0"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtVXAugaSm0[/URL]
literally everyone in this thread who has mentioned Star Trek is listening to this as they read this article
at least i hope
Inb4 Voyager is worst Star Trek
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