Space! Solar Storm Sights

Karl wrote:I can't imagine where technology - and evolution - will take us in a billion years. I do reckon our descendants, whatever they may be, will be still be knocking around. I'm pretty optimistic in that I don't think we're actually really capable of wiping ourselves out. Even global thermonuclear war wouldn't come close to killing us all (though it would clearly end most civilisation for a while and strawberry float up a lot of other species).

Rubix wrote:Just finished watching The Planets on Netflix, bit depressing knowing that if we don't find another planet to move to outside our solar system in a couple of billion years it could be the end of mankind!

Gandalf wrote:Instead of spending Billions of cash actively trying to kill each other, how about we all, you know, work together, research, and try to save each other?

Moggy wrote:

Gandalf wrote:Instead of spending Billions of cash actively trying to kill each other, how about we all, you know, work together, research, and try to save each other?

strawberry floating hippies.

Gandalf wrote:
Well, A. From a selfish point of view, I'll be dead, so I don't really give a toss. B. Instead of spending Billions of cash actively trying to kill each other, how about we all, you know, work together, research, and try to save each other?

Falsey wrote:Im fairly confident that our descendants within the next few hundred years are going to be mostly mechanical. Millions of years from now Id be very surprised if there was anything organic left of 'the human race' other than perhaps brains.

Preezy wrote:Evens brains will be digitised. I bet somewhere in the universe there's a race of machines that used to be organic.

Last summer, NASA Eagleworks – an advanced propulsion research group led by Dr. Harold “Sonny” White at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) – made waves throughout the scientific and technical communities when the group presented their test results on July 28-30, 2014, at the 50th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference in Cleveland, Ohio.

Those results related to experimental testing of an EM Drive – a concept that originated around 2001 when a small UK company, Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd (SPR), under Roger J. Shawyer, started a Research and Development (R&D) program.

The concept of an EM Drive as put forth by SPR was that electromagnetic microwave cavities might provide for the direct conversion of electrical energy to thrust without the need to expel any propellant.

In Dr. White’s model, the propellant ions of the MagnetoHydroDynamics drive are replaced as the fuel source by the virtual particles of the Quantum Vacuum, eliminating the need to carry propellant.

This model was also met with criticism in the scientific community because the Quantum Vacuum cannot be ionized and is understood to be “frame-less” – meaning you cannot “push” against it, as required for momentum.

The tests reported by Dr. White’s team in July 2014 were not conducted in a vacuum, and none of the tests reported by Prof. Yang in China or Mr. Shawyer in the UK were conducted in a vacuum either.

The scientific community met these NASA tests with skepticism and a number of physicists proposed that the measured thrust force in the US, UK, and China tests was more likely due to (external to the EM Drive cavity) natural thermal convection currents arising from microwave heating (internal to the EM Drive cavity).

However, Paul March, an engineer at NASA Eagleworks, recently reported in NASASpaceFlight.com’s forum (on a thread now over 500,000 views) that NASA has successfully tested their EM Drive in a hard vacuum – the first time any organization has reported such a successful test.