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NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

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Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#41

Post by shadowgovt »

roywiggins wrote: post #27
at_a_remove wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is because the payoffs would be so enormous that business like this and "overunity motors" continue to gain attention. All of those other elixirs were shams, but this one will work! Finally, immortality! The enormity of the reward causes the payout matrix to lead people astray. Don't get me wrong, I see a vacuum chamber, which is light years ahead of most of these enterprises, but I would not spend a dime on it un…

It's a kind of Pascal's mugging, I think. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging That said, Woodward does not seem to be an actual charlatan, so I don't have a problem with funding him. At least he might turn up something fun and/or interesting, even if I don't think it's going to usher in a new space age.

I personally believe he rides that line of charlatanism where he's not pursuing this theory in bad faith at all, but he of course recognizes that tromping around on the edge of a theoretical branch that most physicists don't think is worth exploring garners attention he wouldn't otherwise receive.

I strongly suspect that whether history remembers him as a charlatan will depend heavily on whether one of the supports of his branch proves false and it snaps off, or whether he's been right this whole time and we suddenly oops ourselves a propellantless drive that operates by coupling to the gravitational field and pushing distant objects around. ;)

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#42

Post by bdamm »

simiones wrote: post #39
sebringj wrote: post #30

Interesting caveat about traveling close to the speed of light...if you run into hydrogen atoms, which is near 100% likely, your ship violently explodes because at very high speeds, there is a huge reaction on tiny matter collisions. I just learned this and it was like learning that sound doesn't travel in space when I was young and ruined many a starwars movie effects. I keep learning how ignorant and dumb I am the…

Isn't it vanishingly unlikely to ever encounter one particle in interstellar space?

Interstellar space is full of particles flying around. There's plenty of hydrogen in the galaxy. Between galaxies not so much but we're not talking inter-galactic space.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#43

Post by tekacs »

sebringj wrote: post #30

Interesting caveat about traveling close to the speed of light...if you run into hydrogen atoms, which is near 100% likely, your ship violently explodes because at very high speeds, there is a huge reaction on tiny matter collisions. I just learned this and it was like learning that sound doesn't travel in space when I was young and ruined many a starwars movie effects. I keep learning how ignorant and dumb I am the…

Star Trek in particular did put energy into handwaving/explaining away how their ships avoid this issue:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Navigational_deflector

I always thought it was a nice touch and hopefully a teaching moment when they talk about it in the show.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#44

Post by shadowgovt »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #17
0xUser wrote: post #5

So much hate in the comments. Have some hope, people.

People don't like to see quack science take funding from legitimate science. I am not qualified to judge whether or not this is quack science, but it certainly reeks of the same claims as previously documented quack science.

The sense I get is NASA is tossing money at it because if it doesn't work, it falsifies some hypotheses that have been sitting around at the edge of relativistic physics for awhile.

So win-win in the science space.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#45

Post by simiones »

f154hfds wrote: post #23
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't like to see quack science take funding from legitimate science. I am not qualified to judge whether or not this is quack science, but it certainly reeks of the same claims as previously documented quack science.

Where does quack science end and legitimate science begin? There's a real bottleneck in theory right now and I don't see how pushing the envelope in various directions could be a bad thing (especially given the relatively low cost this seems to have been). The surest way we can stagnate is by NOT funding this type of thing.

There are other kinds of quack science, but in this area, anything that seems to contradict the basic laws of motion and/or conservation of energy is recognizably quack science. Especially when doing so experimentally first (instead of first coming up with a theoretical/mathematical framework). Even especiallier when using electrical effects in Earth's magnetic field and measuring minute effects.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#46

Post by majkinetor »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #17
0xUser wrote: post #5

So much hate in the comments. Have some hope, people.

People don't like to see quack science take funding from legitimate science. I am not qualified to judge whether or not this is quack science, but it certainly reeks of the same claims as previously documented quack science.

Its not like it never happened that what looked like quack science turned out to be legit science. Revolutionary ideas almost by rule look like quack.

So if those scientist dudes have better PR skills or whatever is needed to attract funding then other scientist dudes, why is that a problem ?

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#47

Post by motohagiography »

So, I have to ask: If Elon Musk is working on propulsion tech to go to Mars, and Bob Lazar claims to have worked on reverse engineering propellentless tech and is one of the single digit number of living people to have encountered it directly, and NASA is slow rolling their own understanding of it, given the limited available expertise in this area how can Musk afford to not hire Lazar? From a due diligence perspective, Musk would need to know with a high degree of certainty that Lazar is full of crap.

While this might sound insane, from a portfolio perspective, if a VC firm is invested in SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, or anyone else in the space, it seems negligent to not have some exposure to a company with someone like Lazar involved in it, unless you really knew for sure, as he and people like him present an existential risk to rocket-based tech companies. That guy is the ultimate hedge.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#48

Post by cryptonector »

roywiggins wrote: post #31

It's worth noting that if a propellentless drive works, it will probably generate free energy . This may adjust your expectations on how likely this idea is. How likely is a free energy device (ie, one that reliably gives you more energy out than you put in)? Well, this thruster can't be any more likely, because it would produce free energy. https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.00494 > the kinetic energy of a mass with a const…

The schemes I'm familiar with claim to extract energy from the vacuum, essentially. It sounds a lot like hocus pocus to explain away free energy. Great if physically possible, but exceedingly doubtful.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#49

Post by shadowgovt »

jfengel wrote: post #36
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't like to see quack science take funding from legitimate science. I am not qualified to judge whether or not this is quack science, but it certainly reeks of the same claims as previously documented quack science.

Even more than the funding, I hate the perpetual fueling of the narrative that magic is just around the corner. Why bother learning actual, boring science when a revolution is going to make everything different tomorrow, bringing us flying cars and gorgeous green Martian girls in steel bikinis? There's an enormous amount of science denial, at least in the United States. A lot of things go into that, but I don't think…

> the perpetual fueling of the narrative that magic is just around the corner

Do you know why humans went to the moon in 1969?

It wasn't just that people suddenly woke up one day and wanted to. The earliest known story of a voyage to the moon was written by Lucian of Samosata, CE 125. It wasn't that people woke up one day and were smart enough; the orbital mechanics were hard math, but the basics were understood since Newton.

It was that in 1935, the Aluminum Association was founded. Extraction of aluminum was only started in 1825, and we only had the array of necessary technologies to do it in mass quantities, reliably, with the development of massive power stations. Aluminum is useful for several things, but most importantly: it can be hammered into a thin but solid material that can form aerodynamic shells and contain pressures against vacuum. It was, basically, a miracle metal. It made the aviation age cheap and (coupled with other breakthroughs like radio, which is still only a 100-year-old-technology) the space age possible. One generation after the founding of the AA, humanity set foot on the moon.

I believe people think magic is just around the corner because the previous two or three generations have lived through one miraculous invention after another. And you're right; these inventions don't spring from nowhere. They come from people observing unexpected phenomena, dogging that phenomena until it can be understood and reliably manifested or controlled, and putting ingenuity on what could possibly be done now that the rules of the world have changed, because, in a sense, magic just happened. At least from the point of view of the average person living through the technological revolutions as they come one after another.

Re: NASA Funded Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Propellantless Propulsion

#50

Post by sebringj »

tekacs wrote: post #43
sebringj wrote: post #30

Interesting caveat about traveling close to the speed of light...if you run into hydrogen atoms, which is near 100% likely, your ship violently explodes because at very high speeds, there is a huge reaction on tiny matter collisions. I just learned this and it was like learning that sound doesn't travel in space when I was young and ruined many a starwars movie effects. I keep learning how ignorant and dumb I am the…

Star Trek in particular did put energy into handwaving/explaining away how their ships avoid this issue: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Navigational_deflector I always thought it was a nice touch and hopefully a teaching moment when they talk about it in the show.

At least Star Trek tries to answer this in some way even though bs but still cool for the effort, mainstream space is definitely dumbed down compared to that.
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