Nuclear Fusion and Warp Drive

So, suppose all those promises from the past ninety years or so of controlled, commercially viable controlled nuclear fusion actually came true. > >>>>>> > >>>>>> There are many promises, which ones? > >>>>>> > >>>>>>> What does this change exactly? Bear in mind, we all thought atomic reactors would solve everyone's problems, too, and, we all know how well that worked out! > >>>>>> > >>>>>> It depends who you talk to. > >>>>>> > >>>>>>> Surely, there will be massive maintenance costs and and various unanticipated and significant waste products and dangers, as with absolutely everything else? So, would commercial nuclear fusion power plants now, or in the past, really have improved, or even altered the human condition significantly? If so, why and how? > >>>>>> > >>>>>> Water distillation > >>>>>> > >>>>>> Less coal > >>>>>> > >>>>>> Considering that coal is much cheaper than petrol now, and we still have > >>>>>> not got a practical car going to be little effect here although synthetic > >>>>>> fuel might be a goer. > >>>>> > >>>>> OK, Solomon, I'll probably agree with these rather modest advantages. So, like atomic power, certain limited benefits, but, doesn't fundamentally alter our options, significantly. What about space travel? We thought atomic power would help, it hasn't, so far anyway, to any great degree, anyway. Can we become an interplanetary, or interstellar species with nuclear fusion? > >>>>> > >>>> > >>>> Fusion, I presume would need a large space ship, we are not up to that yet. > >>>> > >>>>> One of the real attractions of science fiction in the mid-twentieth century was the idea of a "new frontier", in space, based on space travel. Does nuclear fusion help us with this? > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> It will. The star ship enterprise uses fusion. > >>> > >>> According to the various Star Trek technical manuals, the only way that the Enterprise uses fusion is to power their IMpulse engines, that being "old technology". And let's remember that (unfortunately) it's fictional..... > >>> > >>> Regards, > >>> John Braungart > >> > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > >> The main power is fusion but the warp drive uses antimatter. > > > > Antimatter powers the Warp Drive in Star Trek, but, there's actually no connection between the two, in real physics. Antimatter/matter annihilation is simply the most efficient power source physics can currently conceive of, and, > > > Which is why Scotty is always worried about the dilithium crystals > > > it has been tested to some extent on a very limited scale in the laboratory. Warp Drives are speculative constructs that probably don't exist, at all. > >> > >> . Excellent Solomon! Yes, I've haven't thought Dilithium Crystals in years, makes me very nostalgic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilithium_(Star_Trek) Now, Dilithium crystals are a fictional substance, created to control an actual, demonstrated phenomenon in physics, matter-antimatter annihilation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter Actually, we can have matter-antimatter conversion without these purely hypothetical dilithium crystals. They're just supposed to make it easy and efficient to do. On the other hand, even all this, isn't sufficient to give us the Warp Drive, in the Star Trek universe. It would just give us a great deal of energy, but, Einstein's relativistic limitations on going faster than the speed of light should still apply, according to most of conventional physics, as currently understood. Even Dilithium crystals and matter-antimatter conversion on a large scale should not be sufficient to achieve speeds faster than 300,000 km/s. For the Warp Drive we need something else. We need Warp Nacelles, to structurally warp the configuration of space-time -- whatever that means, exactly! http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Nacelle The matter-antimatter annihilation powers the Warp Nacelles, which somehow "warp" space-time, to allow faster than light travel. Pure fiction, of course. What I really hope, is that if we ever can achieve near light speeds with normal sized objects, nothing much in the way of relativistic effects happen at all, and we can just keep getting faster and faster, indefinitely! Now, that doesn't seem to be the case with sub-atomic particles in an accelerator. But, that's a rather abstract situation, that may not apply to the "real world", of normal sized objects in space, you know.