It’s been wild around the tinfoil house lately, wilder than I liked it, oh well. Life would be boring if it was the same everyday, wouldn’t it?
From Discovery News
May 18, 2007 — A sinkhole in Mexico seems an unlikely spot to prepare for a search for extraterrestrial life, but that’s exactly where a team of scientists and engineers have gathered this week to test a NASA robotic probe that may one day dive into an ocean on another world.
The sinkhole itself is far from ordinary. It could swallow the 1,046-foot tall Chrysler Building with room to spare, though nobody yet knows the chasm’s true depth.
That’s one goal of the expedition to El Zacatón, located in central Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
Some scientists suspect the vertical cave, or cenote, could be deep enough to hold a stack of three Chrysler Buildings.
I studied about cenotes when I was reading about the Mayas in a class I was taking. To them, the cenotes were entryways to the underworld. They tossed their sacrifices down them too. Alien Ocean Probe Practices in Mexico
This next article made me chuckle. After all this talk I go though about UFOs, anti-gravity drives, wormholes and warp-drives, the next best thing in rocket technology is cow farts:
The trouble with exploring the solar system is that there just aren’t any rocket fueling stations out there. That won’t be the case if future planet-hopping astronauts are equipped with a new kind of rocket engine which burns two gases that are already in good supply on several other planets: methane and oxygen. Methane doesn’t exactly have high-tech, Trekkie credentials, being better known for its association with flatulent cows and natural gas. But the latest tests of a prototype supersonic methane rocket engine by XCOR Aerospace show that the good old swamp gas has interplanetary potential. “It’s not as nice as kerosene,” said XCOR Aerospace’s Aleta Jackson. “But it’s available on Mars and other parts of the solar system.”
That abundance on other worlds is crucial if spacecraft are ever going break free of dependence on earthly fuels and still travel at speeds that will get them to other planets in a timely fashion.
Hot sh*t 21st century tech? We should be sending probes down wormhole nexus points by now. The defence industry has a strangle-hold monopoly on rocket tech. Don’t need starship drives when all you need are missile launching platforms from orbit I guess. I’m not chuckling about that. Methane To Power Rockets of The Future?
Larry Niven is a Grand Master of Science Fiction and one of my all-time favorites. His Known Space Series of novels introduced fans to the Kzinti, Pak Protectors, Pierson’s Puppeteers, Grog, Slavers (Thrints), tnuctipun and The Outsiders. Not to mention human heroes Gil “The Arm” Hamilton, Beowolf Shaefer, Lucas Garner and my favorite, Louis Gridley Wu. I’m sure there’s some I missed. In my humble opinion, Ringworld is one of Larry’s finest works, if not the finest. The Ringworld is a larger than worlds object that is what it says, a huge ring with a sun in the middle of it. The ring is rotated for gravity and it’s station keeping, or attitude jets are stripped down Bussard ramjets. A ringworld is considered a real technical invention, a possibility for a class III Kardashev civilization to build and is cataloged as Ringworld or Niven Ring at the Orion’s Arm website.
Ringworld is part of a series that include Ringworld Engineers, Ringworld Throne and Ringworld’s Children.
I know I’ve been giving links to different places that sell classic sci-fi, but to be honest with you, I’m satified with Amazon.com. I have an account there and if you have a debit, credit card or a regular checking account, ordering and buying books are easy. If you are already amazon geeks and you all probably are, I’m preaching to the choir.
In fact, I received Star Maker today and I’m going to dig in. Also, my tinfoil blogging is going to be spotty this summer, personal business y’know, but when I do post, I’ll try to make ’em good and weird!
Peace.
Dad2059's Webzine of Science Fiction, Science Fact and Esoterica 
Time to relax, eat dinner and read. And finish watching the Mets spank the Yankees. That should make Christopher happy.
Current propulsion technology is stuck in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
It’s blatantly ridiculous to schlep a rocket with millions of tons of fuel to a far away planet. We need to think in a new paradigm: antimatter is the key and although it’s expensive now, one day it won’t be.
Without antimatter, deep space exploration will remain the stuff of science fiction and not science fact.
I think the government already has advanced space technology, but they won’t release it because people would demand starships and the means to find and colonize earth-like planets in order to escape to find freedom away from NWO enforced economic slavery, wars and genocide.
Chris, you have hit it on the head. If deep space exploration and colonization is the goal, there really is no need to return to a planet depleted of it’s natural resources, or ravaged by war. Explorers could travel in spome-like “ships” (hollowed out asteroids or something similar) and undertake multigenerational voyages that wouldn’t need complex and expensive star-drive propulsion units.
The descendants of deep space explorers would sense no urgency or desire to return to a world they never knew, thereby making their mission more practical in terms of actually accomplishing their ‘directive’ of finding alternate planetary homes, and possibly sharing their information with other intelligences and even other spomes they might meet at prearranged coordinates somewhere in deep space. This would be beneficial in mapping out the universe without concern for having any need to return to point of origin, nor be encumbered by supply and fuel requirements… or malfunctions. They are always ‘home’.
When you think about it… that could be the very essence of space exploration, not being limited by the need to return home to Earth, which might be a more frivolous and romantic idea than practical from a scientific viewpoint.
Good answer derkurier, that is a theory expoused by Isaac Asimov and Gerard O’Neill. After centuries of travel, why would the travellers “colonize” another planet?
They might not be that type of human anymore!
There’s am article in this month’s Wired about NASA and how they failed (among other things) to move the game forward in recent decades and create new sources of propulsion.
I’m no science genius but I know one thing: space is vast and the location of our solar system in the Alpha Quadrant is rather isolated compared to other solar systems.
When I see a rocket take off with the Space Shuttle bolted to it and the fuel is the same fuel used in the 1960’s, I think it’s akin to traveling around the country in a horse-and-buggy versus an airplane.
Until we harness antimatter as a fuel source, we shouldn’t expect to travel to Europa, let alone, the Alpha Centuari system (4.3 light years away) becuase our little rocket putt-putt machines can’t do it.
Of course, there are all kinds of problems to be encountered with Special Relativity, i.e. time dilation, when dealing with hyper-velocity drives, and there are some that say it’s flat out impossible. Others espouse that faster-than-light drives ARE possible, and that Einstein’s theories are too limited.
“Star Trek” neatly side-stepped the spacial anomalies associated with near-C (light speed) and beyond velocities for a long time, but as general knowledge of Special Relativity increased, Roddenberry’s crew realized that this was a problem that needed addressing. There have been some researchers that have sprung up proposing theories that go along with the “space warp” design which merely contracts space-time, bringing two points closer together without any temporal backlash. They also recognize that the power requirements needed for this type of travel are well beyond the level of today’s technology, if at all possible. That, of course, is what they say.
Personally, for me, it is all moot when one considers there could be a power so far beyond anything that man could even conceive of in his thoughts, never mind his range of technological understanding, that can move throughout time and space at will as easily as we walk around our backyard or on the street, and that we might, in association with that power, realize what we could never otherwise do on our own, given unlimited time in which to do it.
Perhaps, like the Vulcans of Star Trek lore did for humanity, “God” may be helpful in giving man a leg up in his attempts to reach the stars… hmmm?
The FTL conundrum is facinating because the meme is that using Einstein’s “Special Theory” of Relativety, no mass can be at the speed of light. Only a few physicists are schooled in Einstein’s “General Theory” utilizing theories of gravity and quantum mechanics. That’s where the key is. But as derkurier mentions, the power requirements are impossible to comprehend.
That’s why Dr. Michio Kaku of City University of New York, he’s the scientist that is on alot of Discovery channel’s science programs, says that only a Kardashev Class II or III civilization is capable of utilizing energies required for FTL travel. The Terragens/Sephirotic Civilization on the Orion’s Arm Sci-Fi website is capable of creating artificial wormholes that are held open by “cages” or “buttresses” made of negative matter. That civilization is a “Class III” civilization because it can utilize energies that equal the output of the Galaxy. The “terragens” are Earthly decendants 10,000 years in the future.
“Star Trek” neatly side-stepped the spacial anomalies associated with near-C (light speed)
Actually, not at all.
With a craft in a stable field, or “bubble” of antimatter, it can slip into subspace and the bubble would travel at FTL velocity.
That’s right, Chris, and that is what I was referring to when they addressed the relativity dilemma. By creating a localized ‘singularity’ using negative matter output from their engine nacelles, space ‘contracted’ with them in the center, and thereby shielded them from the dilation phenomena.
This would give the appearance of FTL velocities, but in reality, the craft is stationary, and merely ‘drops out’ of one ‘universe’ and into another. It can mean one of two possibilities, (and this is my understanding based on what I’ve read in Assimov’s works) that the aforementioned “universes” may be either separate points within our own, or completely separate universes laying alongside one another in quantum neutrality, yet existing contemporaneously. The “subspace” you refer to, in my view, being the boundary (loosely described) between them. I’m open for discussion on that one, though, as it is just my theory.
Actually Chris, the field is a bubble of “subspace” powered by the matter-antimatter reaction process. The Bussard collectors, at the front of the “warp” nacelles, draw in interstellar hydrogen which then is fired down the length of the nacelle, which really is a linear particle accelerator, strips the hydrogen of it’s electrons, leaving protons and positrons to make into antimatter on the fly. The process isn’t 100% self-sustaining, the ships have to carry supplies of antimatter at the start of missions. The bussard ramscoop also supplies hydrogen that isn’t sent down the linear accelerators for the back-up fusion reactors and the impulse drive.
Zephram Cochrane’s genius in the Star Trek universe is that he found a way to produce a stable warp bubble without immense amounts of energy.
In the movie “Event Horizon” the ship also utilized the type of propulsion I described, creating it’s own wormhole to other universes. There has been an evolution of sorts in the manner of propulsive techniques in the Star Trek series. Originally, they just ignored the negative aspects of quantum theory, and designed that a matter/antimatter drive would provide the necessary kick to cover vast distances, but not instantaneously. They also calculated the warp values in different terminology.
I like the spome technique, myself, as it seems to be within reach of our capabilities comparatively soon. The other techniques open a lot of possibilities and a lot of uncertainties and danger that perhaps a fledgling society, weakened by war and natural calamity, cannot afford in terms of it’s continued existence.
I’m saying this in the absence of the other alternative; divine intervention, which I more readily ascribe to!
Barring divine intervention, I see the time-line used by the Orion’s Arm site as the most “realistic”. The calculations and energies that need to be controlled can only be met by vaster intellects than human, ie the ascended descendants of AIs. The ascended AI “gods” watch over their respective empires and control the manufacture of wormhole nexus points.