Are we alone in the Universe? Probably not. Due to the sheer volume of stars and galaxies chances are pretty high that there are some, and probably quite a few, higher intelligence lifeforms out there, somewhere, among the stars.
The problem with finding them is that relatively speaking, we’re too far apart, and drifting further and further apart by the day, like swimmers in an ocean current, as Dark Energy drives the expansion of the Universe at an ever increasing rate. To make matters worse we’re limited by the natural resources we have at our disposal, unable to develop the means to travel to even our nearest stellar neighbor even if we wanted to.
Forget about exploring the Universe to search for intelligent life. If we make it to the outer reaches of our own solar system it’ll be a miracle. After all, we’ve only been to the Moon once and getting to Mars still seems like a pipe dream. It’s amazing that we can launch anything off the surface of the Earth at all.
But our fate may be about to change. For we may be able to visit distant worlds after all. Thanks to an incredible new design for a stellar engine that wouldn’t need a fuel source. Just electricity. A breakthrough that could make it possible to approach the speed of light. Suddenly our dreams of far flung space exploration can come back into focus.
As Futurism puts it:
“California State University, Fullerton physics professor emeritus Jim Woodward has an out-of-this-world idea to allow spacecraft to travel to neighboring star systems: tiny crystals that vibrate tens of thousands of times per second when an electric current is applied.
His invention, dubbed the Mach-effect gravitational assist (MEGA) drive, makes the extraordinary promise of a propulsion system that relies on nothing but a source of electricity — no heavy combustion fuel necessary…
The idea is to accelerate slowly, but over a very long period of time. According to Woodward, a spacecraft with a MEGA drive could eventually reach velocities approaching the speed of light, with the help of an onboard nuclear reactor to supply decades worth of electric power.
The MEGA drive relies on Mach’s principle, named by Albert Einstein himself, which claims that inertia is related to distant gravitational effects. As an object’s energy changes, the very matter of space and time changes around it as well, a controversial interpretation of Einstein’s famous mass-energy equivalence principle E=mc².
In other words… if part of an object — in the case of the MEGA drive, parts of tiny piezoelectric disks — were to simultaneously change its mass and energy state, it could theoretically start accelerating.”
This is amazing. If proven to work the MEGA Drive could enable us to travel fast enough to make long-distance space travel a reasonable proposition within a single human life span. Allowing us to explore not only the outer reaches of our own solar system but our nearest stellar neighbors in the Milk Way Galaxy as well.
It reminds me of another recent innovation, the Air Plasma Engine, that promises to make use of electricity and air to power an airplane, no fossil fuels required. Taken together it’s pretty amazing to think that the future of travel, both on Earth and across the cosmos, could be achieved without using any traditional fuels. If that’s true it could completely revolutionize society, enabling us to go where no man has gone before, while saving our home planet from Climate Change along the way. It just doesn’t get any better than that.
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