Gravity Control by Laser

[mansouryar]

sexobon, xoxoxoBruce, footfootfoot, ZenGum, Undertoad, Griff,
Thanks a lot for your comments. I want to know what can be done to make most good effects & least bad effects out of it …

Society isn't ready for an accomplishment of that magnitude. The ramifications far exceed those of the development of even something like the internet which governments already have difficulty regulating. It would be like using fractal patterns instead circular spherical boundaries for the holes in your plates.

I expect that nation states would commandeer such a project early in its development and that the private sector wouldn't realize any benefit until long after it became possible to do ... if ever.

It sounds sadly true …

I suspect you're right about nation states seizing control of that technology. Of course there would be a worm hole race... guaranteed Israel would steal it first, and the Russians would claim to have done it in the '50s.

If that could be realized, the definition of "nation" needs to be reconsidered IMHO. If people can reach to each other in blink of an eye, how can one define a border, country, … ?

I think you need to partner with the guys at google and wikipedia who are the most egalitarian of the big companies. Certainly don't want mainstream companies getting involved.

But seriously, I think a Cellar think tank considering this idea would be great. Let's leave aside the issue of government control or people not being ready and think about how life would be different if it were fait accompli.

The question is: Would be any big corporation interested/able to work on such a subject that could cause extreme military consequences to its locating country? Maybe secretly, however that requires a high courage …

I think society could handle FTL travel just fine. The sooner we discover other livable planets, the sooner we find the aliens that are similar to us and then we can take their money.

Hopefully they will have solved a lot of the messy problems we have here.

I hope we could contact to an intelligent alien civilization by this mechanism at last; but on the earth, any country could have another country's resources: gas, oil, water, gold, money …!

I think society would handle FTL but States are not going to be great supporters of uncontrolled use of it. Consider where we are with space travel since the go go sixties...

I'm not an anarchist, but I believe those damn governments have suppressed many innovations to become public during the past years. The present space technology is pathetic, compared to what potentially that would be able to become …

[footfootfoot]

A friend of mine pointed out to me that most of the technology we rely on daily are "hand-me-downs" from the military. Things like GPS, night vision, various optics, electronics, etc. are all born in the military.

That may be changing somewhat, as super large corporations are now much stronger, economically, than the government, but on the other hand, most of those corps are in some way related to the military.

I think one of the key things to think about is "What is at the destination?" FTL travel in and of itself may be cool, but after a while "driving around the parking lot" will lose its appeal. Where will one go, what will be there and why would one go back?

Another question I have is what effects will the experience of FTL have on a person's perceptions of reality? How will it change someone's sense of time and of their place in the universe. How will it change someone's sense of "self" or their concept of their spatial relationship.

I know from my own experiences of flying in small aircraft and hot air balloons, that my sense of time passing, my sense of my location and relationship to moving through the area I live changed greatly. Not just from acquiring a new vantage point, but being able to traverse distance at a different pace.

Similar to doing a long distance bike ride, covering a hundred or so miles over ten hours and then getting in a car and driving back over the same route alters your perception of the distance covered. One thing is the faster you move the less you experience of any individual spot; the less you see, smell, hear, etc. You lose detail but gain a better sense of totality. I expect with FTL travel you'd lose so much detail that you'd be approaching complete loss of detail, if there were a true inverse relationship between loss of detail and acquisition of totality (the total picture: Seeing the forest for the trees) then what an FTL traveler would perceive would be perhaps paradigm changing and life altering. Perhaps even putting it on a par with a Kensho experience.

[xoxoxoBruce]

3Foot, it would probably be like an actor moving from their dressing room to the stage.

Need a fence.

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

I think one of the key things to think about is "What is at the destination?" FTL travel in and of itself may be cool, but after a while "driving around the parking lot" will lose its appeal. Where will one go, what will be there and why would one go back?

Imagine anchoring one end of a wormhole in Jupiter's atmosphere, allowing us to quickly and cheaply "harvest" abundant hydrogen. No more burning fossil fuels on Earth. How about a factory in Venus' orbit, able to use solar energy and able to dispose of toxic waste in a way that won't ruin our planet, using a wormhole to get its product to market. Wormholes could even be used intra-earth. Want to go to Australia, to hook up with Zengum? You go to the "wormport" and getting to Australia would be instantaneous.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Not if Homeland Security has a say in it.

[Undertoad]

Viva Las Vegas!

[Flint]

Originally Posted by mansouryar

Thank you so much for the warm welcome. Well, I had found this forum at months ago while googling some interesting words and then I bookmarked here to deal with it at a right time later, but that affair took so much time. Since here seemed a good website to me, I decided to bring up my concerns with you members.
...

What terms were you Googling that brought you to this site? This is a continued point of curiosity (what draws individuals to a community).

[mansouryar]

I think one of the key things to think about is "What is at the destination?" FTL travel in and of itself may be cool, but after a while "driving around the parking lot" will lose its appeal. Where will one go, what will be there and why would one go back?

At least to me, the main goal of FTL is colonizing other earth-like planets & spheres in other stellar systems & galaxies, in addition to finding alien civilizations. Regarding the cosmic distances in the universe, the only solution is going FTL and as long as the mentioned goals would not be reached, its appeal would not be lost, at least to me.

Another question I have is what effects will the experience of FTL have on a person's perceptions of reality? How will it change someone's sense of time and of their place in the universe. How will it change someone's sense of "self" or their concept of their spatial relationship.

Similar to breaking the sound barrier, one would be able to watch the past events, if he could exceed the light speed, then adjust a strong telescope to a targeted point; it just seemed to me a significant effect.
We are not completely strange with such affairs. For now, you can have access to anyone's info (i.e., text, voice, picture & video) on the earth almost immediately, provided both would have the related cell phones (devices) and numbers. The next step is access to physical existence of each other. We'd used to that IMHO.

One thing is the faster you move the less you experience of any individual spot; the less you see, smell, hear, etc. You lose detail but gain a better sense of totality. I expect with FTL travel you'd lose so much detail that you'd be approaching complete loss of detail,

There are billions of galaxies in the known universe; each of them having millions or billions of stars, and it is expected there must be a couple of planets rotating around each star, forming a stellar system, like our own Milky Way galaxy & solar system. Now multiply these numbers to find a huge number of the planets we'd have to verify for being worthy of living or contacting their residents. This technology shall make us busy for a long long time!

Imagine anchoring one end of a wormhole in Jupiter's atmosphere, allowing us to quickly and cheaply "harvest" abundant hydrogen. No more burning fossil fuels on Earth. How about a factory in Venus' orbit, able to use solar energy and able to dispose of toxic waste in a way that won't ruin our planet, using a wormhole to get its product to market.

You're totally right. It can solve the energy crisis. Imagine anchoring one end of a wormhole in a deep point of the earth, so you can extract the internal heat of the earth and use it in a geothermal power plant. To make it more economical, you can avoid installing new complexes. Just take out the facilities of a fossil/nuclear plant from the building, then install the new facilities in the same building and start having green geothermal energy!
Also, almost any public vehicle would not be necessary. The planes, ships, trailers, trains, metros, … anything but a personal car to go out the vacation with the family in the weekend. Replace all of them with the new transporting system! We need to move on as fast as we can:

Wormholes could even be used intra-earth. Want to go to Australia, to hook up with Zengum? You go to the "wormport" and getting to Australia would be instantaneous.

That's really awesome. I was invited to a scientific conference in the USA about 3 years ago, but the US embassy officer in Turkey didn't issue me a visa because I couldn't prove him I will come back Iran after finishing that conference. We Iranians have plenty of visa problems to travel abroad, so this is a personal motivation for me to make all the people who control others' travels … jobless!

[mansouryar]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Not if Homeland Security has a say in it.

If there is a wormhole technology at work, what does the "Homeland" mean? How would the DHS guys want to stop that?

[mansouryar]

What terms were you Googling that brought you to this site? This is a continued point of curiosity (what draws individuals to a community).

I don't remember exactly, there were a few unusual words. The website is online for a long time, has a good number of members, has a suitable Google rank, … so I saved its name & address …

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by mansouryar

If there is a wormhole technology at work, what does the "Homeland" mean? How would the DHS guys want to stop that?

Whoa, just because we can get from here to Mars in a jiffy, doesn't mean we can all start singing Kumbaya and buying each other Cokes. I know damn well if this technology were to become a reality, nation states would closely control it's use for their own benefit. Running down to Home Depot for a wormhole is not in the cards.

You're totally right. It can solve the energy crisis. Imagine anchoring one end of a wormhole in a deep point of the earth, so you can extract the internal heat of the earth and use it in a geothermal power plant. To make it more economical, you can avoid installing new complexes. Just take out the facilities of a fossil/nuclear plant from the building, then install the new facilities in the same building and start having green geothermal energy!

That sounds lovely, but just taking carbon out of the earth has caused a world of hurt, that wasn't predicted for a very long time. How do we know what the consequences of moving the heat from the earth's core to the atmosphere are going to be? Will it cause excess cooling of the core, and shrinkage causing massive earthquakes, tsunamis, super volcanoes and prairie dog suicides?

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

shrinkage

[glatt]

Mass access to teleportation would be cool, but at the same time it would suck. Those remote exotic locations would lose their charm if they were easy to get to and millions of people around the world decided they wanted to go there. I can picture the peak of Mount Everest having a Planet Hollywood on it with an oxygen bar.

The only way you would be able to find a place where you could get away from it all would be if you chose a barren inhospitable location, like the middle of a flat desert in Nevada.

Things like the "suburbs" and "country" would cease to have meaning if you can instantaneously commute from anywhere. Population density would become evenly distributed instead of being centered around cities. Put another way, there would no longer be rural areas, it would all be one big suburb.

[footfootfoot]

What is the speed of dark?

[Lamplighter]

Parking at the Teleporter Terminal would still be a drag.