Faster than Light Travel. Meet the people who want to build our first starship. Really? Let's talk about a mature nanotechnology system that is solar powered, works at room temperature, largely recycles itself, and evolves to meet new situations. In case you haven't twigged, it's our own biosphere.
Us. Yes, I've got a first edition copy of Drexler's Engines of Creation, so I'm not unfamiliar with the dreams of nanotech. Thing is, cells are so complex that we've got an enormous industry that's devoted entirely to reverse engineering them and hacking them (the biotech industry). Nanotechnology isn't magic fairy dust, and assuming that it will automatically solve all our problems is foolish. For example: Fusion reactors have the fundamental problem of going from thousands or millions of degrees (the fusion reaction) to close to absolute zero (the supercooled magnets making the fusion bottle) in a few meters. Similarly, making matter go from interstellar speeds to zero in a few meters (a shield against interstellar debris) is hard. And so forth and so on. A world first! Success at complete quantum teleportation. Furusawa group at the University of Tokyo has succeeded in demonstrating complete quantum teleportation of photonic quantum bits by a hybrid technique for the first time worldwide.
In 1997, quantum teleportation of photonic quantum bits was achieved by a research team at Innsbruck University in Austria. However, such quantum teleportation couldn't be used for information processing, because measurement was required after transport, and the transport efficiency was low. So, quantum teleportation was still a long way from practical use in quantum communication and quantum computing. The demonstration of quantum teleportation of photonic quantum bits by Furusawa group shows that transport efficiency can be over 100 times higher than before.
Also, because no measurement is needed after transport, this result constitutes a major advance toward quantum information processing technology. "I think we can definitely say that quantum computers have come closer to reality. Ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110023492_2011024705.pdf. Facebook. Timeline Photos. Warp Drive More Possible Than Thought, Scientists Say.
HOUSTON — A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television's Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say. A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre; however, subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.
Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science. "There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said here Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight. Warping space-time Laboratory tests. Pdf/1202.5708v1.pdf. Wormhole Construction: Proceed with Caution. Ronnie Chen/Hampton University, from a ThinkQuest project Spaceships on Star Trek: Deep Space 9 regularly take a shortcut between distant parts of the Universe by traveling through a wormhole, a kind of spacetime tunnel. Although Einstein’s General Relativity theory allows wormholes to exist, physicists have been trying for decades to construct them mathematically without breaking any other laws of physics.
Most researchers agree that wormholes require “exotic matter”–stuff that is repelled by gravity, rather than attracted–but some have claimed ways around that problem. Now a report in the 27 July PRL shows that all wormholes, no matter how cleverly constructed, require exotic matter–a condition that many in the field are already working to satisfy. According to Matt Visser of Washington University in St. On the other hand, no one knows if enough of this weird stuff can exist in one place at one time to create a decent-sized wormhole.
References. Dead stars 'to guide spacecraft'