Stochasty

As I happen to be somewhat acquainted with the process of scientific publishing, I will simply respond that the practices of peer review within the "climate science" community make me ashamed to call myself a colleague (however loosely that term may apply). As for how I would feel had a biologist or an economist published something that negated relativity - I would feel ecstatic, assuming he had gotten things right. But, then again, I would go to the source - read the actual papers - before I made up my mind. Training doesn't matter. I know people who are physicists by training who work in chemistry or biology or mathematics, and vice versa. What matters is the quality of research. I'm going to ignore the rest of your post. You won't convince me with links to blogs; I've read a number of the original papers, and my opinion comes primarily from my assessments thereof. I also have no interest in convincing you - as I said, I'm agnostic on the question - merely in pointing out to others who might read this thread that the media claims of "consensus" are nonsense. This question is difficult for me to answer, since (again) I'm not an expert, and I've done less reading on the issue than I have with climate science (I'm acquainted with the major papers regarding climate change, but I would hardly know where to start looking regarding energy usage and resource reserve numbers). My feeling is that most of the crisis is political - nuclear fission has the capability to replace oil, if we were serious about. I don't know what your source for the 10-15 years number is, but I suspect that it is counting only proven energy reserves and considering only outdated nuclear technology. Breeder reactors, thorium reactors, and fuel reprocessing should extend that number substantially. The main problem I've encountered in the US and in my limited experience abroad is that both fossil fuel and nuclear power are so politically unpopular that it is impossible for countries to update their power grid to meet demand. Solar s not yet viable (still perhaps ten years off), hydroelectric and geothermal are viable only in certain locations and face some of the same political problems as fossil fuels and nukes, and the rest of the Green "renewable energy" wish list is just that - a wish list, not an actual solution. Eventually, I suspect that either the energy situation will become so bad that the political equation will change, or fusion power will get off the ground and make the rest obsolete. As for peak oil, it's a matter of economics. We've mostly run out of the cheap stuff, and what's left is harder to get to and therefore more expensive. When prices go high enough, the economics will no longer favor oil and a shift will happen to something else. My guess would be nuclear, but given the political opposition to nukes oil prices might have to go considerably higher than they are today to change the equation, and that would do bad things to the world economy. So, it's a political problem, but a bad one.

My particular field of expertise is quantum field theory; so no, it's not connected to climate or resources. My opinion on climate change is of no particularly great weight; my reply was more to rebut Nibbs snide post with a snide post of my own than anything else. I consider myself agnostic on the question of climate change; I understand the physics involved and have looked rather deeply into the evidence and the proposed mechanisms and I find myself unconvinced for several reasons - massive flaws in historical climate reconstructions, failure of the models to backcast without tuning, and the reliance of the models/predictions upon a strong positive feedback that would lead to an unstable climate system even in the absence of human meddling - but I also acknowledge that I am not an expert (nor do I have the inclination to become an expert) so I'm content to wait until such time as the experts address the issues I named or the evidence becomes clearer. That said, I despise those who attempt to use political pressure to decide a scientific issue; Nibbs post is a prime example of that pressure.

I, personally, am within the global scientific community. I doubt that we are facing huge problems right now (at least, huge problems regarding the climate; the economy is another matter). Ergo, your statement is false on its face. It is also moronic. Since when has consensus ever mattered in science?

Not bad for a 14 year old kid. Of course, physics has moved far beyond these conjectures; there's a heck of a lot we don't know about the Universe, but we do know quite a bit. For instance - what is the center of the Universe? Everywhere and nowhere. Think of the Universe like the surface of an expanding balloon. From the perspective of a point on the surface of the balloon (any point on the surface), everything else is seen to be moving away. Where is the center of the balloon? Inside the balloon, so no point on the surface can lay claim to being "the center." However, here is where the analogy breaks down; while the Universe is like the surface of the balloon, in that all points move equally away from all other points as the Universe expands, there is no "inside." The Universe is all that exists (nitpickers - save the multiverse debates for another time). Thus, at any given point in the Universe we can look in any direction and see that things are moving in all directions equally away from us - in other words, every single point in the Universe will observe itself to be "the center." Okay, now that we know where the center is, how do we define "stationary." The case is similar here. Up to certain constraints, we can say that stationary observers are "everyone and no one." I use the word "observers" here because velocity - and thus the concept of "stationary" - depends on whom is doing the measuring. Velocity is not an intrinsic property of the Universe, but rather can only be measured between two objects. For instance, Alice and Bob are both out in spaceships far enough away from everything else that they have no reference points. Alice turns her radar gun on Bob and measures Bob to be moving at 1000 mph. Likewise, Bob turns his radar gun on Alice and measures Alice to be moving at 1000 mph. At this point, a cop pulls both of them over for speeding. When the officer starts to write Bob a ticket, Bob tells him "no sir, I was stationary. Alice was the one that was moving." Likewise, Alice claims that she was stationary, and Bob was the one who was speeding. The officer throws up his hands and turns to Einstein, saying "you figure this one out." Fortunately, Einstein knows the answer - they are both right. Everyone will always measuring themselves to be stationary, and others to be moving around them. Here on Earth, we have a consensus reference point to use that we like to call "the ground" - but that's only because we happen to be living next to something that's large enough and unforgiving enough that it hurts if we smack into it too hard, and thus it makes sense to give the ground pride of place. In space, that's not the case. Now, I say that everyone will always measure their own velocity to be zero - and this is true - but there is a case where one can, in a sense, measure oneself to be moving. This case is called "acceleration." While velocity is not an intrinsic property of the Universe, acceleration (change in velocity over time) is - and you can always measure your own acceleration. So, that constraint I mention above is exactly this - "stationary" observers (in the sense you mean the term - there is another physics sense, but we won't get into that) are all observers which are undergoing no acceleration - "inertial observers" in the parlance of physics, or "observers in free fall" to use a layman's term.

There's no point in going if you're only going to turn around and come right back. Exploration is better done robotically.

Okay. So, now, where does the mass go? When matter collapses into a black hole, it doesn't suddenly lose mass. Also, black holes with masses equivalent to that of starships (say on the order of 10k metric tons for an aircraft-carrier sized ship up to a few million or so for something bigger) will be short-lived. The bigger the ship, the longer the black hole will last, so in this case bigger is better - but, that defeats the idea of somehow reducing the overall mass of the ship by turning it into energy. And, once again, I'm forced to ask the question "what do you mean by energy." You want the passengers to live "trapped on the horizon" - but, that doesn't work. They'd fall in, and become part of the singularity. If you mean that you want their information to be preserved by the surface of the event horizon to be reconstituted later, that might work - but it doesn't solve the mass issue. Something that might handle the problem of "where does the mass go" while at the same time preserving the information is to have the passengers converted into photons trapped in the photon sphere of the black hole - this also solves that pesky issue of conservation of momentum. I guess my issue here is that you are both too specific and too non-specific. By too specific, I mean that you're going into too much detail regarding future inventions, and by too non-specific I mean that you aren't going into enough detail regarding the physical basis of these inventions (and making sure they're properly grounded in real physics). You're somewhat caught in a no-mans land where people who know their stuff will look at this and say "nonsense." There are a lot of sci-fi authors who make this same mistake; the unfortunate consequence of this is that it is now very difficult for me to read and enjoy sci-fi. I guess my advice is to not try to go into so much detail regarding your drive - accept that it's fantasy, and use a lot of hand-wavium. The alternative is to sit down with a real physicist (or, better yet, learn physics yourself) and go over your ideas with a fine-toothed comb for feasibility, but this is a lot of work that is likely not going to be central to whatever story you want to tell. Frankly, this is the whole "soft" versus "hard" sci-fi debate. Soft works because people can use Clarke's Third Law to justify their suspension of disbelief. Hard works by giving the audience as little to disbelieve as possible. Anywhere in between is untenable.

Portals aren't really wormholes, but you could imagine creating wormholes that worked in a similar fashion. Furthermore, energy conservation in GR is a strictly local (not global) phenomenon, so nothing about this particular setup violates energy conservation per se. However, (although I'd need to sit down and do the math to be sure) I rather doubt that it's possible to set up a pair of static wormholes such that there was an asymmetric gravitational potential between them.

I read. Are we assessing this based on real physics, or are we just throwing around sciency sounding mumbo jumbo? If you want the latter then I counter your resonance cascade with a quantal phlebotinum oscillirotor powering my Transylvanian trans-Planckiest translatifier (with built in automatic polarity reversal). However, given the fact that we were talking about Baryon number conservation, I rather assumed that, for the moment at least, we cared about real, actual physics.

How exactly do you plan on turning it into energy in the first place? Or, for that matter, what does "turn it into energy" even mean in this context? That's the real sticking point here. Barring unknown physics, there are only a few forms that matter can take, and "energy" is not one of them. High energy photons is one possibility, but then you have to worry about Baryon number conservation and keeping your high energy photons from scattering all over the place (and somehow reconstituting them into the right kind of matter at the right place). Solving the Baryon number problem by building your ship half out of antimatter probably isn't a good idea (although it would make converting the matter into high energy photons quite easy).

I'd be happy to critique this, but - given that I am a practicing physicist - before I do so I'd like to ask what kind of critique you want. Are you asking what we think about this from an actual science perspective, or just from the perspective of whether it would make good science fiction?

I would very much advise you to not be confident about ITER; there are serious problems with magnetic confinement which may not be solvable by the direct application of more money. In fact, one of the biggest problems with ITER is that it diverts funding from other potential fusion candidates. Also, fusion physics has little to do with particle physics. Other than that, CERN is of course the top dog in HEP-EX. I'm not sure who I would call top dog in HEP-TH.

What this probably means is that your rocket has too much thrust, and the weight above the stack separator is crushing it when you launch. Usually, the fix is to add more struts (spacetape fixes everything!). If that's not the case, then this is probably the result of some funky attachment bug. Try going back to the VAB, removing that separator, and then reattaching it.

When I was a TA for astronomy as a grad. student, my favorite target was always the Hercules globular cluster (M13). It was a great way to teach (and test) telescope skills. It's easy to find, and on a clear night with the little 6-inch scopes we had available the students who were careful could just barely bring things into focus enough to resolve individual stars (rather than just a fuzzy blob) - which gave them a cool reward for their efforts, and made grading easy for me. (Did they sketch some random star field? No points. Did they sketch a fuzzy blob? Half points. Did they sketch individual stars? Yay! Finding ways to make grading easy is the number one agenda when you're a TA.)

I did some testing, and it seems pretty clear the either the game or the Wiki authors are rounding G to 6.674E-11.