[extropy-chat] USA - No Science, No space travel, No money ........

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> At 02:25 PM 3/10/2005 -0800, Mike wrote:
> 
> >  it may be time for me to say "I told you so"
> >(especially you Damien) as NASA is currently turning one of those
> >concepts, which it earned a patent on, into a workable electric
> >propulsion system needing no propellant (and it's not a sail).
> 
> I only recall criticizing `Dean drive'-type speculations.
> 
> What's the NASA patent about? It must be very frustrating that they 
> patented it if you were the one who thought of it.

Well, your speculations were without scientific merit, as Sasha and
John Cramer have both commented the concept works if the working mass
is changing velocity in the near-relativistic range, because the frame
dragging phenomenon plays a trick on inertia and Mach's Principle.
While this isn't possible for purely mechanical devices, it is possible
for devices which either use lower values for c or which use particles
which are easier to manipulate in the desired velocity range.

I had previously commented about the work of TT Brown and the Biefeld
Brown Effect (Biefeld was his professor at Stanford) observed with
assymetric capacitors, which led to a number of patents for Brown and
significant top secret research by the Rand Corporation in the 1950's
which dissapeared into a black hole of bureaucracy. Brown's work has
recently resurfaced in the form of the following patent by NASA: 
http://l2.espacenet.com/dips/bnsviewer?CY=ep&LG=en&DB=EPD&PN=US6317310&ID=US+++6317310B1+I+

Which describes the following devices which have been replicated by a
French researcher:
http://jlnlabs.imars.com/lifters/act/html/omptv1.htm

While this concept has in the past been disparaged as solely due to
'ion wind', the following paper disproves this argument:
http://www.geocities.com/ekpworld/doc/EKP_satellite_maneuvering.doc
and demonstrates that ion wind can only account for a small fraction of
the observed thrust from such devices.

I have shown in the past how all devices described essentially work to
relativistically cheat Mach's Principle. Despite this, I have gotten
nothing but scorn from this list, such that eight years later, NASA is
finally starting to do what I could have been developing as a private
space enterprise back then. But I let the voices here, who all
professed to be much more educated and wise than I, tell me I was a
fool.

THis is the real reason this list has gone mundane: it is no longer a
center of extropy, it is a center of cynical entropy. People here
abandoned 'dynamic optimism' for 'practicality' long ago and as a
result ExI and the list, have become further irrelevant. I once
described this list as the biggest bunch of do-nothings I've ever seen.
Since then I went out and started doing things in the political scene,
but this list hasn't really changed at all.

Especially you, Damien, whose job in life is supposed to be imagining
"what if" to be as cynical as you've been to me, is IMHO terrible.

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com


		
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