DARPA is offering $500,000 on November 11th for the best proposal for this. It's open for public submissions. Hop to it Yarlen!
Our whole discussion might be changing soon friends. The LHC is working on independent confirmation but they believe they have discovered particles that can travel faster than light.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/09/23/faster-than-light-particles-may-be-physics-revolution/?test=faces
Well I don't know about needing to send anyone there. But whichever nation colonizes a planet first is definetly going to have sway over the world. Its more of a Pen is blah blah blah sword etc etc.
But to go in depth more about why we should colonize is simply, resources, imagine what we could find on Mars. Oil, uranium, perhaps even a new means of power that exceeds Nuclear. Its more of an opportunity cost, not to mention tourism of course.
You doknow that oil is made from dead plants, right? while there is some possibility of bacterial life existing and it would have a huge impact on our view of the cosmos, I don't think we'll find oil on Mars.
Yeah, I've been reading about that. Interesting results. Here's the actual paper. The thing with this result is that the speed measured is so huge compared to the speed of light. I welcome you to do the calculations yourself, as it's not hard: distance= 730 km, time= 60 nanoseconds, speed of light= 3x10^8 m/s
The paper I listed and the news reports I saw regarding this never tell you what this calculates out to. I figure it to be 40,500 times faster than the speed of light. Now, neutrino speeds have been measured before (its one of the ways to extrapolate the mass of the neutrino, which is known to be very small) and come out faster than light, but the accuracy meant that it was probably just close to light speed. This new measurement is so out of proportion to those other speeds... something has to be going on.
I did immediately figure out a way in which this result could really be happening however: quantum tunneling. You see, neutrinos rarely interact with matter. So, to detect them, you shoot them straight through the ground so that they have a lot of chances to interact with matter. Most of the time, nothing happens. But why is nothing happening most of the time? My new, completely unfounded, idea is that the neutrino tunnels through the matter or it interacts with it. So, most of the time, it is tunneling. That would make it travel faster than the speed of light through matter. This wouldn't work in space, and as such, the previous speed measurements (which I'm completely guessing are based of solar neutrinos) would be in line with neutrinos that are slower than light speed.
For those that do not know about quantum tunneling: in quantum mechanics, sometimes things can, rather than travel the distance, disappear and reappear. This affect is already known to travel faster than the speed of light and is usually associated with some type of 'barrier' (place that the particle 'can not' pass). I'm thinking that the atoms in the rock that the neutrinos are traveling through are the 'barrier' and it just instantly appears on the other side of them during its travel. Each tunneling event is a small shave off the clock, but it all adds up.
In any case, there needs to be confirmation of this result. Which might be a few years, tbh. The trouble with neutrinos is that they interact so rarely that the number of events per year is very low, and so you have to accumulate the data over years before you can say anything with certainty
There is no such thing as matter...it's just a different form of energy.
Interesting on the quantum tunneling idea. That would be something if its true. So now we can have teleporters they just have to be grounded.
They had some similar results with light inside glass and with mirrors back a few years ago. A lot of ambiguos and not certain things and others were explained--but those experiments also indicated the speed of light could be altered in a medium.
I'll be interested to hear the smart math guys explain it.
I don't think we should even consider leaving our solar system until we, as a species, you know, get along with each other.
Being someone who's interested in such things as alien visitation and UFO's etc, if our respective governments first response to a UFO is to send a plane to shoot it down, then we shouldn't be spreading our virus like self to other planets, let alone other star systems.
On the other hand, that can be quite the motivation for wanting to 'get away from it all'. Not touching UFO's with a 10ft anal probe. Mostly because I don't care for the anal probe.
I spoke with someone who is taking quantum physics at his college. He says that my idea is an interesting possibility and has merit. I guess the likelyhood that a particle will tunnel is inversely proportional to it's mass, and neutrinos are well known to be very, very light (this mass-tunneling relationship I didnt know, it's just something that fits). The other thing I thought about after I posted my idea is that I bet the previous neutrino speed measurements were based off solar neutrinos, and therefore would not have picked up anything anywhere near the new result. Ah, well time will tell.
Yeah, theres quite a bit of tech that could come out of this find, if it proves true. Going with my analysis (because, frankly, it makes the most sense), we could have faster-than-lightening speed internet and communication. Everything so far has been moving to wireless in the air, it looks like we could eventually go with wireless in the ground. I would bet theres alot less interference with neutrinos as well. Eventually, yes teleporting over the surface of the earth might be possible (depends on getting computers to handle all the computation and dealing with decoherance). The main obstacle to all this happening (once again, assuming this is legit), would be the efficiency of the signal output and the signal loss. Neutrinos rarely interact with matter, so how many do you have to send to get the transmission to where you need it to go? How many neutrinos get absorbed in the environment on the way? Is it worth all this effort? If I'm wrong and the find proves true, theres numerous other possibilities (can't say for certain without more knowledge of the physics involved), but they all face the neutrino-interaction problem.
As for the results with light.... I'm not sure if its the same situation, but the idea behind meta materials is that they have a negative index of refraction. The way you generally think about refraction is that the material 'slows down' light as it enters a material with a positive index, bending it's path through the material. Negative indices therefore imply that light is 'speeding up' as it meets the surface of the material. While there was some possibility that might be happening when this metamaterial business began, I believe they found that light is not actually speed up (probably similar to the fact that light never 'slows down' in a material, it is simply absorbed by the material and re-emitted a short time latter). I could look around and find this result if thats what you were talking about.
The other possibiliy that you are referring to is that all particles can, and often do, break the light barrier... on the very, very tiny scale, when looking at the situation from a certain perspective. A particle, when it travels from point A to point B, takes every possible path to there simultaneously. It is these possible paths that can break the light barrier, but must contribute a small about to probability of finding the particle along this path. The possible paths average out to be the straight line we expect it to be.
I NEED my secret Mars base to survive the coming alien apocalypse so, ergo, we must go to space. The rest of you can stay here--except for the supermodels who will man my secret base facilities and any of you who wish to volunteer as life-long labor slaves in my Martian water mines.
I'll have to get time to dig it up but they just discovered quantum communication pathways in plants this past year. So we might be really surprised at how deep into and out of our universe the rabbit hole actually goes...and careful, we just might fall in trying to look.
Lol--first ground teleporter array volunteer is greeted by chief scientist at receiving station: "Ow...we're sorry...uh...there was a little signal loss enroute. Someone get him a napkin for that drool please.
Small child in field thousands of miles away: "Look mom...I found an ear in a rock!"
I thought that was a really original and sharp thought you had there too. Nice to see you talking more like a visionary instead of a lab worker.
I also am pretty sure adamdresch is an Agent. I'm a man, not a virus, dammit!
Life Long Slave on Mars?
Where do I sign?
Presuming of course I get to share living quarters with the supermodel facility managers
I fully intend to reward workers who excel aty slobbering subservience with the presence of supermodels who have failed to demonstrate the same effort--it's a win-win situation.
Email me your blood signed oath and firstborn and I'll put you in the queue.
To continue this topic
Meh I've always had this vision(dream) of going to mars just to start over with followers of the same belief as me. Tolerance and open mindedness. Earth is a cesspool of intolerance and intoxication where we don't take care of even ourselves.
This comment alone is the foundational premise of many a SciFi tale.
Don't worry, when I do it we'll come back and have psychic powers and white eyes. So badass.
Open minded people that have the same beliefs? Don't those 2 ideas contradict?
I really have no idea how I could explain it to you, but generally just think of it like a world without hate or judging based on how you are.
"Once I am elected president, I promise my first act will be to do away with these no longer needed elections."
I would think that creating a religion based around the Universal Will To Become would get us there about as soon as research into these technologies. It may take us a million years, but then we can go anywhere instantly. At the very least it's a good plan B.
And I would give us 500 years before we get any useful interstellar travel. That is a generous estimate forgoing any solar wide wars. The other half of exploration is exploitation. If we can't get the resources back to Sol III (Earth for now), what the hell is the point?
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