Saturday, November 30, 2013

Scotty or Somebody ... Warp Drive 8 or Something

This isn't Trekkie stuff as this warp drive stuff is getting quite far enough out of hand without anything from Star Trek.  Right now a scientist is leading a team to build one ... with NASA's support.  (io9:  How NASA might build its very first warp drive)

Harold White, the physicist running this square dance, is working up a proof of concept to determine if the warp drive concept would really work ... or melt the Universe like a giant snow cone.

One possible spacecraft design looks like something from Orange County Choppers so perhaps mankind will go tooling around the Universe in faster-than-light Harley hogs.

Assuming the science is right and it really does work, it would probably take, say, twenty or thirty years to build the first one.  Man got to the moon in ten years but this is a trip to a star.  The packing will probably be just a wee bit different.

The trouble with twenty to thirty years is that I don't get to see it and that frosts my goznitch.  Why?  I'll tell you why.  It will mean I read all that damn sci-fi fer nothin'!  I was ready for starships, man.  I've been reading about them since I was a wee lad.  I would hide somewhere with a sci-fi novel, a bag of potato chips and a 16-oz Pepsi.  That was kid heaven.

But where are the starships now.  Nothing.  And still they may take another twenty or thirty years.

I'm just going to start reading cheesy romance novels.  Pfft.

No comments: