Science Friday open thread

Well, hopefully today will be a slow news day. (Hah.)

When I started this blog, I wrote that I didn't want it to be solely about politics. So today, I'm going to share with you some of the exciting things us hairless apes are doing.

Warp speed, Mr. Data

News broke this week that a NASA scientist devised an engine concept which could reach 99% of the speed of light.

When it comes to space, there's a problem with our human drive to go all the places and see all the things. A big problem. It's, well, space. It's way too big. Even travelling at the maximum speed the Universe allows, it would take us years to reach our nearest neighbouring star.

But another human drive is finding solutions to big problems. And that's what NASA engineer David Burns has been doing in his spare time. He's produced an engine concept that, he says, could theoretically accelerate to 99 percent of the speed of light - all without using propellant.

He's posted it to the NASA Technical Reports Server under the heading "Helical Engine", and, on paper, it works by exploiting the way mass can change at relativistic speeds - those close to the speed of light in a vacuum. It has not yet been reviewed by an expert.

Now, this isn't warp drive. Light speed is still pretty slow when compared to the vastness of the universe. To put this into perspective, at near the speed of light, it would still take a ship from Earth four years to reach the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri. But it's a start.

As the article said, the concept hasn't been peer reviewed or tested. This might end up like the infamous resonance cavity thruster which set the space world agog a couple of years back. But, as the saying goes, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Science isn't linear, and even failures teach you something. Here's to light speed.

Quantum Supremacy

More news broke this week.

Google claims that its prototype quantum computer solved a problem in a little over three minutes that it would have taken a classical computer ten thousand years to solve.

Called "quantum supremacy," this is the first time that a quantum computer has been able to solve a problem of this time.

Quantum computers depend on the peculiarities of the quantum world, or the world of the very small.

Here's a short and sweet explanation:

Unlike traditional computers that rely on bits of information that can be in one of two states (1 or 0), quantum computers manipulate qubits, or units of information tucked inside subatomic particles. That means, they follow the wacky laws of quantum mechanics and so can be in two states at once. This ability allows quantum computers to theoretically store exponentially more information than your everyday laptop.

While detractors are poking holes in Google's claims, this is still a, pardon the pun, quantum leap in computing. With quantum computing, scientists could solve and model ever more complex problems. They could even develop warp drive, or that holy grail of worshippers of the Singularity, the uploading of your consciousness to the cloud. I know, I'm getting ahead of myself. But we literally don't know all the things we could do with this kind of computational power. For a science geek like me, this opens up untold vistas.

So, as I always say, us hairless apes have a bright future ahead of us if we can avoid slaughtering each other. Hell, if we do manage to achieve that, maybe all those aliens UFOlogists say are all around us might actually show themselves, as we've proven ourselves to be ready. Bring on the Vulcans.