ZetaX

I recommend you to do the math and then tell us how that much mass should go unnoticed. And how that really works out anyway, cause it simply won't.

No, it is not a red herring. It is a simply analogy for why you should apologize for making the "argument" above: it comes down to the very same dishonest reasons. You do not understand entanglement, yet try to "disprove" physics using it; and you claim physics as a whole is wrong cause it cannot (yet!) explain some borderline cases. It is not a red herring to point out that you do something that you would find depicable in other contexts. Simple as that. And by the way, no, the standard model is not contradictory to dark matter. Stop making things up. Really, your argumentation is pretty bad right now. Please stop that. I might not agree with several others, but those seem to know what they talk about and/or are doing a resonable debate. And by the way, a lot of things that turned out to be false were initially verified by several (even independent) experiments. Some have been named in this thread already.

That's why I uttlery despise the US judgmental system: it has none (or only ridiculous) contraints on the possible costs of lawsuits.

Sorry to say this, but you are argueing like a creationist here (using that analogy because I know you to have some footing in biology): The EM-drive as claimed goes against the fundamentals itself and so far has very weak evidence in that direction. To suddenly pull dark matter, which is a very recent topic and under heavy research, is a really bad argument against such basic thing such as conservation of momentum. You are essentially saying "physics as a whole is wrong cause of some unresolved problem", which is the one main reason always out forward against evolution. I hope it is clear why this is not actually an argument. I can't say much about the neutrons, but it is new to me that this is disputed, so I would like to see some evidence. And the entanglement one is essentially an argument from ignorance: you are definitely not changing the polarisation of a photon, and especially not to influence another photon. Instead, both photons did not have a well-defined polarisation before measurement at all. You can't send information that way. So entanglement is simply not what you claim it to be. I wil probably comment on the statistics later, by the way. But I have probably less objections there anyway, only on the premisses.

I strongly doubt that.

The mass (size is a no-brainer in space, so I guess you meant mass) is irrelevant for anything intended to carry many humans to other stars. Such a ship would be in the hundreds of meters and tens of thousands of tons anyway. But one would want to optimize for power per mass.

It was an addendum to a much broader point: money and expected use. We only got there with tons of time. Which again leads to what I said: no reason to rush the sat. And a lot of fields made almost all their progress deductively, not by trying random things (the only exceptions that come to my mind are medicine and psychology, and those are about one of the most complex things we know, so simplifications become a necessity). Damascus steel is essentially over-hyped steel, worse than modern steels. In the end, it is quite easy to make something that is hard to replicate, but in most cases this also won't be the best product we could make. Try to _exactly_ replicate a computer from 1980; I bet you will fail. And for the greek fire: this is due to us not knowing what it was. So we can only guess. It's not like we have some chemical from that time that we simply cannot produce. So to say that we cannot make it is unscientific (due to being unfalsifiable). It was up to some centuries ago. Then we realized that understanding works much better. Also, "trial and error" is a bit ridiculous if you want to use it as an argument for sending this into space instead of testing on earth. On earth we can easily adapt and repeat experiments; good luck in space, even if we could ignore costs. And what would this actually accomplish¿ Knowing that it works is an almost useless information by itself in regard to making it useful. If you understand it enough to maximize it, then chances are essentially 1 that you already know how it works, thus rendering space tests only a final stage.

No, that's not how it works. Lots of plasma physics would carry on anyway. Lots of material physics would, too. Not even speaking about more general advances in computers or whatever other relevant researches.

What has change to do with this. You made a very strong claim about the entirety of existence itself as if it were obvious. I don't even think it is a correct claim, but at the very least you should give evidence or arguments.

How about no¿

But the 1% is totally made up, that's part of the problem. If we put this against physics as a whole, it might easily be 0.0001% only and then it suddenly is a very ineffective way to spend the money. Instead, you could have spent it on the surface to figure out the actual way it works or at least exclude absolutely everything else. Even if you put it in space and it works, then what¿ Without a sufficient understanding of the how's and why's you still have no idea how to fully utilize it. On the other hand, detailed ground-based experiments with fine measurements may tell you how it works and then we can improve it.

Umm, that's exactly the case I responded to.

What is that even supposed to mean¿

You can't even circularize that way. All the planning, execution and whatever of a rather long-term orbit-change adds into the costs as well. And if it only works in the air, then you just wasted millions in shooting a very bad jet engine into space.

That's very very optimistic. That's the prize for a single-cubed sat and that is probably way too small. This thing needs a chamber and a relevant power supply, so either a RTG (a no-go for cubesats, I think), a chemical battery (rendering its operation time very short) or a huge solar panel (being voluminous and heavy). I don't even expect this to fit in a 1x2x3; maybe a 2x2x3, and that's already around a million, and still not guaranteed to fit. And that's also only the prize for LEO, but you want to get higher to exclude atmospheric effects (e.g. it propelling distant air). Not speaking of the actual costs of designing and building it.

No. Just no. There is no reason to spend tens of millions on sending something into space just to see if it produces thrust. A mission like that would not be approved by any of the larger space agencies (but sure, you can try to convince private investors to waste their money). To make this a viable mission you need a lot more than "lets see if it works". This includes tests that we cannot do on earth that are likely to produce insights that cannot be found here on earth. And this doesn't even have to do with that thing probably not working as advertised due to violating known physics. Many other drives also went through years and years of surface testing, then vaccum chamber testing, before finally being sent to space (or canceled for bein impractical). Take almost any drive as an example (orion, solar sails, ion, ...).

No. While very likely being not what many think it is, EM is being tested (->science) and has a public blueprint (->everyone can try it). The link you gave is just a claim that someone sometime made some magic thingy that does something violating physics.

All I see is something that reeks crackpot. No actual physics, no science, no nothing is shown there. Just the claim to have invented an incredible thing, without any evidence.

Yes, it is as you say: not enough stars to really fill that part of the sky associated to it.

Someone above protested they aren't and it sounded to me like one is the local, the other the global version. That's where our definitions disagree: I fixed a frame of reference (say ours) and definied finiteness relative to that. And yes, it may then change for different frames of reference. But even those frame have infinite space in _some_ directions, just not all. So we should be careful wheter infinite means non-compact or boundaryless. I have by the way problems to imagine how that "barrier" in space or time would behave. A singularity is one thing, but an entire codimension 1 submanifold where reality stops sounds... weird. Manifolds with boundary stop sounding like an easy concept if you want to imagine to live in one... Adding up the missing things makes things unnecessarily complicated. The area is factored by 3/4 each time, thus the final area is the limit of (3/4)^n, which is 0. I don't understand what your (remaining¿) objection is. Can you please clarify¿

Scandal! Vega once again twinkles towards Polaris!

Most fish wouldn't "drown" on land. They should have no problem in spending a few minutes on land; if the water lacks enough O_2 then even come to the surface to breath air. They only die after their gills dry out, only then they die due to lack of oxygen.

May I suggest that Jouni states a formal definition of complexity, including how one might measure it¿ Then we can discuss if a) it is adequate, whether it in- or decreases.

There is a difference between there simply being those long chains and them being strictly necessary. They are simply efficient (from a market point of view), but they are not necessary.

But... Stargate¿