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One of the profoundest truths of science was uttered
50 years ago by the biologist JBS Haldane: "The Universe may be
not only queerer than we imagine but queerer than we can
imagine".
That situation has arisen once more. Cosmologists are facing
the most extraordinary theory since the days of Einstein, namely
that empty space itself contains a source of apparently limitless
energy.
This could one day give us an endless supply of free power; it
could also provide a means of propelling starships without the
need for any fuel. |
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One sign of the theory's importance is that Arthur C. Clarke, in
his 1997 novel 3001: The Final Odyssey, named the
propulsion system in the starship of his story the SHARP drive,
after the theory's inventors, Andrei Sakharov, Bernard Haisch,
Alfonso Rueda and Harold Puthoff. (Clarke added an A to create his
acronym.)
He explained in an afterword: "If their theory can be proved,
it opens up the prospect - however remote - of antigravity space
drives and the even more fantastic possibility of controlling
inertia. This could lead to some interesting situations; if you
gave someone the gentlest touch, they would promptly disappear at
thousands of kilometres per hour, until they bounced off the other
side of the room a fraction of a millisecond later."
The idea is this, and it's the best I can do to explain it:
take a region of space and, in your imagination, remove from it
all matter such as planets, moons and stars so that there are no
strong gravitational fields. What remains is a seething tide of
electromagnetic radiation and a menagerie of subatomic particles
that pop into and out of existence in the blink of an eye. This is
quantum energy, or the energy of a vacuum.
It may, or may not, be something similar to the dark energy
that is supposed to be driving the galaxies apart. I don't believe
that anyone knows. But it is an entirely new factor in the debate
about whether it is going to be possible to build ships that will
fly to the stars at reasonable speeds.
The alternative, barring faster than light travel, which
remains speculative, is an antimatter drive. Antimatter is by far
the most efficient fuel that exists. Using antimatter, one could
fly to the Moon in an hour.
But the trouble with antimatter is that it's so expensive to
produce. To make a round trip to Alpha Centauri one would need
several tonnes of it. But its present theoretical price is still
about $100 billion per milligram. To be of practical use in space
travel, this price needs to drop by a factor of about 10,000. Yet
short of building a giant antimatter factory on the airless
surface of Mercury I can't see any immediate way of making this
happen.
And so the discovery of a new fundamental source of energy is
extremely welcome news. It is true that nobody at present has the
faintest idea how to exploit this energy. But that doesn't matter.
All technological history shows that if a natural phenomenon
exists, then sooner or later someone will design a machine that
will exploit it. We shall have our SHARP drive. |
