Recent content by KimB

They clearly seem to believe what they're doing, and the results would be revolutionary if true. I'm still skeptical because it's easy to make mistakes about this kind of thing. It's not that they're necessarily delusional or incompetent, but rather that the subject itself is difficult. But...

I still doubt that there is anything valuable about this design at all. For one, why are they quoting lift in terms of distance? Max force, average force, and impulse would be far more relevant. Distance tells us nothing. But there's still the problem that this design is physically...

Ahh, okay. If it's just a tech test vehicle, then I'm not at all concerned.

You'd think. But private corporations are often much more cavalier about this sort of thing than government agencies. And government agencies aren't great at it. You'd think the corporations would be concerned about the reputations of their products, but I'm not sure that works out in...

I hope they checked very carefully, because really subtle structural flaws can cause complete failure of a rocket.

To be clear, it's impossible to get a toothpick-sized rocket-powered spaceship to the nearest star. The reason why rockets are so inefficient is that the velocity of their exhaust is relatively low, and as a result they end up expending most of their energy just accelerating the fuel they...

Yeah, ion drives are definitely viable.

Ah, no. That one is complete bullshit. The criticisms of others are correct: it requires violation of conservation of momentum. That isn't happening. The idea that it's a "space warp" drive is complete, unadulterated nonsense.

Many links have been posted. Which one are you referring to, specifically? Note that I'm not promising to look into it in any amount of detail. I'm not sure how much time I'd want to dedicate to this. But the short of it is that space travel is monstrously difficult. Rockets are incredibly...

Her.

This entire perspective completely ignores the fact that the people who are most knoweldgeable about what we do and don't know about these things typically tell us they're impossible. Space-time doesn't warp randomly. Space-time geometry is determined by matter and energy. And the precise...

Then it's a null result, not a positive result.

Probably. But with some substantial differences to make it work at speed. In particular they note: It's not clear whether the performance drawbacks are theoretical in nature or could be reasonably-overcome via specialized hardware. If my quick reading of the paper is accurate, it also sounds...

I was thinking about this some more recently, and trying to see how they could use a neural network to directly estimate the final pixel color and still match the previous observations. The thing that convinced me that the neural net was just deciding how much sampling to perform was that...

Nah. The misinformation campaign is well-funded and strong. There have been more than enough dramatic impacts on the lives of people within the US that enough people should be convinced by now. Increases in storms, droughts, and severe hurricanes are readily apparent. So is sea level rise in...