Friggin Tractor Beams

[CoorsLight]

I actually don't se Dont this world as all that amazing. All this tech, all this glorified mindless entertainment doesn't actually advance us or make us much happier. Bit it does eat up finite resources at an astonishing rate.

Faster than light travel,or even somewhere close to half that speed,is something humans may never do. I hope I'm wrong but what is required is so crazy, the amount of effort put into it....Just getting a handful of protons up to near the speed of light requires the most complex machine ever built by humans.

And even then, space travel would still be a monumental effort.thedistances are so imesme it isn't even really conceivable by humans. I'm a huge sci if nerd and insider cosmology and understanding of the functions of the universe to be among the greatest human achievements there are, I dont see humans ever getting off this rock in any kind of meaningfull and large scale way.

Anyone who believes in space travel needs to sit down with a computer and work out how many miles there are in a light minute. (The distance light travels in sixty seconds.) The universe is around 14 billion light years across.

The current tech ( and the laws of science) make serious space travel almost impossible. Within out tiny solar system is extremely difficult and horribly expensive. And slow. It's insanely expensive to lift ONE ton of stuff into orbit.

Just because you can imagine something does not make it possible. A 300 pound linebacker can imagine running a marathon in 2 hours, and I can imagine bench pressing 400 pounds.

Thanks for inserting some reality here.

That said, the subject of the post is pretty interesting. Scientists have been using optical forces to trap really small stuff for several years now; this tractor beam concept is a logical progression. Thanks for the link, OP.

...But it's pretty funny that we react to stories like this by envisioning a Star Trek future...humans are still figuring out how to do something as "simple" as to satisfy basic needs for our expanding population without eating ourselves out of house and home, and we're failing miserably at it. As long as we prioritize our research on weapons, and stuff like tractor beams and warp drives, we are sentencing our populations to starvation and our environment to decimation.

 

[afm199]

link, OP.

...But it's pretty funny that we react to stories like this by envisioning a Star Trek future...humans are still figuring out how to do something as "simple" as to satisfy basic needs for our expanding population without eating ourselves out of house and home, and we're failing miserably at it. As long as we prioritize our research on weapons, and stuff like tractor beams and warp drives, we are sentencing our populations to starvation and our environment to decimation.

But if we "conquer" the universe we can send out teeming billions of starving wretches to "Australia!"

Of course the problem that exists is some motherfucker already there who gets pissed.

 

[CoorsLight]

Marklar?

 

[asthmodeus]

star trek future

 

[Britny]

...The current tech ( and the laws of science) make serious space travel almost impossible. Within out tiny solar system is extremely difficult and horribly expensive. And slow. It's insanely expensive to lift ONE ton of stuff into orbit...

Current technology and current laws of science. Those are things that are constantly changing.
If you tried to explain to someone in the 11th century that you'd put a 45,000 ton boat made of metal on the water, they'd tell you it wouldn't float. If you tried to tell someone in the 17th century that you were going to get into a bird-shaped metal vehicle and fly from Europe to the U.S. in 6 hours (vs. a 2-month boat ride) they'd tell you it was physically impossible to fly, let alone move that quickly.
Based on what we know right now, long-distance space travel is impossible. But who knows what we'll discover? We must never stop exploring and learning.
Who are we to say what is and isn't possible? No one can put a time limit on what we might find.

 

[sandyxb]

..
And yeah...battery technology, or more generally energy storage, is currently the gating item holding back so may cool advancements.
...

I would dare to say that we are close to the limits of what electron-transport (i.e. chemical energy) can deliver. Heck, biology has reached that limit long ago, and scaled down organism size.

Once (if ever) you reach your dream battery densities, you might as well burn whatever chemicals you are using, because that battery isn't going to last long. A solar panel on the roof producing some organic fuel would be more efficient than the wishful-thinking nano batteries. It would be a plant optimized for energy conversion and self-repair, not seed production or procreation.

Oh, re the tractor beams. Scale it to useful proportions, and out of suspension in a liquid, and you'll most likely spend orders of magnitude more energy than the plain old methods, and vaporize the object in the process

 

[jacksprat]

iPhone blah blah blah

Light speed travel is going to be the 3rd coolest app on the iPhone 6.....

 

[afm199]

Current technology and current laws of science. Those are things that are constantly changing.
If you tried to explain to someone in the 11th century that you'd put a 45,000 ton boat made of metal on the water, they'd tell you it wouldn't float. If you tried to tell someone in the 17th century that you were going to get into a bird-shaped metal vehicle and fly from Europe to the U.S. in 6 hours (vs. a 2-month boat ride) they'd tell you it was physically impossible to fly, let alone move that quickly.
Based on what we know right now, long-distance space travel is impossible. But who knows what we'll discover? We must never stop exploring and learning.
Who are we to say what is and isn't possible? No one can put a time limit on what we might find.

Anything is possible? I bet I'll never see monkeys fly out of Mitt Romney's asshole on live TV.

You didn't take many science courses, did you?

Here's a quick question for you. How much matter was converted to energy in the Hiroshima A bomb explosion?

 

[Karbon]

think about how rad this tech is when coupled with 3d printing at a micron level.

 

[asthmodeus]

Less than a gram to a fuckload of tons

 

[afm199]

Less than a gram to a fuckload of tons

pretty much. Probably several hundred milligrams.

 

[Asphaultnaut]

someone invent laser tweezers for holding tiny screws in place for nearly inaccessable auto/moto repair jobs.

Or combine the whole thing into one device...the laser screwdriver is good enough for The Master after all

Here's a quick question for you. How much matter was converted to energy in the Hiroshima A bomb explosion?

can you imagine the power of such a device that did matter/energy conversion at even 10% efficiency? Much less 100?

sure you'd eliminate radioactive fallout but not sure how much local atmosphere or planetary crust would be left LOL

---------------------------------------------------------------

to address another irksome argument that raises its head both elsewhere and in this thread:

there's a serious problem with people's "faith" in "Capital S Science" based on predictions of the past that failed.

many of the "limits" envisioned by 16th century 'scientists' were philosophical or even religious doctrine based, they were not tested or observed limits based on scientific method.

Lightspeed limits are theories that we have predicted, modelled, and experimentally observed. Worries about falling off the planet while exploring the globe, were not.

As the recent LHC experiments finding the higgs-like particle are demonstrating, the "standard model" theory with all it's horribly inconvenient limitations is becoming more and more experimentally solid. Research over the last few decades has not revealed any potentially "new physics" but instead cements what theorists have been describing since Newton.

It's like those tired old sayings like "if we can put a man on the moon why can't we (insert wish list wet dream here)?" as if the two were comparable. We've seen evidence that some sci-fi things are possible, and confirmation that others are not.

It is important to clarify that there is nothing in an iPhone or any modern device that violates the understandings of physicists from 50 or even 100 years ago-only the understandings of marketers, politicians and people required to actually build products. And of the builders, most of them will add to their "impossibles" the caveat: "not yet". Politicians, marketers and priests (of faiths both spiritual and secular) are the ones whose limits and understandings are historically and currently being broken.

Bottom line: there is stuff you can do, and stuff you cannot. Fairness, hope, faith, etc. do not change this.

 

[Britny]

Anything is possible? I bet I'll never see monkeys fly out of Mitt Romney's asshole on live TV.

You didn't take many science courses, did you?

Here's a quick question for you. How much matter was converted to energy in the Hiroshima A bomb explosion?

As a science major, I've taken enough science courses to know that no self-respecting scientist would be arrogant enough to declare that every scientific law that exists has been discovered, proven, and understood. I find it interesting that every generation thinks it has reached the ceiling of invention and exploration, only to be consistently outdone by the next generation.

...Bottom line: there is stuff you can do, and stuff you cannot. Fairness, hope, faith, etc. do not change this.

I'm not asserting that light-speed travel or inter-planetary travel will definitely exist someday. I just think it's presumptuous to say that anything is impossible, for certain.
Unlikely, yes. Cumbersome and inefficient, sure. But non-existent and never to be? We don't know yet. We may never know. And even if we never figure it out, we still can't say it's impossible. It's fundamentally unscientific to say that no new laws will be discovered and that human technology has reached it's limit.

 

[Reli]

snore...

It would require an artificial wormhole to travel anywhere significant outside our solar system.

"Conventional" (sub-light) travel would require us to freeze everyone on board in order to reach someplace significant. The closest star system is what, 10 light years away or something like that? And it's probably not even one of the ones with Earth-like planets. So it would be a worthless trip unless there was a real objective behind it. There's enough stuff to do right here in our own solar system.

As for NASA "warp drive projects", well knowing our government, if anything significant comes close to fruition, it would be put under the military's control and hushed up.

 

[i_am_the_koi]

Add this to the Photon Torpedos they're working on and we're almost there...

 

[Cycle61]

Friggin sharks with friggin laser beams on their heads.

 

[afm199]

As a science major, I've taken enough science courses to know that no self-respecting scientist would be arrogant enough to declare that every scientific law that exists has been discovered, proven, and understood. I find it interesting that every generation thinks it has reached the ceiling of invention and exploration, only to be consistently outdone by the next generation.


I'm not asserting that light-speed travel or inter-planetary travel will definitely exist someday. I just think it's presumptuous to say that anything is impossible, for certain.
Unlikely, yes. Cumbersome and inefficient, sure. But non-existent and never to be? We don't know yet. We may never know. And even if we never figure it out, we still can't say it's impossible. It's fundamentally unscientific to say that no new laws will be discovered and that human technology has reached it's limit.

We can certainly stipulate it's highly unlikely. Who said tech has reached its limit? Not me. Who said no new laws will be discovered?

What I said was that light speed is the barrier that's going to keep humanity on earth for all practical purposes.

When the first H bomb was detonated, there were many scientists who thought that the explosion might cause a holocaust, being powerful enough to create a firestorm that would ignite the atmosphere. They went ahead anyway. That's science and tech. Let's go ahead and fuck the rest of the world, technology and science are the new God.

If tech ever gets to the place where it can manipulate the basic building blocks of the universe ( which is what FTL means) it's going to be very scary stuff. There's way too much evidence to show that men are not smart enough to deal with the end results of science.

 

[sandyxb]

I am afraid that discovering new physics might be possible through observation and reasoning, but that their implementation would require a scale and energies that are impractical on earth. Some of the cosmic rays are still 5 to 7 orders of magnitude beyond what even LHC can provide. And we are still only taking about the 5% of matter that we see in the universe.

 

[Britny]

When the first H bomb was detonated, there were many scientists who thought that the explosion might cause a holocaust, being powerful enough to create a firestorm that would ignite the atmosphere. They went ahead anyway. That's science and tech. Let's go ahead and fuck the rest of the world, technology and science are the new God.

Exactly! They took a risk, yes. But look at the end result. The things we have learned, and continue to learn, about nuclear fusion are amazing. It's crude and dangerous at best (for now), but as we continue to better understand how it works and how to apply it, the possibilities are virtually endless! Every new invention, exploration, and innovation requires some amount of risk. If we'd never taken that risk, the opportunity for a self-sustaining energy source would still be a fairy tale. Just like certain theories are only fairy tales today. It may not always be that way.

 

[afm199]

Exactly! They took a risk, yes. But look at the end result. The things we have learned, and continue to learn, about nuclear fusion are amazing. It's crude and dangerous at best (for now), but as we continue to better understand how it works and how to apply it, the possibilities are virtually endless! Every new invention, exploration, and innovation requires some amount of risk. If we'd never taken that risk, the opportunity for a self-sustaining energy source would still be a fairy tale. Just like certain theories are only fairy tales today. It may not always be that way.

No, they took a risk with ALL our lives. The things we have learned about fusion (self sustaining) so far are that we have thrown tens of billions of dollars at it with no real results. (Yes, there has been actual energy produced, however the amount is tiny and the possibility of containment is just as far away as it was twenty years ago.) I'm not all sure what you mean by "applying it." We don't apply fusion to anything, it's a state that is reached for a few tiny fractions of a second by throwing enough power into a tiny target through a laser to light half a state. We've learned some interesting technical data. That's it. We don't have a handle on fusion. The natural containment system for fusion is a star half a million miles across with a gravity system so immense that it squashes hydrogen into helium. We don't have that and we probably never will. But I guarantee you the staff at the labs will continue to state that "just a few more years and billion dollars" is all they need to attain self sustaining fusion. Three generations of scientists have made a great living with this, and I am sure three more will.

Self sustaining fusion is still a fairy tale, I'm not sure how you see it otherwise.