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Honestly, this is pretty much all that public schooling in (in the U.S. anyhow) teaches students how to do.

If the fiat-based greed system doesn't fall in the process, there's no difference between the two.

Well gee, guess I was wrong. There ARE gods in Science. But since you asked: what is your definition of "violating a law?" Would you say, for example, that a warp field would be a violation of relativity? For my money, that's the kind of thing I think is happening. I wouldn't say that's the same as violating a law though. Even if it did, it's not going to make conservation laws obsolete. They'll still be fine for nearly all practical applications. Newton is still universal, even in space, even though technically it's not completely accurate.

Except that this is exactly the case. You CAN'T possibly know. And it doesn't take someone who is an expert in the field to know that. Of course the odds are low, but this would hardly be the first time that there has been a game changer, and it wouldn't be the last time either. And again, exactly why I think this is irking so many people. Because "you can't possibly know" is exactly the same argument that is often applied to another... thing... that will not be discussed in depth here for obvious reasons. What's sad is I think the LACK of these kinds of things is what makes it so hard to get people interested in science these days. The bar is SO HIGH now that you need to be richer than Midas (through grants), AND smarter than Hawking to get anywhere now. It's a far cry from the days when you could just accidentally spill a couple of things in your kitchen, see a cool reaction, and stumble upon something that nobody ever knew before. People like to experiment. The trouble is we can't do it in our garage anymore and expect something amazing and new to happen. This EM Drive fluke reminds me of that "wow, what the heck just happened?!" kind of feeling that I used to get as a kid when experimenting with random stuff, when I didn't know that everything I could possibly figure out on my own without two or more degrees, had already been figured out decades or centuries before me.

There's really no point to terraforming Mars. Even with breathable air, the ground will be very bad for us. Mars soil is full of silicates, and you do NOT want to breathe it. Even letting it get in through your front door is begging to have your lungs turned into swiss cheese.

It doesn't have anything to do with it. But zealotry doesn't care about that. The simple possibility of something that in layman's terms is a freaking miracle, is apparently enough to ruffle a lot of feathers.

It won't be that way for long. There are fully-automated fast food restaurants now, of all things. And you can still easily reach a point where slave labor will cost more. No matter how cheap you make it, people still need to eat, drive to work, and sleep. They get sick (especially when you pay them poverty wages), injured, have to take care of kids, and the quality of their work takes a nosedive when they're pushed too hard. Robots aren't affected by any of those things, and since we don't live in a sci-fi movie, you also don't have to worry about labor disputes and PR damage control.

While I agree with this statement, I also think this might be why the very idea of this thing "working" irks a lot of people. At the moment, it's boderline magic. And while Scientists are excited, it seems like Atheists hate it and can't wait to see it fail based on the article comments I've been seeing.

And therein lies the great paradox that is already happening. Super-rich people creating robots that replace jobs in droves, not caring whether or not new human jobs will replace the industries that get wiped out. But even when nobody can afford the services anymore because nobody can be make money, will that matter? Financial success generally favors selfish sociopaths, and they will be the ones who own the machines doing all the jobs. Even though money will become obsolete, they will still want to get paid for what they provided. But even slavery, the robots can do better. So what else will the non-elite workers have to offer the wealthy robot-owners?

For all practicality, if it needs nothing but sunlight to run, it's infinite. We can start complaining that it's not good enough when we start having ten-billion-year lifespans.

Point taken.

Gosh... forcing an entire population to permanently turn homosexual? That's practically genocide if nobody reproduces.

The effects would have been temporary, so I doubt it.

If you liked that, you'll love these. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb

I think I too have had that theory hypothesis)... We have 'laws' that are now inaccurate, but still good enough to still be used for nearly all conventional activities. Gravity was once a simple rule that what goes up, must come back down, and that it always comes down at 9.8m/s/s. Then we discovered this is not a constant as we moved away from the Earth and looked at the bigger picture. If the drive is real, it doesn't mean the universe is broken. It just means that our current laws do not cover the bigger picture. String theory suggests there may be up to 26 dimensions. Whether that's true or not, we can only perceive three... maybe four of them. Our current ideas about the universe leave room for a LOT of uncharted territory. Aside from concerns about this being a possible harbinger of "Doomsday," is there any OTHER reason that anyone has for hoping this isn't real?

Name it after the politician who can get the most funding for the first ship. That oughta put the haters in a logical paradox. "I must not support space. But... but... IMMORTALITY!"

Not sure if this has been mentioned in 53 pages, but it will also make shorter trips much more feasible. We need not even send manned ships into orbit with the drive installed. A couple of permanent "space tugs" could be left in orbit for when they're needed. Dock with it, switch it on, have it push you to the moon or wherever you need to go.

It would be very strange though, a thousand year journey. Without rereading through mission briefings, we could forget why we were making the trip in the first place.

Wait for No Man's Sky to be released. Then I'll decide on that question. The computer could extrapolate the procedural data and then convert it to files, if that became an issue. A sort of "temporary internet files" for recently visited worlds.

That's not a question just for this hypothetical situation. One way or another, we're going to have no choice but to enforce population control eventually. The instinct to spawn is probably the most powerful drive that we have, yet it's the only one we don't have a law to regulate.

I guess that depends on what the definition of "old" is in this scenario. I can't fathom developing immortality without compensating for some of this. What would be the point of having the body of a 20 year old for hundreds of years, if all we did with it is get senile and stare out the window all day?

I disagree. If immortality came with a solution to the classic diseases of the brain that tend to start in the 70's to 90's, it would mean a paradigm shift in our ability to acquire knowledge. If we had the tech centuries ago, Einstein could still be developing new theories now. Fields of scientific study are already pushing the limits of the human lifespan, in that it takes a HUGE swath of our life expectancy to just attain the knowledge that came before us. That leaves us at best, maybe 40 years to apply what we have learned, to push it even further. But if we had a thousand years to apply that knowledge?

In nearly my entire adult-hood, I've been feeling civilization was in need of a quantum leap of some kind. Computers never really did that for me, because 90% of the reason they now exist in everyday life is because, like television, they're tools to sell more stuff to people. But like the Star Trek timeline, warp drive always felt like the "big one." This may not be that, but... PLEASE, Universe, PLEASE give us a little room to break contemporary laws of physics here. Let this be for real.

I was able to still boot my PC with a dead CMOS battery. I just had to reconfigure my settings anytime I tried to do it. What OP seems to be describing sounds like corrupted firmware.

I really need to try that stuff yet. Went to Kennedy as a kid and wanted it by my 'rents wouldn't allow it. Time to fulfill one of my inner child's unfulfilled desires.