[Gandalf_The_Gray]

There’s just one tiny little problem about space travel...fuel. Minor, detail, I guess.

Well yes, that is a problem if your mind is fixed on some sort of engine which consumes fuel, however... just suppose we could design some way to twist a wrinkle into the local space time and just surf down the wave front. As we slid down the wave we would drag the device as well as the wave along with us.

The use of fuel to sustain flight is just a convenience. People have been flying gliders since before the Write Brothers. People have flown for hours and covered considerable distances using nothing but shifting densities of the atmosphere brought on by temperature gradients (electric fields interacting with magnetic fields already permeating space?).

Solar sails? Why not?

We need designers who can think outside the box...

Regards,
GtG

[cloudmountain]

just suppose we could design some way to twist a wrinkle into the local space time and just surf down the wave front.

:o) Ah, Gandalf, you really OUGHT to be Gandalf the White.
"some way to twist a wrinkle into the local space time"?? I LOVE scifi but I know that twisting wrinkles is what I do with the laundry that needs ironing, not with thinking about space travel.

"Surfing down the wave front"... right out of STAR TREK!! I do love that program and have loved it since 1966.

Fuel is the problem. There is no twisting some wrinkle, though it REALLY sounds like a neat phrase.

All the scientists say the same thing: we don't have the fuel to travel so far.
In the Star Trek universe, dilithium is a fictional chemical element, although dilithium is also the scientific name for a molecule composed of two lithium atoms.

We can't even hope for some new element. There are none. What we have on the periodic chart is ALL THERE IS in this universe of God's.

[cloudmountain]

"My early results suggested I had discovered something that was in the math all along," he recalled. "I suddenly realized that if you made the thickness of the negative vacuum energy ring larger — like shifting from a belt shape to a donut shape — and oscillate the warp bubble, you can greatly reduce the energy required — perhaps making the idea plausible." White had adjusted the shape of Alcubierre's ring which surrounded the spheroid from something that was a flat halo to something that was thicker and curvier.

Piece of cake. He makes my warp bubble!
I bought an Alcubierre's ring last week--very tasty!

[Sherman Logan]

Also people traveled all over the world for many centuries without using one bit of fuel. Sailing ships explored and colonized the entire earth.

It is not at all unreasonable to think similar opportunities for propulsion may exist in space.