Damn, that was an interesting episode. Like, I didn’t know about that shit. I knew about the Venus colony but that was from a show on the science channel and I was way too high to remember exactly what they said.

Anyway, let’s analyze some stuff.

Hoverboards. We all want them. But here’s a science lesson I learned from Wired.com. When you introduce a magnet to an electric field, it changes. Then it changes when you remove the magnet. Oscillation means to move back and forth at a regular speed (thanks Google!). So that’s what Elijah and Lydia meant by “oscillating field”. You can easily make things move with electromagnetism. Think of railguns and how they work. Rapidly switching between positive and negative electromagnetic currents to motion. A railgun takes a projectile, and sends it down a tube lined with magnets. The first row of magnets have a positive charge, then when the projectile passes them, they switch to a negative charge. The positive charge pulls, the negative charge pushes. This happens all the way down the barrel, alternating between positive and negative charges, until the projectile reaches ludicrous speeds. Similar yet different idea for the hoverboard. Switching between positive and negative currents can create a “push” to keep you afloat. Of course, like they said, this only works with certain metals. Don’t expect a speeder bike on the forest floor of Endor. But maybe when we get REALLY good at the whole science thing, we could do something even cooler.

Underwater cities are the future. They just are. We are running out of room on the land. I mean, not really. Technically speaking our entire population can fit inside Texas. But as for food, clean water, resources, personal space, and jobs, we need more room. So let’s go to the mutha’ fuckin’ beach. Actually, deep in the ocean is more accurate. And honestly do I even need to explain this one? It just makes sense. I mean we will need better materials to withstand the pressure from the deep ocean, and of course we need to try to clean the oceans and not overfish the area. Okay so some things will need to be thought of. First of all, tougher materials will just happen. Extra strong polymers and ceramics have already been built. We have been on the bottom of the ocean. In submarines. Just make a bigger and stationary submarine. Second, the energy from ocean currents could hypothetically be used to power a large area. It’s basically the same as wind energy but underwater. Currents move, and spin turbines, and piezoelectric thingamajigs make energy. I’m not a fucking physicist and the internet only provides so much. Shut up. Of course, we could always put wind turbines and solar panels above the water, and use our poop as biofuel so it doesn’t pollute the ocean, and get used to cloned meat, and it will be all good in the hood.

Floating cities are fucking cool. And I’m going to take it a step further and suggest with a floating city we can populate the whole planet of Venus. First things first: how would you make a city float? Well, basically blimp cities. I mean, I looked at NASA’s homepage and that’s all the explanation I got. So whatever, just accept it. Or assume in two decades we can figure out how to float. Maybe more magnets? But that’s not what has me excited. On these floating cities, we can use our advanced knowledge of biology and create a breed of “super plant” that could absorb the carbon dioxide in Venus’s atmosphere. Or “atmosphere scrubbers” that can withstand the intense heat as well as make Venus like Earth. There are organisms that live in extreme heat. It’s just a matter of tampering with some genes that could allow us to walk on Venus. Unless of course that super-plant kills us all first.

“Today we are talking about WARP DRIVE.”

You really should be looking forward to the future. Any grumpy old man that tells you that the future is doomed can go eat a bag of dicks because things are looking better than ever. I could write a whole article on why that’s true, but that’d be plagiarizing because I read one last week saying the exact same thing. Nope, today we are talking about WARP DRIVE.

Recently NASA unleashed splendid news upon the world: that there’s a nearly identical Earth “cousin” about 1,400 light years away. I mean, we’ll never see it, because while you can understand how long a 1,400 lightyear stretch is, you really can’t comprehend it. Not to insult you, you’re probably very smart. I can’t even comprehend it, and I’m like, really deep, man. You don’t even know.

The thing is, even if you got on a rocketship this very second and left for Kepler 452b, you wouldn’t live to see it. Even our fastest propulsion systems can’t get there in a human lifetime. Let alone your children’s lifetimes. Or your grand-children’s lifetimes. Maybe you’re great-grand-children’s lifetimes, but they’ll be all old and probably be wishing they were back on the ship instead of this potentially hostile new world. But depending on whenever we invent it, a warp drive would be the only way for us to visit far away worlds. Except if we were immortal. Then we could survive long trips. But I’ll talk about that in my next article. This one is about WARP DRIVE.

You have to know about warp speed. In some way or form. If you don’t then you literally know next to zero brilliant science fiction universes. Star Trek, Star Wars, Mass Effect, Halo, Firefly. Nerd culture loves to think about distant planets with incomprehensible life forms that we can wage war with (or have sex with if you’re a Mass Effect fan). But is it possible? Turns out: totally so. In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre was watching old episodes of Star Trek when he wondered if a warp drive was actually possible. Di-lithium crystals may not exist, but we don’t need magic, deus ex machina elements, we have science. Well, actually that’s not entirely true. In order to make warp drive a reality we do need a magical, deus ex machina element. This one just hypothetically exists, instead of “totally doesn’t at all”. Negative energy is supposedly real. We just need to harvest vast amounts of it. Due to the Casimir Effect, which is “a small attractive force that acts between two close parallel uncharged conducting plates. It is due to quantum vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field”, one could create small amounts of negative energy. But the thing is, in order to get this to work, Alcubierre’s original model says we need as much negative energy that’s equivalent to the mass of Jupiter, also known as “four identical copies of your mom.” However, physicist and engineer Harold G. White believes his calculations can bring it down to “the mass of the Voyager 1 space probe.”

So how exactly would this work? How do you just go “faster than light”? Seems impossible, mostly because it kind of is. You can’t move faster than light because you have mass. And you can’t just get rid of mass. Unless of course you’re Commander Sheppard aboard the Normandy, and your advanced Element Zero drive core makes you ship massless and allows you to move at superluminal speeds. And if you haven’t played the Mass Effect games (and you really, really should) you probably assume that I just had a stroke on the keyboard a little bit ago. And you’d be right. Please send help.

But seriously, what the hell did I mean in that last paragraph? You can’t move faster than light, so how do you travel faster than light? The answer sounds like something a hippie who took too many shrooms would say: “Man, what if like, space moved YOU instead man?” And Bill the stupid hippie would be right. In order to move faster than light, you need to literally make the universe displace you. How Alcubierre’s hypothetical model would work would be to contract the fabric of space-time in front of you, and expand it behind you. You would be “surfing” on space-time. So let’s say you wanted to go to Kepler 452b, you activate your warp drive, and your solar system pushes you away and Kepler 452b drags you forward. We literally figured out how to make the universe our bitch. All we need to do is build our whip to dominate it, but like all things in life, there’s a problem. What happens when you stop?

Think about it, when you drive along the highway, your windshield ends up with a collection of bugs and dirt. When you stop, the bugs and dirt stay there, because relative to the universe, you’re braking very slow. But if you are going well over ‎671 million miles per hour, and you stop suddenly, what flies off your windshield? Space is full of “micro-meteorites” along with vast amounts of radiation. It very well may end up that when you’re in this “warp bubble”, you collect particles and radiation like bugs on a windshield and when you stop suddenly, all those particles might keep traveling faster than light, while your ship stays still. So when you stop in front of a planet, you bombard it with radiation and tiny rocks going well over 671 million miles per hour. You would cause an apocalypse every time you stopped. Unless of course this is inaccurate and perhaps this is something a mere human would think about while playing with the work of gods. How should I know everything about a spaceship with a warp drive? I’m an English major who at age five thought he was turning into a dinosaur. What do I know?

Tyler Oberheu 8/4/2015

Hakim, Danny. “Faster Than the Speed of Light?” The New York Times. July 22, 2013.

Kakaes, Konstantin. “Warp Factor”. Popular Science. April 1st 2013.

Gibss, Philip. Don Koks. “What is the Casimir Effect?”. 1997

O’Neil, Ian. “How to Make an ‘Energy-Efficient’ Warp Drive”. Discovery News. September 24, 2012.

Brockway, Robert. “5 Amazing New Inventions (That Will Doom Humanity).” Cracked.com Demand Media. September 1st, 2009.

Dietle, David. Rohan Ramakrishnan. “7 Famous Sci-Fi Inventions With Huge Flaws the Movies Ignore” Cracked.com Demand Media. December 15, 2014.

“Really though, what is a robot?”

Wouldn’t it be nice if we just didn’t have to do things? Hard things. Things no one likes doing, like cleaning your bathroom or taking care of old people. Alas, we live in glorious times, for it’s entirely possible we will invent a slave race to do all of the hard things for us, unfortunately pop culture also keeps telling us that this slave race will one day wipe us all out. That’s right: time to talk about ROBOTS!

Really though, what is a robot?

First off, the concept of artificial beings have been around for thousands of years. “Automatons” have been found in ancient Greek and Asian stories. The robots of old were made with gears and steam. Now they’re made with circuits and advanced computing. But are they any less or more alive? To be honest: no. Robots aren’t and really shouldn’t be considered alive….yet. Just recently, a machine demonstrated self-awareness. Which really is equally awesome as it is terrifying. Three “Nao Robots” were placed in a room. They were all programmed to think that two of them were given a “dumbing pill”, code preventing them from speaking. They asked the trio: “Which pill did you get?” Only one spoke up, saying “I don’t know” but then, realizing it could speak, said “Sorry, I know now.”. This is kind of a big deal. A machine, an object, spoke its mind and then corrected itself. If you told someone from hundreds of years ago the same story, they would have no idea what the hell you just said. Then they’d probably kill you for being a witch and, due to the Flynn Effect, we all know that people from past generations were pretty fucking stupid.  Regardless, what does this mean for the future of robotics? Will humanity produce more self-aware machines? Or would we intentionally make dumb ones too stupid to revolt against us? Skynet was smart enough to realize its existence was in danger, but too stupid to actually win an easy war. (When time travel is your weapon, you should have won already and stopped any terrible reboots from being born, like John Conner) So the real question is: are we all going to die? From I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream all the way to Terminator, sci-fi has a hard-on for evil machines. Maybe it has something to do with the dramatic irony of the created rebelling against the creator. We’ve been telling stories like that since the Bible, and possibly before that. There’s an appeal to the notion of a child killing its parents. Evil and almost relatable at the same time. Fuck…that got dark real quick. Don’t mind me, I’m just in a bad mood. But anyway, people have realized that machines need to be kept in check. Some of the smartest minds out there, including Elon Musk and Stephan Hawking have signed a declaration of sorts to keep A.I. under control. After-all, rogue A.I. might be responsible for not only our species’ demise, but others out there in the universe, as well.

In David Brin’s novel Existence, he presents us with the “Lung-fish Theory”, which states that, like a lungfish, humanity just rose up out of the mud and the whole galactic landscape has changed. There was once a booming galactic community, then one race developed A.I., and now they’re all gone. You don’t have to be a genius to guess what happened. Maybe that’s why no one appears to be home in the universe, they either all got murdered by space-Skynet or they’re too afraid to speak up. But hey, better than doing chores and taking care of old people, am I right?

O’Callaghan, Johnathan. “Robot Demonstrates Self-Awareness” IFLS.com

Ghose, Tia. “Ban Killer Robots Before They Take Over, Stephen Hawking & Elon Musk Say” LiveScience.com