http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Star_Trek-like_warp_drive_theorized_999.html

Great, now we just need to create, stabalize and harness the power from a singularity, eazy peazy! =)

Perhaps the LHC will teach us a few things about minature black holes.


Cheers,

And/Or end the world!

Seriously having read recently in to the doomday theories of this. Even though they assure us, its a little scary.

Makes sense since black holes warp space/time already.

There's a great book by Alan Dean Foster (Parallelities I think it is?) about a scientist who develops a machine that causes a reporter to slip through worlds. In one world the scientist's machine destroyed the environment and everyone is suffering in a dying world. Great read, and every time someone mentions the LHC I think about that chapter. Damn mad scientists.

A better explanation:

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Traveling_Faster_Than_the_Speed_of_Light_999.html


The Baylor physicists estimate that the amount of energy needed to influence the extra dimension is equivalent to the entire mass of Jupiter being converted into pure energy for a ship measuring roughly 10 meters by 10 meters by 10 meters.


We are going to need a few more gerbils running on treadmills me thinks.

Cheers,

Do anti-matter explosions come even close?

The potential is there Six, but humans are only in the very early stages (by many orders or magnitude) in developing technologies to create, contain, deliver and harness the power from matter / anti matter collisions.

Here are some antimatter facts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter)):

ENERGY:

The energy in a few grams of antimatter is enough to transport an unmanned spacecraft to Mars in a few minutes. In comparison, the Mars Global Surveyor took eleven months to reach Mars using conventional means. It is hoped that antimatter could be used as fuel for interplanetary travel or possibly interstellar travel, but it is also feared that, as a side-effect of antimatter propulsion, the design of antimatter weapons might become an equal reality.

An antimatter particle colliding with a matter particle releases 100% of the energy contained within the particles, while a hydrogen bomb only releases about 0.7% of this energy.


CURRENT COST OF PRODUCTION:

Antimatter is said to be the most expensive substance in existence, with an estimated cost of $300 billion per milligram. Antimatter production costs, in mass production, are almost linearly tied in with electricity costs, so economical pure-antimatter thrust applications are unlikely to come online without the advent of such technologies as deuterium-tritium fusion power (assuming that such a power source actually would prove to be cheap).

Many experts, however, dispute these claims as being far too optimistic by many orders of magnitude. They point out that in 2004; the annual production of antiprotons at CERN was several picograms at a cost of $20 million. This means to produce 1 gram of antimatter, CERN would need to spend 100 quadrillion dollars and run the antimatter factory for 100 billion years.


CONTAINMENT:

Antimatter cannot be stored in a container made of ordinary matter because antimatter reacts with any matter it touches, annihilating itself and the container.


The potential is there but we are way off any real applications.


Cheers,

I remember in Star Trek they used "magnetic bottles" to contain the antimatter, and keep it from physically contacting the walls of the warp core.

This sort of stuff is fascinating (not to sound too Spock-like) to me. The feasibality using today's standards are always a nice reality check to my imagination, though...

The question is, when the quote was made about transferring the mass of Jupiter into pure energy, was it meant that the conversion would be by conventional means (~0.7% efficiency) or if it would take the entire energy of the entire mass of Jupiter to do it. If that is the case, I don't think anti-mater is anywhere close to the answer, and that the possibility of using this technology for travel is not just a long way off, but more than likely impossible.

As an aside, isn't 1g of anti-mater enough to destroy the world many times over?

The reaction of 1 kg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram) of antimatter with 1 kg of matter would produce 1.8×1017 J (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule) (180 petajoules) of energy (by the mass-energy equivalence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass-energy_equivalence) formula E = mc²), or the rough equivalent of 47 megatons of TNT. For comparison, Tsar Bomba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba), the largest nuclear weapon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon) ever detonated, reacted an estimated yield of 57 Megatons, which required the use of hundreds of kilograms of fissile material (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fissile_material) (Uranium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium)/Plutonium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium)).

I remember reading somewhere about some guys shipping the CERN (?) guys a red crowbar....

Hehe, that's awesome.

That sounds somewhat similar to what Mass Effect (great game, if you own a 360 you should at the very least rent it to give it a try) uses to explain faster than light space travel, except they had gigantic relays floating in space that harnessed the energy to 'slingshot' a ship through space-time to get to its destination.

Interesting stuff.