Registered: Jul 2001
Location: Z'ha'dum
Posts: 186

Actually the teck on st isnt that far fetched, were catching up pretty quickly with there tech. For example nasa has made a model helo that can change the shape of its rotors, and we can make AG feilds! Babylon 5 was based in the late 2250's to early 2260's , by that year our tech would be as great as the minbari.

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: In front of the computer.
Posts: 39

Well possibly but I can't help remembering people in the sixties claiming that by now we'd all be wearing silver jumpsuits and be taking quick weekend jaunts to the moon with our flying saucers.
Frankly I'll be happy if we can figure out sustainable fusion before the fossil fuels run out, currently it takes more energy to create a fusion reaction than the reaction produces.

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Registered: May 2001
Location: Canada
Posts: 436

I believe we'll achieve B5 Earth Alliance tech by the 2050.... but we dont have the resources, materials and manpower to construct that many ships... but we'd have the technology to

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Posts: 1218

what??? b5 tech by 2050???!!! we´re nowewre near that!!
do you have any idea how to make a jump to hiperspace? (providing the theories of its existence are right)
we dont even have enough theoric information on how to do this much less investigating to build hyperdrives. Well still use kinetic weapons and lasers for many decades, no plasma nor pulse weapons just yet, no anti-mater drives no anti-mater weapons no nothing.

By 2050 well still use gas turbines and ramjet as propulsion to any aerial and space vehicles. Not viable for interstellar travel.
Currently there are energy drives being studied for implementation, hydrogen fusion and cold hydrogen fusion, at current rate they will never see the day of light before 2040, these are way inferior to those drives the authors of the series say those ships have. Your being over-optimistic.
I say at least 100 years more, and the ships wont look nearly as ugly or boxy as B5's

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Transylvania, ROMANIA
Posts: 1040

cold fusion was a bluf...Noone succeded in replicanting that experiment .
FIsion is ok , Fusion a long way ahead of us

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: In front of the computer.
Posts: 39

Oh it's not that far off, theres a laboratory just down the road from me where they are apparently looking into it right now, trouble is they haven't quite got it right yet.
However I agree that B5 tech is not plausible by 2050, some of it probably isn't possible atall, like hyperspace, thats just a sci-fi idea, wormholes or Einstein-Rosenburg bridges are far more plausible.

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: scotland
Posts: 1205

cold fusion never going to happen at least not for ages - tere are thigns tehy call cold fusion but are not acaully an atomic reactions they jsut nick named it cold fusion cause it looked like it could have been

Anti grav fields - while some claim to have done this - tehre is no proof - i cant rmemeber if the effect was ever dupilicated but if it was the effect might be generatable but its jsut a likely to be paramagnetic effect in responce to ther earth magnitci feild as ag - certainly we have no idea of the science behind anti gravity yet - but i hope we work it out soon cause that would just truely rock

hyperspace therorys? - what has been nicknamed hyperspace has nothing to do with faster than light travel - its acaully a theory involving mulitple subatomic dimesions 52 of them i think the theory suggested. our best hope at FTL travel is somethign more similar to warp drive - spacetime bubbles arround the ship expand the continuim behind you shrink it in front - or somethign similar with a more wormhole effect

hyperspce as seen in b5 would be incredibully difficult - you would have to open a portal into another universe than sits in perfect allignment with our own but allows faster than light travel with minimal energy input - finding such a universe would be all but impossible routinely opening a stable connection between the two well i doubt we'll work that out in the next few millenia - and remember - in b5 jump gate tech was given to us not invented by us - infact noone knows who invented it but its safe to assume loriens race and perhaps some of the early first ones developed it themselves - the vorlons are agood bet for this since they invented third space - not the best legacy perahps but there you go =)

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Posts: 1218

quote:

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Originally posted by tomcat
cold fusion was a bluf...Noone succeded in replicanting that experiment .
FIsion is ok , Fusion a long way ahead of us

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Registered: Apr 2001
Location: University Park
Posts: 268

Was bored, so I decided to post the correct spelling of the experimental fusion reactor, Tokamak.

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: scotland
Posts: 1205

not to be negative but i'm going to have to correct afew thigns - the fusioins reactions to date all have sever issues - thay can reuse the tomakak reacvor many time caused no dmamge is done to it at all - however the energy require to make the intense magnetic feilds then heat up the plasma - has taken more electricity than the reactors energy output - thats why we dont use them already - cold fusion isn't going to happen - to induce fusion you need to split atoms up so they can reform into other atams and in the break up transform a small amount of mass into energy -to do this you need to overcome the strong nuclear force - or possibly the weak one - maybe both i haven't taken physics for afew years and its all slipping away slowly but since its so difficult to do i'm going to assume its the strong nuclear force - anyway to do this reqyuires alot of energy to break those bonds hence the high temps and pressures - the achieve cold fusion it would require some sort of energy feild that overcame those bonds then anythign withing such a feild would break down and release to much energy and you'd mostly likely have yourself a nuclear explosion - i cant see anyway a chemical reaction could overcome those forces - and i'm pretty sure if you asked any reputable physicist he would declare cold fusion to be wishful thinking and well impossible certainl,y with what we know of chemistry and physics today

the teleportation thing - you clearly heard rompurs about this device nothign solid it teleported a photon of light but managed very veyr very cleverly (not sure hwo to by pass hissenbergs uncertainty principle) but the teleportation of matter well they haven't even attempted that cause it wouldn't work - the light version used mirrors and all sorts to get around hisenberg

antimatter drive now they are on the cards if only we could manufacture enough anti matter but we can only create tiny amounts of it which kinda sucks

replicators -not quite sure what your getting at here - are you refering to nanotech assemblers? cause they do hold the potenstial to work aswell asa replicator except you need to throw some materirals in for them to change into somethign else - but we are along way from doing that yet - although some scientists thing 50 years and they should be pretty good at this - i personally i'm not sure - it seems a very ahrd thing to do - while i bleieve making the bot would be simple enough in 50 years how do you control them?????

lastly - ion drives /solar sails - deepspace 1 a small space probe has been tearing around the solar system for well years now and still functioning - is running on an ion drive - yes its not veyr powerful but with prolonged burning its far far far more effienct than a chemical rocket and solar sials - nasa is working on a test probe using one just to see if its potential is as good as they hope

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Registered: Jun 2001
Location: Bristol, Wilds of Somerset, England
Posts: 75

Alright, I both agree and disagree with Killmenow here...
Ion Drives and Solar sails, he is correct.
Teleportation I don't know about.
Fusion in a tokomak reactor, he is correct- it requires immense amounts of energy to maintain the reaction, more than they give out at the moment- the break even point is the goal they hope to have reached by 2050.
Cold fusion, however, is completly possible, and is currently undergoing research. I can't be bothered to argue this point yet again, so I will give you the link to a thread on HLP:
http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~freespace/ubb/noncgi/Forum13/HTML/000242.html
I would say we would get B5 tech, in most areas in about 100 years, bearing in mind a lot of the long range communications rely on Tachyons.
Also, I don't think a hyperspace exists...
A wormhole generator might be interesting

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Posts: 1218

about the replicator thing... I read it in a specialized magazine.
Its so simple it can be scary the implications it can have once perfected.
I'll explain: in conventional laser holograms you project different laser beams into each other in a very precise angle settings so their interference causes cancelation/amplification of the laser beams wave lenght, hence making it visible in thin air.
with this new variant , atomic hollograms you do the same... with IONS. so far the projection target is not air, but instead a prepared pure monocrystal silicon dish (if I remenber right) unlike photons the ions can have interatomic forces between them. when the beams interact with each other in a very precise way you can form rows of atoms in the dish with a pre-planed form at your wish! your hologram gets 'sticked' and doesnt fade away when you swithch the projectors down. now they want to do it at larger sizes and in 3D that will make it possible to manufacture objects with unprecedented precision and/or micro-size.
For example the gravitic senser I mentioned.
The down size is the these objects wont have moving parts and will be of chrystaline nature.

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: Z'ha'dum
Posts: 186

Artifical/Anti gravity feilds have been made, and they don't have anything to do with magnitism. I forget exectly how it works but it goes something like this. There is a terrace like shape in a superconducter filled with ions, enormous amouts of energy are put into the ions causing them to spin very rapidly make an arif/anti gravity feild. The one thing we need for fusion reactors is a better way to collect the energy.

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You come here and you will die.
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Words of logic from RED GREEN
The mans prayer "I'm a man,but I can change if I have to,I guess."
The three little words men find so hard to say "I don't know"

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Registered: Jun 2001
Location: Bristol, Wilds of Somerset, England
Posts: 75

What we need to do for fusion is to get it to work properly without taking up more energy then we put it- this includes better containment, injection and energy collection functions than we currently have.

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Posts: 1218

exactly! in normal nuclear reactors the heat of the core is turned into steam this steam is then conducted to turbines were the generators turn motion int electricity. with the fusion the reaction is so fast that there is no time to conduct heat to form vapour. if you did youll probably dissossiate water into hydrogen and oxigen and then cause a real nasty explosion.
When some peolpe said it doesnt produce as much energy as it expends I wondered why they said that, when the energy released (in theory) is immense in the order of giga-watts. the megnetic field inside the reactor cant demand more than this. Do you even imagine the raw energy that comes with fusion?? its comparable to a nuclear detonation (no blast just energy in radiation form). Too keep the plasma in place doesn take nearly as much energy in the magnetic field as it comes from the fusion. You must have made an imprecision not mentioning that the problem was we couldnt find a way to extract electricity fully from it.

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: Z'ha'dum
Posts: 186

dude, haderak, a fusion reaction is nuclear, ever hear of an H-bomb?I have several exelent was to make a fusion reactor, anyone want to hear them?
I also hear that the people that claim to have succeseded in cold fusion experments may actually have made another type of energy, zero-point. (I really suck at spelling)

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You come here and you will die.
http://www.bobborries.com/ProudTN.jpg
Words of logic from RED GREEN
The mans prayer "I'm a man,but I can change if I have to,I guess."
The three little words men find so hard to say "I don't know"

Last edited by zoobafoo on 09-29-2001 at 12:28 AM

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Registered: Sep 2001
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Posts: 18

haderak, the "atomic hologram projector" that you describe isn't the same as a Star Trek replicator, replicators work on the same principle as E=mc squared. basically if matter can be turned into energy, than energy can be turned into matter, the trick is actually turning the energy into matter, and dictating what kind of matter it turns into.

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: scotland
Posts: 1205

its not the magnectic containment feild thats the prob - the reason it doesn't put out as much energy and it is energy not electricity =- they haven't even tried to make electricty from them yet -is that they have to contain the plasma - they have to heat it up to about 100 million degrees celcius thats what takes the energy - withouth the pressure of the suns core fusion takes place at far greater temp - if it could done at about 15 million then it would be easy but thats with the presure of the suns core - not practicle as you can imagine on the surface of the earth

combine it with the fact they are heating up a tiny amount of plasma so there isn't that much of it to fuse and that the reaction lasts all of a fraction of a second and thats why it takes more energy to start the reaction than it released

and the cold fusion/zero point energy is probally the best explaination for cold fusion i have heard but i still doubt it - zero point energy is not easy to tap by all reports but you never know those trying to do cold fusion might have stubled onto it by accident

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: Capella
Posts: 15

Read this, fusion is apparently really close
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1573000/1573450.stm

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Posts: 1218

quote:

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Originally posted by CrazyEddie
haderak, the "atomic hologram projector" that you describe isn't the same as a Star Trek replicator, replicators work on the same principle as E=mc squared. basically if matter can be turned into energy, than energy can be turned into matter, the trick is actually turning the energy into matter, and dictating what kind of matter it turns into.

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Last edited by haderak on 10-01-2001 at 08:50 PM

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