Your Tax Dollars At Work

I just love reading news stories like this one today. Ok, not really, but I'm sure many of you will be shocked to learn that the government is using our tax dollars on experiments and projects that should be left to the movies let alone the far corners of our imaginations.

I guess it's not enough for them to simply use our hard-earned money to bail out those companies and individuals that made irresponsible economic decisions, but I digress.

Yet, here were are reading about DARPA (a super-secret research agency of the U.S. Department of Defense that often dabbles in far-out technologies) at it again. This time they're soliciting innovative research proposals in the area of Casimir Effect Enhancement.

Traveling through wormholes, time machines and hovering landspeeders are the stuff of science fiction novels. Nevertheless, scientists have suggested that the quantum mechanics of something called the Casimir Effect can be used to produce a locally mass-negative region of space-time, a phenomenon that theoretically could be used to stabilize a wormhole to allow faster than light travel.

In other words, for many years the Casimir Effect was little more than a theoretical curiosity. With the advances in micro- and nanotechnology and the fact that the Casimir force affects nanoscale devices such as NEMS, research in detecting and manipulating this mysterious force has generated substantial interest.

Yes, you read all of that correctly. Science fiction is quickly becoming science fact. What's amazing to me is how all of this research is being done and all this money is being spent right under our noses and we barely acknowledge any of it.

I'm sure there are many people who will just shrug their shoulders and wonder what all the fuss is about. Even so, you have to wonder about such things. I mean, just because we can think of doing something doesn't mean we should actually attempt it.

Who knows what all of this research and eventual technology could lead to. Sure, the scientists working on these projects (as well as those who want to secure more funding) will try to tell us that their work could lead to some of the greatest scientific brekathroughs in history and that they may even lead to cures for major diseases.

However, we all know that there are always two sides to every coin and before we're so quick to throw the weight of our full support (not to mention our wallets) behind such things we better be damn sure we're not investing our future in the devil and opening his pandora's box in the process.

RECOMMENDED READING:
Nanotechnology, The Mysterious Casimir Force, And Interstellar Spaceships

Posted in: How Close Are We?,Technological Signs