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Category: physics – Page 359

Previous posting in this Debunking Series.

In this post we will look at the last three types of engines. Can these engine technologies be debunked?

Start with the boring stuff. Nuclear/plasma engines. For more information look up Franklin Chang-Diaz’s Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR). Real. Cannot be debunked.

Now for the more interesting stuff. The second is Pulse Detonation Engines (PDE). This type of engine uses detonation waves to combust fuel and oxidizer mixture. “The engine is pulsed because the mixture must be renewed in the combustion chamber between each detonation wave initiated by an ignition source.” Theoretically this type of engine is capable of speeds from subsonic to Mach 5.

Here is an UT Arlington Feb 2008 YouTube video that shows how elegantly simple, a workable engineering concept is. According to the posting this engine was built and tested in 2005.

Here is a link to Mojave Skies blog posting which shows photographs of an Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) subsonic pulsed detonation engine trials (about May 2008), made from off-the-shelf automotive parts. Impressive!

Some history regarding the Mojave Skies blog posting. Scaled Composites is led by Burt Rutan, whose team won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004. Scaled Composites is now owned by Northrup Grumman a defense contractor. What a small world. Everyone is interconnected to everyone else.

What about supersonic trials?

Here is a link to Military, Aviation & Space forum where the jet plumes appeared to be pulsed. The date of this posting is Feb 2008, while the AFRL’s press release is dated May 2008. Here is the AboveTopSecret’s link to a Jun 2008 discussion about what appears to be PDE aircrafts in action. The writers appear to be experienced and leaning toward the PDE aircrafts in the video being real.

My guess is that conventional fuel pulse detonation engines are a reality in experimental supersonic aircrafts, and that the May 2008 AFRL’s press release is about making PDEs cheaper. These engines are real and cannot be debunked.

Now for the third type of engine technology, atomic bomb or nuclear pulse engines. It is quite obvious from the Medusa design that the nuclear energy released by such a device that is used to propel this starship is only 1/6th of the useful energy. Note, useful energy is less than total energy released. Therefore this is an inefficient design.

Further, as the Wikipedia article on nuclear pulse engines points out, there is the Partial Test Ban Treaty that makes such engines illegal. Debunked.

Therefore, nuclear or atomic bomb pulsed engines are debunked, and people who support such ideas are out of touch with reality. Let me quote Billy Currington “God is great, beer is good, people are crazy”.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

Previous post in this Debunking Series.

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This video was broadcast on G4TV, September 19th 2012.

http://www.g4tv.com/videos/60838/dr-eric-w-davis-on-new-ligh…g-science/

Major Notes from the Video are:

a. Dr. Eric Davis, Senior Research Physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Austin TX.

b. Use exotic energy, quantum energy from vacuum energy, to generate warp drive by surfing space.

c. Surfing on space at faster than the velocity of light.

d. Theory requires stupendous amount of vacuum energy.

e. Sonny White (correct name?) suggests that it could be done with much less energy.

f. Disruptive innovations can happen at any time.

g. Richard Obousy of Icarus Interstellar Inc, using string quantum theory shows that the limit of velocity is 10E32 x c (velocity of light) using quantum string theories.

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Need to bear in mind that for interstellar travel to become a reality three factors must be realized.

1) Costs:

From the video this group has not been able to quantify their costs.

2) Technological Feasibility:

As Dr Eric Davis states it might take anywhere from a 100 year to 200 years for this technology to become a reality, but you never know that some disruptive innovation might change all that.

There is another problem with this. Dr. Robert Nemiroff’s Three Photon Observation, which suggests that quantum foam may not exists, therefore falsifying the ability to do interstellar travel in this manner.

Actually come to think about Dr. Eric Davis was describing Dr. Miguel Alcubierre work but substituting Alcubierre’s General Relativity tensors solutions with ‘string quantum’ theory.

3) Safety: Don’t know how to navigate or how to protect crew.

That is a fail on all three counts.

Finally, if I remember correctly, the string theories sits on top of quantum theory and therefore all the discoveries in quantum theory have been translated into string theories. But the string theories by themselves have not been able to predict any new physical behavior, in an ‘a priori’ manner.

For a simple description of quantum foam and vacuum energy see, here.

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I put forward a test for these type of proposals, in the comments section of an earlier posting,

https://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/10/debunking-antimatter-rocke…lar-travel

And here it is, if you had a few millions dollars can you demonstrate experimental feasibility as a propulsion device?

If the answer is ‘no’ then it is debunked if it is ‘yes’ then let’s get the funding. From Dr Eric Davis comments it is clear that the answer is ‘no’.

Appreciate your comments & feedback.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

Previous Post in this Debunking Series.

Why is it necessary to debunk bad or unrealistic technologies? If don’t we live in a dream world idealized by theoretical engineering that has no hope of ever becoming financially feasible. What a waste of money, human resources and talent. I’d rather we know now upfront and channel our energies to finding feasible engineering and financial solutions. Wouldn’t you?

We did the math required to figure out the cost of antimatter fuel one would require just to reach 0.1c and then cost at that velocity, never mind about reaching Alpha Centauri.

Table 2: Antimatter Rocket Fuel Costs to Alpha Centuariat 0.1c (in metric tons)
Source of Estimates Amount of Antimatter Required Maximum Velocity

Spacecraft Mass

Cost of Antimatter per kg
(metric tons) (metric tons)

Gerald Smith

NASA

2.5E+16

6.25E+16

Total $ Cost of Fuel for Trip
A Poor Formula for Interstellar Travel

5

 0.1c

2,000

1.25E+20

3.13E+20
Project Valkyrie

100

 0.1c

100

2.5E+21

6.25E+21

The table above compiled from various sources shows that the cheapest cost of just reaching 0.1c velocity is of the order of $125,000,000,000,000,000,000. This so unthinkably large even I don’t know how to conceptualize it, and by comparison, conventional rockets appear realistic!

Also note that the large variations in the estimates of the amount of antimatter required combined with the larger variations in the mass of the spacecraft antimatter engines could propel. That is no one reallys has a handle on what this would take.

But wait, let me quote EJ Opik, “Is Interstellar Travel Possible?” Irish Astronomical Journal, Vol 6, page 299.

The exhaust power of the antimatter rocket would equal the solar energy power received by the earth — all in gamma rays (and Opik quotes Carl Sagan, Planet. Space Sci., pp. 485–498, 1963) “So the problem is not to shield the payload, the problem is to shield the earth”

I don’t need to say more. Debunked.

Next psot in this Debunking Series.

—————————————————————————————————

Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

Previous Post in this Debunking Series.

Why is it necessary to debunk bad or unrealistic technologies? If don’t we live in a dream world idealized by theoretical engineering that has no hope of ever becoming financially feasible. What a waste of money, human resources and talent. I’d rather we know now upfront and channel our energies to finding feasible engineering and financial solutions. Wouldn’t you?

We did the math required to figure out how much fuel one would require just to reach 0.1c and then cost at that velocity until you reach Alpha Centauri and reverse thrust to orbit the star.

Table 1: Conventional Rocket Fuel Costs to travel to Alpha Centauri at 0.1c
Maximum Velocity (km/s)

1980’s cost ($/lb)

Proportion by Weight

Amount (lb)

Cost (in 1980 $)
Apollo Fuel Mass

11.2

5,625,000

$20,250,000.00
Alpha Centauri Liquid H2

0.1c or 29,970 km/s

$3.60

82.46%

6.60E+13

$237,473,684,210,526
LOX

$0.08

17.54%

1.40E+13

$1,122,807,017,544
Total

8.00E+13

$238,596,491,228,070
Note: 1) Fuel mass required to reach 0.1c or 29,970 km/s is twice 5,625,000*(29,979/11.2)^2,
once to accelerate 0.1c on leaving Earth and a second time to decelerate at mid
journey to arrive at zero km/s
2) 8.00E+13 lbs converts into 36,287,389,600 metric tons

This analysis assumes that your payload is the about the same size as the Apollo 11 command, service and lunar modules with a combined mass of 46.7 metric tons. That gives you an idea of how impractically small 100 tons is for an interstellar flight.

The total cost of a conventional rocket interstellar trip is on the order of $238,596 billion! Even if we said that the costs are over estimated by 1,000x it would still costs $238 billion!

It is so unrealistic that if you search the internet the parties who say such a trip never discuss how much it will cost. The parties who say it cannot be will also point out the mass of fuel required.

I don’t need to say more. Debunked.

The next in this Debunking Series.

—————————————————————————————————

Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

Previous Post in this Debunking Series.

I just watched Looper the movie. It is such a good movie and a great story. But then I’m biased. Anything with Bruce Willis is a great movie. Bruce Willis is getting older, which reminds me so am I!

For those who have not watched Looper I won’t give the story away … Looper is a must watch for science fiction fans. And there were other great movies and episodes about time travel. The three Back to the Future, and the Star Trek episodes, for starters.

That was the good news, and now for the bad news. Time travel is impossible. The mathematics behind time travel is excellent, but the physics is not. In contemporary physics, the mechanism of time travel requires wormholes. You get into a wormhole on one side and you pop out the other side either in the future or in the past, depending on what the wormhole was designed to do.

I did some digging, and found the Polchinski’s billiard ball paradox which is a version of the matricide paradox (travelling back through time before one’s birthday and killing one’s mother, hey what about father?) without the free will component. “A billiard ball sent through a wormhole which sends it back in time. In this scenario, the ball is fired into a wormhole at an angle such that, if it continues along that path, it will exit the wormhole in the past at just the right angle to collide with its earlier self, thereby knocking it off course and preventing it from entering the wormhole in the first place.”

Then Kip Thorne’s students came up another solution “to avoid any inconsistencies, by having the ball emerge from the future at a different angle than the one used to generate the paradox, and deliver its younger self a glancing blow instead of knocking it completely away from the wormhole, a blow which changes its trajectory in just the right way so that it will travel back in time with the angle required to deliver its younger self this glancing blow.”

Add to this second scenario that one collects the older billiard ball in a basket. Of course there are some boundaries driven by conservation of mass and when the wormhole was created, that constraint what is observed. But this then raises some questions. How many balls are there in the basket at the start? How many billiard balls does one observe in the middle of this experiment? Think parallel processing not sequential logic.

And, what can I do?” That is, since cause and effect no longer have a consistent relationship, if the basket fills up with billiard balls before I set off the experiment, can I choose not to set off the experiment?

It is sufficient to stop here to make the case that time travel is not possible.

I’m sure Kip Thorne, his students and many, many others are doing good work to develop theoretical models. I hope these older theoretical wormhole models would evolve to new ‘tunneling’ models that do not allow for inconsistent relationships between cause and effect. And these new ‘tunneling’ models will one day allow us to do interstellar travel using some kind of tunneling technology.

Right now time travel is just too easy to debunk. We are not there, yet.

The next in the Debunking Series.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

EOH events are events that cause the irreversible termination of humanity. They are not events that start the physical destruction of humanity (that would be too late), but fundamental, non-threatening and inconspicuous events that eventually lead to the irreversible physical destruction of humanity. Using nations and civilizations I explain how.

(1) Fundamental: These events have to be fundamental to the survival of the human species or else they cannot negatively impact the foundation of humanity’s existence.

On a much smaller scale drought and war can and have destroyed nations and civilizations. However, that is not always the case. For example, it is still not know what caused the demise of the Mayan civilization.

The act of war can lead to the irreversible destruction of a nation or civilization, but the equivalent EOH event lay further back in history, and can only be answered by the questions who and why.

For example, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is the EOH event that triggered a domino effect which started with Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia, and Central Powers (including Germany and Austria-Hungary) and the Allies of World War I (countries allied with Serbia) to declare war on each other, starting World War I.

In this case Europe was not destroyed as it still had the capability to rebuild, but it led to massive loss of human lives.

Lesson: This illustrates that an EOH event acts like a trigger. Therefore, EOH events must have the capability to trigger destruction in such a manner as to annihilate the capability to rebuild, too.

(2) Non-Threatening: They have to be non-threatening or else these types of events cannot take hold and become main stream.

The Hindu numeral system designed for positional notation in a decimal system, invented (trigger event) in India, was transmitted via the Arab traders to Europe where it took root, and bloomed into the counting and mathematical systems we now accept universally.

Note, the Roman Empire, essentially Southern Europe, Mediterranean and parts of the Middle East, used a comparatively awkward system, by contrast, and this has not survived into general usage today.

The development of mathematics in a Europe, hungry not to be left behind, led to the development of the sciences and engineering not envisioned by India. And several hundred years later came back to India in the form of the British Raj, and changed how Indians live.

Lesson: This illustrates that for an EOH event to prosper it requires a conducive environment – in this case a Europe hungry not to be left behind.

(3) Inconspicuous: They have to be inconspicuous to facilitate the chain reaction of irreversible events. If these events were visible to the majority of humanity when they occur, people could intervene and prevent these chain reactions to irreversible destruction of humanity.

The 9/11 attacks on the Twin World Trade Towers was inconspicuous simply because no one believed that commercial airplanes could be used as weapons of destruction. The subsequent chain reaction, the sequential collapse of building floors, lend to destruction and major loss of lives.

Lesson: Inconspicuous does not necessarily mean ‘cannot be seen’ as the 9/11 example illustrates that it would also encompass ‘cannot be believed’.

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In summary an EOH event is a non-threatening inconspicuous trigger in a conducive environment, that chain reacts into irreversible physical destruction of the foundations of humanity in a manner that prevents rebuilding.

By this definition there are two EOH events within our comprehension.

The first that comes to mind is the irreversible expansion of our Sun into a red giant will lead to the total destruction of humanity with the inability to rebuild if we remain on Earth, and is triggered by the inconspicuous exhaustion of hydrogen in the Sun’s core which switches to the thermonuclear fusion chain reaction of hydrogen.

Therefore, the EOH event is the exhaustion of hydrogen.

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The second are experiments in small black hole production. The hypothesis that small black holes can be used for interstellar propulsion (https://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/09/debunking-the-black-hole-interstellar-drive) lends a conducive environment to trigger the funding for such experiments. The realization of small black holes without experimentally proven controls will lead to the irreversible chain reaction of black hole growth as it consumes matter around it at increasingly faster rates. This will result in the complete destruction of humanity and everything within our reach, in manner we cannot rebuild.

Therefore, the EOH event is the approval of funding into small black hole experimental research. And with CERN we have achieved an EOH event.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

Tim Ventura told me 2 days ago that American Antigravity is back. Congratulations Tim. Yours was a very popular site and it was a loss when it went dark.

Welcome back Tim. I look forward to more scoops from American Antigravity.

—————————————————————————————————

Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

I am very pleased to have received an email from Dr. Takaaki Musha of the Technical Research and Development Institute, Advanced Science-Technology Research Organization, Yokohama, Japan.

Dr. Musha and Prof. Mario J. Pinheiro will be publishing a book on electrogravitics including the electromagnetic propulsion systems, titled, “Physics of the Zero Point Field and Its Applications to Advanced Technology”, Nova Science Pub Inc. Publication date is Sept.25, 2012 (tomorrow).

To quote Dr. Musha:

“Space-time in a vacuum has generally been viewed as a transparent and ubiquitous empty continuum within which physical events take place. However quantum field theory and quantum electrodynamics views the vacuum as the sum total of all zero-point fluctuations of the vacuum electromagnetic field, arising from the continuous creation and annihilation of virtual particle pairs. It is this latter more contemporary view that is, for the first time, more fully explored in text form with Physics of the Zero Point Field. The scope of applications in this book range from the Casimir effect, the variation in zero-point energy at the boundaries of a region observable in nano-scale devices, to ideas for a proposed inertial drive as first described by Puthoff.”

Congratulations Dr. Musha & Prof. Pinheiro on your publication and above all, the completion of a book on this topic. Having done one myself I know it was not an easy endeavor.

And congratulations to Dr. Musha’s & Prof Pinheiro’s co-contributors, Prof. Claus Turtur, Mr. Gary Stephenson, & Dr. Thomas Valone.

—————————————————————————————————

Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

Pervious blog post in this debunking series

Recently I had an interesting discussion about Laithwaite’s Big Wheel demonstration.

Note that the late Professor Eric Laithwaite was Professor of Heavy Electrical Engineering at Imperial College, and inventor of the linear motor, and the maglev train technology which Germany and China have taken the lead. The poor Brits they missed out on their own invention.

The Big Wheel experiment is basically this. Attach a wheel to the end of a 3-ft (1 m) rod. Spin this wheel to 3,000 rpm or more. Then rotate this rod with the spinning wheel at the other end. The technical description is, rotate the spin vector.

The Ni fields solves the Big Wheel experiment to give acceleration a=ωrωs√h is governed by the rotation ωr, spin ωs, and the physical structure √h, and shows that both weight loss and gain are observable. If the spin and rotation are of like sense to the observer, the force is toward the observer. If unlike then the force is away from the observer.

Then somebody pointed me to link at Imperial College that said that the late Prof Laithwaite had “coming to a series of false conclusions”. I was very surprised, especially since I did both my undergraduate and post graduate at UK Universities.

All this ‘exotic’ mathematics to prove Laithwaite was ‘wrong’. What arrogance. If Imperial College had asked very simple and obvious question they would not have posted such nonsense. How can the human wrist carry a 50lb (approximately 23 kg) weight at the end of a 3 ft ( 1 m) rod? Obviously this Imperial College ‘research’ was conducted by someone who had no idea how to do emperical validation.

This raises the question, are British Universities into closing off the minds of future generations or are they about empowering their future industry leaders to find the … truth?

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland co-authored the paper Are Black Hole Starships Possible? (http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803) that suggested that one could use Small Black Holes to propel starships close to the velocity of light for interstellar travel. To give them credit, they stated that this is at the “edge of possibility” and would only be possible in the very distant future:

“The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether it is possible to build artificial BHs of the appropriate size, and to employ them in powerplants and starships. The conclusion we reach is that it is just on the edge of possibility to do so, but that quantum gravity effects, as yet unknown, could change the picture either way… Many questions which arise in this program lead to calculations in general relativity which have not been done. Whatever the other merits of our proposal, we are confident it will pose many interesting problems for classical and quantum relativity.”

Note, BH = Black Holes

That is it. Crane & Westmoreland were presenting an academic exercise to pose “many interesting problems for classical and quantum relativity”.

However, others like James Messig and Paul Gilster and Marcus Chown have taken this to mean a real engineering problem that can be solved . . . Read their articles.

I only found out about Marcus Chown because Paul Gilster says “Chown does a good job with this material” quotes him, and I reproduce here,

“The resulting million-tonne black hole would be about the size of an atomic nucleus. The next step would be to manoeuvre it into the focal range of a parabolic mirror attached to the back of the crew quarters of a starship. Hawking radiation consists of all sorts of species of subatomic particles, but the most common will be gamma ray photons. Collimated into a parallel beam by the parabolic mirror, these would be the starship’s exhaust and would push it forward.”

What a parabolic mirror … with black holes in the same paragraph? This I must see. I traced Marcus Chown comments to his article Riding a black hole to reach the stars. Chown actually states this paragraph above.

Here are the problems with Marcus Chown statement & Paul Gilster’s unquestioning nod of authority to Chown’s statement.

1. How do you control a black how?
Small Black Hole radius = 0.6 × 10-18 m, in comparison assuming a spherical shape (Illinois University), the typical space between particles in the gas is 2×10-9 m, and the average distance between two bonded atoms in water is 2X10-10 m, and generally speaking the space between two bonded atoms is around 10-10 m. That is one can fit 108 or 100 million Small Black Holes between two atoms in an average chemical compound.

So how does one control a 1,000,000 ton black hole that is more than million times smaller than an atom?

James Messig had suggested “Now imagine that a 1,000 metric ton rest mass ship could be coupled to the black hole via electrically charging the black hole or otherwise setting up a coupling field between the ship and the black hole”

Funny, James Messig contradicts Crane & Westmoreland. Crane & Westmoreland write “Note that if an isolated SBH is initially endowed with an electric charge, then it will quickly, and almost completely, radiate this charge away”.

But wait, there is another problem. Even if you could somehow electrify this black hole contraption the electric field breaks down into a discharge in air at 3kV/mm or about 1kV/mm in vacuum. So you cannot hold an black hole in a container with an electric field.

If you try, one whiff of the electron cloud on the atom and the electron cloud is gone. Another whiff. Another whiff… and before you know it there are millions of naked nuclei without their electron clouds, and an electric force based explosion, because the black hole (BH) of this size could whiz past matter striking down electron clouds in its path without ‘colliding’ with their nuclei.

Crane & Westmoreland write “As to confinement, a BH confines itself. We would need to avoid colliding with it or losing it, but it won’t explode.” They weren’t thinking about massively ionized matter because they had already stated “need to avoid colliding with it”. In their paper they were comparing black hole with antimatter.

Never mind the naked nuclei explosion that is a small matter. The real problem is that the black hole gets lost (because it is 0.6 × 10-18 m small) and it sucks out the air or the Earth, maybe the Sun. Don’t forget black holes love a good meal and will consume anything in their path and get bigger, and bigger … Need a black hole in our neighborhood? No thanks.

2. How do you maneuver the spacecraft?
Remember you are lugging around at least 1,000,000 tons of black hole matter to your 1 ton. Oops, I misspoke, the laws of physics require that it is actually the other way around. 1 ton of spacecraft is lugged around by 1,000,000 tons of black hole matter.

So how does one alter the direction of the Hawking Radiation that this 1,000,000 ton black hole is producing? Archimedes is reported to have said that if you give him a fulcrum long enough he could move the Earth. So what would be the equivalent of a “large enough fulcrum”? Hmmm. I know! Another black hole!

3. How do you collimated gamma rays with a parabolic mirror?
Really? Gamma radiation passes through everything we know of, if the material is not thick enough. Maybe Chown was reporting science fiction? Remember this was 2009. What do you think?

In all fairness I think the gamma ray problem is a more realistic problem than the black hole control & maneuvering problem.

No wonder, Prof. Adam Franks stated in his July 24, 2012 New York Times Op-Ed, Alone in the Void, “Short of a scientific miracle of the kind that has never occurred, our future history for millenniums will be played out on Earth”.

Done. Black hole interstellar drive debunked.

The next blog post in this debunking series.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.