I’m seeing more and more encouraging news about the EM drive. It seems to have passed the giggle factor stage, and is now being tested by some of the world’s top labs and researchers.
What’s really intriguing, is that they’re getting results. We could be looking at one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the last hundred years.
It has a factor in there people aren’t dealing with yet. From what I’ve read this device is alleged to allow achieving velocities of hundreds if not thousands of miles a second. You are not going to be able to have a solar system teeming with vehicles at those velocities unless those vehicles have autodestruct mechanisms that turn them into a cloud of gas if they get within X million miles of inhabited structures or planets.
There is just to much kinetic energy to risk it. Objects with the mass of a pickup truck striking the earth at 5000 miles a second would be cataclysmic. The fastest we’ve gotten anything up to is, I believe, the voyagers at about 11 miles per second. There will have to be a whole system developed for safely moving objects around at 1%-10% C.
One thing sci-fi hasn’t tended to convey accurately (or wanted to, since it would be boring) in visual space epics is the fact that anything that is going somewhere in space at a rate remotely capable of getting there within a reasonable time is going to be going so fast you’re not going to be able to see it.