Bells
Staff member
Which does not apply to a bunch of people going into space.
NASA validates seemingly impossible space thruster
- Thread starter Kittamaru
- Start date
No, this is exactly what NASA does. They look into odd phenomena that might be useful for space travel.
This isn't even that out there. Consider space elevators or launch loops. Now, space elevators are currently physically impossible; there is no known manufacturing process that can produce a cable strong enough. But I am glad they are doing the work so we can see how close we are.
Agreed - and there is a lot known about this device, and one very large unknown. Most likely we will just discover a new principle of magnetrons that might lead to more efficient/smaller/more powerful magnetrons. There is a small chance that we will discover an entirely new principle of microwave propagation. And there is an even smaller chance that this will turn out to be a useful drive for spacecraft. Those odds are well worth the small amount of money spent so far.
Science does not advance by doing the same experiments over and over. It advances via new experiments, and the most promising statement a scientist can utter during such an experiment is "huh, that's odd - that doesn't make sense."
And thousands of people lose their sanity every year living in crowds of other people, in a normal society.
sculptor
Valued Senior Member
agreed
I once worked at site R, we would spend weeks at a time underground(under mountain actually).
I once spent 15-16 weeks without seeing the sun once. Some folks adapted well to the confinement, some had to be removed.
Before sending a crew into space, It would be prudent to have them spend months/(years?) within a replica "space ship" buried underground.
How many generations would it take to reach the nearest earth-like planet?
Would the people who do well confined to a ship have offspring with the same traits?
sculptor
Valued Senior Member
True:
And, maybe you gotta be just a little bit crazy to begin with to want to lock yourself up in a cave for six months.
The continuum between sanity and insanity makes for a fascinating study, incluging the "triggers" which tend to move someone toward one pole or the other.
What is "normal"?
[video=youtube;p1G6W863ppU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1G6W863ppU[/video]
Bells
Staff member
Depends on the people, the ship, the distance, the destination and a variety of other things.
I think it is premature to declare that they would go insane without even knowing what is involved, the time and distance, and everything inbetween.
Relying on a dodgy website with ranting about a doomed mission to antarctica and having to fight for survival and the madness that followed and then finding articles about a woman having gone insane and saying it was because she had been into space is not the way to go about it either.
Nor should we be relying on a guy who decides to live in a cave and lost his mind..
We do not know what any of these individuals were like before, if there was always the propensity to suffer from mental illness. Were they mentally ill before? Were their parents? What is they psychological and psychiatric make-up prior to embarking on solitary confinement studies? Was he mentally ill prior to deciding to live in solitary confinement in a cave somewhere? All of these factors play a direct role in the end. And without knowing the psychological and psychiatric history (if any) prior, then it is hard to say that they went insane because they were living alone and shut off from everyone. For example, I have an aunt who is mentally ill. She has panic attacks if she is alone, sometimes even in her own house if her children are traveling or on holidays and no longer close (two of them live fairly close by). Full blown panic attacks that feel like heart attacks and require hospitalisation. She has a history of this. She's always been like this. Apparently even as a child. If she, or someone like her or with her history, were put in a study group, studying whether one goes insane if in solitary confinement, then the answer would be yes. Because she would go insane.
And yet, there are others, perfectly sane, who crave that level of solitude and sometimes even move away from their loved one's to attain that type of solitude, without any negative effects on their psyche.
Not everyone is the same. And I think declaring that they would just go insane is premature as there is no factual basis for such claims. Not everyone would go insane if they went on such a space mission.
Here again you prove my point - you cannot actually discredit the idea, so you attack the person presenting it...
Simply shameful.
As interesting as Siffre's studies proved, it is evidence that one person suffered issues in isolation, but as others have pointed out, people go insane without isolation, and one person does not a sufficient sample make with which to support "projects have show humans go insane.
same results over and over.
the end result is, they went insane." as krash661 claimed.
And it also has little bearing on interstellar travel, unless we're suggesting that such missions will be solitary?
So I still await krash661's evidence to support his claims.
OMG, have you not been reading the thread?! Do I have to quote the entire discussion as a preface to every new post(do you?)?
I'm really at a loss for (and a little disturbed by) the fact that you don't appear to have absorbed the content of the discussion (even aside from not having picked up on the issues up yourself). Could you explain which parts of the explanations about how big a Fail this is you don't understand? For example, do you not get how a null test getting the same result as the main test shows the effect to be nonexistent/a calibration error? Do you not get just how big a deal it is for a group of professional scientists to make such a mistake?
Anyway, I'm comfortable with the level of technical content I've added to the thread. And while you have responded to some of my posts, very little of your content has been technical. Feel free to rectify that inequity. Moreover, feel free to apologize for falsely implying that my contributions have been entirely (or largely) ad hominem, especially since you started down this road by comparing me to racists. You are the one attacking the presenter here instead of providing technical content, not me.
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I understand that NASA has a mandate to look for exotic propulsion ideas. That's not what my complaint is about. My complaint is about NASA doing spectacularly bad science while researching a stupid idea. Putting those in bullet points:
1. The idea itself is really, really bad.
2. NASA's investigation of the idea was very poorly done.
These are separate problems, but often go together when dealing with crackpots. That's what's so scary about this: these NASA scientists are acting like crackpots.
Similar to Kittamaru, you aren't recognizing the difference between theoretically impossible and technologically impossible.
-Theoretically impossible means that as far as we know, an idea violates the laws of the universe and can't ever work.
-Technologically impossible means that an idea is known to be possible, but for reasons of money, time, [non-theoretical] efficiency, etc. we are unable to do it currently.
Fusion power, for example, is researched heavily because it is known to be theoretically possible. Cold fusion is not [seriously] researched because it is currently understood to be theoretically impossible. Between them might be a third category:
-Theoretically uknown. Obviously: something we don't know if is possible or not.
I'm not certain if NASA has a well-defined mandate for this and the line between theoretically impossible and unknown can be grey, but IMO NASA should not be trying to research things that are fairly confidently known to be theoretically impossible.
This idea falls into the realm of the theoretically impossible. It isn't inventing new science, it is just a basic and obvious - stupid even - misunderstanding of existing science. It is so bad that I have a hard time believing it isn't a hoax/scam.
The original idea is the "EM Drive":
http://emdrive.com/principle.htmlEM Drive said:
Setting the side the poorly stated (and also wrong) variable speed of light angle, the principle is the same misunderstanding of geometry that schoolchildren have when dealing with hydrostatic pressure being independent of the shape of a container. I've even had kids ask me why a cone-shaped object placed underwater doesn't shoot-off in the direction of the pointy-end due to the pressure on the flat end. That is exactly what the originator of the EM Drive is suggesting happens. From a kid, the question is naive. From an adult who claims to know physics, the idea is stupid. For NASA to investigate the stupid idea is mind-boggling.
The newer incarnation proposes a mechanism based on interaction with "quantum vacuum virtual plasma", a phenomena that they apparently made-up, with a name that looks suspiciously like technobabble gibberish (the word "plasma" doesn't appear to belong there). It smells like a hoax.
Disagree. I think the device is quite well understood. The science behind what is happening is not complicated.
What you are probably considering a "very large unknown" about "this device" is almost certainly a fairly small uknown about the test bench (how the test bench caused the measurement error).
Near certainly, nothing will be discovered but the source of the experimental error.
In science, since no theory is ever 100% proven, no wrong idea can ever be 100% ruled-out, so I would have to agree. But:
Given that we don't even know the odds of either of those, I don't see how you can suggest that other than by full-fledged wishful thinking. Any economist will tell you that playing the lottery is a bad idea, but at least with the lottery you know someone is going to win. Here, we can be reasonably certain from the start that what is being searched for is an error, not a phenomena.
Of course. But in this case, it does already make sense.
Circling back to the original two points:
1. (Stupid idea) NASA has finite research dollars, not to mention brain power and time. There should be a process by which they decide what to research based on how promising it appears. There probably is. There is likely a problem with it, either in that:
A. They aren't doing it rigorously.
B. There just aren't any worthy fringe ideas out there, so they just pick the best of a bad bunch.
While I would hope for B (because it at least saves face for NASA), I'm seeing A, because:
2. The investigation of the idea was poorly done. When the research announcement has clear scientific process flaws that any Junior High student should be able to identify, it calls into question the capabilities of the people that are running that office.
I would be somewhat OK if my tax dollars were spent doing good investigation of bad ideas, but I am not OK with my tax dollars being spent doing bad investigation of anything.
You say this as if unaware of what has already been done:
-Submariners regularly spend many months underwater.
-Several astronauts went into space for a year or more straight.
-The BioSphere project, where people were isolated for two years.
The experiment you mention had special, aggravating constraints, including lack of timekeeping, outside communication and companionship, none of which apply to space missions.
Now can we get off this pointless tangent?
As far as I'm concerned, nobody has proven this to be a fail. As for why so little of my content is "technical" - simple, really... I trust the guys that have years of experience and years of training far more than my armchair knowledge. You would do well to do the same. I shall apologize for no such thing - I merely stated how so many people here are so stuck in their ways and are unable to embrace new possibilities - you are the one making the comparison to racists *shrugs*
Guilty conscience Russ? Or are you just looking for a fight that isn't there? Who knows.
Prove to me that this is theoretically impossible - I expect post-graduate level knowledge of quantum physics here, since you are claiming to have it with this kind of post.
So you know better than NASA if something is theoretically impossible? Again, I want to see some credentials and papers supporting this argument.
I would like you to post your credentials Russ - since you apparently believe you know more than the combined minds at NASA. I look forward to seeing several degrees from prestigious schools, or a retraction of your statements based on the understanding that, perhaps, you DON'T know more than the combined knowledge of NASA.
Otherwise, I can only presume this to be some form of intentional intellectual dishonesty on your part... something I am growing increasingly tired of seeing on the whole.
There is, of course, a difference. Nevertheless we should be researching BOTH areas. Ten years ago the idea of escaping a black hole was theoretically impossible; now, not so much. Fortunately we did not decide that the possibility of escaping a black hole was "just a basic and obvious - stupid even - misunderstanding of existing science."
Good example. Cold fusion actually IS being researched right now because although it has shown to not be a power source, there are a lot of as-yet unexplained phenomena that occur under LENR conditions, such as high gamma fluxes. The DOE did a review of the cold fusion work out there and came up with the following recommendation:
"The current reviewers identified a number of basic science research areas that could be helpful in resolving some of the controversies in the field, two of which were: 1) material science aspects of deuterated metals using modern characterization techniques, and 2) the study of particles reportedly emitted from deuterated foils using state-of-the-art apparatus and methods. The reviewers believed that this field would benefit from the peer-review processes associated with proposal submission to agencies and paper submission to archival journals."
That's a reasonable conclusion, and an example of where study into a field that was a dead end nevertheless led to other, more directed research.
And I can guarantee you that if you do enough research into ideas that mainstream science considers wacky, you will eventually win.
At our company our CTO has stated that fundamental research is important to him, and if he funds ten research projects and only one succeeds, he will consider it money well spent. I do as well.
You're missing the point here. If you repeat the same experiment over and over, and it always makes sense, then you're not learning anything. For example:
In 1964, scientists experimenting with radio astronomy detected a faint level of noise everywhere they looked. It was common knowledge that empty space did not emit microwaves, so they looked for possible sources of error. Noise in their receivers, misalignment, even pigeons on the antennas. Nothing. "That's odd" one of the scientists was quoted as saying. The results just didn't make sense. Now, it would have been easy to dismiss them as cranks - they were just poor designers with crappy noisy equipment.
But they persevered and demonstrated that it was not just measurement error. Turns out that, against all known science at the time, empty space DOES carry remnant energy from the Big Bang - and they went on the win the Nobel Prize for first detecting cosmic background radiation, and made a big contribution towards our understanding of the universe.
Perfect example billvon!
The impossible space thruster won't work once it gets beyond the suns energy source so this idea should be discarded.
There's plenty of interesting stuff within the sun's sphere of influence; indeed, 99% of our spacecraft are within it. So if it works (big "if") there will be plenty of places it will be useful.
What makes you say that? All it seems to need is electricity... and there's plenty of ways to get that.
Indeed, black holes are on the very edge of existing science and therefore very much open for question. They are not a good example of a core scientific principle. So I ask you: is there a line at all? You seem to be saying that NASA should investigate absolutely any idea anyone presents them. Is that really what you think?
IMO, an idea that at face value obviously violates a core scientific principle such as conservation of momentum should not be bothered with unless there is a really good reason to believe it has found a work-around.
Not with any significance/seriousness -- not like hot fusion is. Because one is known to work and the other is understood not to.
You're misinterpreting. They are saying cold fusion would benefit from the peer-review process because right now it isn't getting peer reviewed. Translation: it isn't being seriously/scientifically researched.
You aren't grasping just how far out in left field this idea is: Do any of those 10 projects implicitly claim to violate a fundamental physical law such as conservation of momentum? Does your company have a vetting process to decide what to research? I propose that a cone placed horizontally underwater will produce thrust. Will your company test it for me?
As is typical with such accidental-discovery-by-mavericks crackpot myths, you have both the science and the history wrong:
-The CMB had been predicted decades before and others were at the time preparing an experiment to look for it. So it was most certainly not "against all known science at the time".
-The two guys who found it first didn't know about the CMB when they found it because they weren't research physicists. They were working on an engineering project (microwave satellite communications). So while they did get lucky, there was no anti-mainstream/bucking-the-system issue here. Just engineering physicists stumbling on something lucky because the technology and science were both advancing in parallel with each other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_cosmic_microwave_background_radiation
That isn't how science works, that's how crackpottery works (until someone proves it wrong we should assume it works: like the Rossi Reactor). New ideas must be proven to be valid and this one has not been.
Appeal to authority is not a fallacy if done correctly, but you're doing it wrong. You are believing the people making the claim when I'm sure the only thing you know about them is that they work for NASA -- that isn't appealing to a relevant authority, that's gullibility. I'm sure you don't know, for example, that the lead investigator has a negative scientific reputation at NASA. But other authorities -- recognized, reputable physicists -- have also weighed-in on the issue. Why don't you trust them?
And again, you're viewing this backwards: no reputable physicists have endorsed the paper. Validation isn't "nobody has proven this to be a fail", it comes when the idea is endorsed by the writers' peers.
Since you just said you will only recognize appeal to the authority of the authors of the paper and are unwilling to put any thought of your own into this and you've backed that up by not responding to technical content already provided by myself and others, what proof can I offer that you would accept? Closing your eyes and putting your hands over your ears does not turn fantasy into reality.
You are the one who posted the comparison to racists. Have you forgotten what you posted?
Again: you attacked me, not the other way around. And then you attacked me more for objecting to your attack!
No, this is schoolchild level physics: conservation of momentum is taught in Junior High or High School. Are you even reading the thread? I already said what the issue is.
This isn't "NASA", it is a small group of people who work for NASA. You need to recognize the difference.
No. They aren't relevant. Since you're appealing to authority here, you are going to need to decide what sort of authority you will accept. Suffice to say I'm not a famous physicist like some of the ones who have weighed-in against this, so if you won't accept their opinions, obviously you won't accept mine. As it happens, my opinion aligns pretty closely with theirs.
And I'll also refrain from asking you your credentials.
Again: not "the combined minds at NASA", just a small group of NASA researchers.
Intellectual dishonesty? Can you be more specific about what you think I've said that is dishonest? In order to challeng my intellectual honesty, you must read and address something in the technical content I wrote and you've so far declined to do that! What you are saying here is beyond insulting. You haven't addessed my technical content, but you don't like my conclusion so you call my technical content dishonest without ever addressing it. This is unprofessional and unscientific.