Hey, don’t you DARE smack down on the Nazi Salt Shaker Robots, man. They’ll mess you UP.
And there is one obvious answer that everyone seems to have overlooked: power source.
Consider this: what kind of power source do you need for a gadget that can (a) ignore gravity, and (b) ignore the speed of light? We can throw © ignore inertia in there as well, since it seems like kind of a given.
I am fairly certain that no one has yet mastered the trick of doing all this with a few “D” batteries. It seems a safe bet that steam technology is not up to it, either – you might find water asteroids between here and Alpha Centauri, but I wouldn’t hold my breath looking for wood or coal.
This leaves several options.
(a) ANTIMATTER. Starfleet and several other alien races on TV do very well with this stuff. Just pour into a magnetic bottle and mix with an equal amount of matter, and kaboom, lots and lots of usable energy. We already know how to make the stuff in the laboratory, too!
On the other hand, a fragment of antimatter weighing about one pound, upon touching any form of matter, including air, could just about rip the state of Delaware completely off the map. Considering the Federal Government’s track record with keeping track of uranium and plutonium, I don’t think I want them handling any amount of antimatter. Crate it up, Fritz.
(b) GRAVITY WAVES
Gotta be a mathematician to understand this one, and I’m not. I understand that you can use gravity waves as a form of propulsion, and that it theoretically has no upper limit. The bad thing is that to make it really work, you need a quantum black hole.
A quantum black hole is a black hole that’s really tiny, like, big enough to hold in your hand. You couldn’t HOLD it in your hand, of course, because the gravitational force around it would suck you INTO it before you even successfully TOUCHED the thing. In fact, the first thing it would do as soon as it came out of your bag would be to head straight for the core of the Earth, eating rock and dirt as fast as it went. It would then yo-yo back and forth through the Earth’s crust, eventually eating the entire planet and everything on it.
Would YOU want the Feds screwing around with anything like this? The first thing I’d do is crate the sucker up and stick it in Hangar 51 forever. Crate it up, Fritz.
© BUSSARD RAMJET
This idea is fairly simple. There is supposedly a great deal of hydrogen in space. Why not run an engine on it? Just set up magnetic ramscoops, thousands of miles across, and have them channel all this hydrogen into your engines as you fly the ship! Theoretically, you can never run out of fuel, and you can accelerate up to an infinite velocity!
On the other hand, you have to get it up to a certain speed before it will work at all. And you still have to worry about relativistic effects. If we had one from the aliens that worked, we’d need to get it into orbit with space shuttles as tugboats, then we’d need to get it clear of the Sun’s gravity, and then we’d need to figure some way to get it up to ramscoop speeds… and then we’d kiss it goodbye for a few years while the astronauts aboard got it up to ramscoop speeds, field tested the thing, and brought it back. They’d only be gone a couple of years, THEIR time… while ghod knows how long would pass here; I can’t figure out the math.
And if I can’t, it’s a safe bet no politician can. Crate it up, Fritz.
(D) TOTAL CONVERSION
Theoretically, we’ve known about this one for years. You split atoms, you get energy. So far, we’ve only been able to do it with hydrogen and uranium and stuff, but it’s theoretically possible with ANYTHING made of atoms. Furthermore, we can only do it with a very low rate of efficiency – most of the atoms aren’t split before the chain reaction dies out.
What if we could do it with 100% efficiency? With ANY SUBSTANCE? This would kick ass. The garbage in your kitchen garbage can, when dumped into a Total Converter, could run your house’s electricity for the next 100 years!
Plainly, this would make a dandy starship engine. Just load it up with lots of ballast, and shovel a few pounds of lead shot in, periodically, to keep the power levels up. Man, if the government has THIS… why haven’t they released it?
Well, because if we took a person about my size, and converted his mass to energy, right there on the spot, we would rip the entire state of Texas off the hemisphere, trigger tectonic effects, volcanoes, possibly crack the entire planet, and pretty much trigger global armaggeddon, right freakin’ there.
We’ve already SEEN what a few loonies aboard a couple airliners could do. Do we really want Total Conversion Units in every household in America?
Crate it up, Fritz.
Classic.
