Lifeboat Foundation

1. Thou shalt first guard the Earth and preserve humanity.

Impact deflection and survival colonies hold the moral high ground above all other calls on public funds.

2. Thou shalt go into space with heavy lift rockets with hydrogen upper stages and not go extinct.

Continue reading “Ten Commandments of Space” »

I continue to survey the available technology applicable to spaceflight and there is little change.

The remarkable near impact and NEO on the same day seems to fly in the face of the experts quoting a probability of such coincidence being low on the scale of millenium. A recent exchange on a blog has given me the idea that perhaps crude is better. A much faster approach to a nuclear propelled spaceship might be more appropriate.

Unknown to the public there is such a thing as unobtanium. It carries the country name of my birth; Americium.

A certain form of Americium is ideal for a type of nuclear solid fuel rocket. Called a Fission Fragment Rocket, it is straight out of a 1950’s movie with massive thrust at the limit of human G-tolerance. Such a rocket produces large amounts of irradiated material and cannot be fired inside, near, or at the Earth’s magnetic field. The Moon is the place to assemble, test, and launch any nuclear mission.

Continue reading “Petition for Americium Emergency Stockpile” »

It is a riddle and almost a scandal: If you let a particle travel fast through a landscape of randomly moving round troughs – like a frictionless ball sent through a set of circling, softly rounded “teacups” inserted into the floor (to be seated in for a ride at a country fair) – you will find that it loses speed on average.

This is perplexing because if you invert time before throwing in the ball, the same thing is bound to happen again – since we did not specify the direction of time beforehand in our frictionless fairy’s universe. So the effect depends only on the “hypothesis of molecular chaos” being fulfilled – lack of initial correlations – in Boltzmann’s 19th century parlance. Boltzmann was the first to wonder about this amazing fact – although he looked only at the opposite case of upwards-inverted cups, that is, repulsive particles.

The simplest example does away with fully 2-dimensional interaction. All you need is a light horizontal particle travelling back and forth in a frictionless 1-dimensional closed transparent tube, plus a single attractive, much heavier particle moving slowly up and down in a frictionless transversal 1-dimensional closed transparent tube of its own – towards and away from the middle of the horizontal tube while exerting a Newtonian attractive force on the light fast particle across the common plane. Then the energy-poor fast particle still gets statistically deprived of energy by the energy-rich heavy slow particle in a sort of “energetic capitalism.”

If now the mass of the heavy particle is allowed to go to infinity while its speed and the force exerted by it remain unchanged, we arrive at a periodically forced single-degree-of-freedom Hamiltonian oscillator in the horizontal tube. What could be simpler? But you again get “antidissipation” – a statistical taking-away of kinetic energy from the light fast particle by the heavy slow one.

Continue reading “The Riddle of Cryodynamics (A Call for Cooperation with Lifeboat and Singularity University)” »

“Olemach-Theorem”: Angular-momentum Conservation implies a gravitational-redshift proportional Change of Length, Mass and Charge

Otto E. Rossler

Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Tubingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 8, 72076 Tubingen, Germany

Abstract

Continue reading “‘Olemach Theorem"” »

For those in Colorado who are interested in attending a talk by John Troeltzsch, Sentinel Ball Program Manager, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. please R.S.V.P Chris Zeller ([email protected]) by Tuesday, 26 February 2013 for badge access. US citizenship required.

6:00 pm Thursday, February 28th 2013
6:00 pm Social, 6:30 pm Program
Ball Aerospace Boulder Campus RA7 Conference Room
1600 Commerce St
Boulder, CO 80301

It will be good to see you there.

About the Talk:
The inner solar system is populated with a half million asteroids larger than the one that struck Tunguska and yet we’ve identified and mapped only about one percent of these asteroids to date.

Continue reading “AIAA Rocky Mountain — Sentinel Program” »

A Revolution in Physics and Cosmology

by Otto E. Rossler, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Tubingen, Germany

A deterministic 2-particle system interacting with a fixed third particle (the wall of a confining T-tube) shows two kinds of behavior never seen in a deterministic system before: Dissipative and antididissipative behavior in both directions of time (dependent on the sign of the force law). Dissipative behavior occurs in both directions of time when the system is started from non-selected far-from-equipartition initial conditions while the potential (giving rise to the force law) is Newtonian–repulsive. Antidissipative behavior occurs (in both directions of time) when the system is started from non-selected far-from-equipartition initial conditions while the potential is Newtonian–attractive.

“Entropic” behavior had not been demonstrated before in a deterministic system. Now, both “entropic” and “ectropic” behavior are described under deterministic-chaos conditions. The numerical simulations are due to Klaus Sonnleitner (2010) and, independently, Ramis Movassagh (2011) who also provided an analytical derivation.

Continue reading “A Revolution in Physics?” »

If, we as a community, are intending to accelerate the development of interstellar travel we have to glower at the record and ask ourselves some tough questions. First, what is the current record of the primary players? Second, why is everyone afraid to try something outside the status quo theories?

At the present time the primary players are associated with the DARPA funded 100-Year Starship Study, as Icarus Interstellar who is cross linked with The Tau Zero Foundation and Centauri Dreams is a team member of the 100YSS. I was surprised to find Jean-Luc Cambier on Tau Zero.

Gary Church recently put the final nail in the Icarus Interstellar‘s dreams to build a rocket ship for interstellar travel. In his post on Lifeboat, Cosmic Ray Gorilla Gary Church says “it is likely such a shield will massive over a thousand tons”. Was he suggesting that the new cost of an interstellar rocket ship is not 3.4x World GDP but 34x or 340x World GDP? Oops!

Let us look at the record. Richard Obousy of Icarus Interstellar and Eric Davis of Institute for Advanced Studies claimed that it was possible, using string theories to travel at not just c, the velocity of light but at 1E32c, or c multiplied by a 1 followed by 32 zeros. However, Lorentz-FitzGerald transformations show that anything with mass cannot travel faster than the velocity of light. Note that Lorentz-FitzGerald is an empirical observation which was incorporated into Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

Continue reading “Gravity Modification – What Is The Record?” »

Einstein Mining

Otto E. Rossler, Faculty of Science, University of Tubingen, Germany

The young Einstein was the most fertile scientific mind of history. He first saw the observer-private nature of simultaneity, a consequence of the global constancy of the speed of light c valid in Maxwell’s equation. He then spotted the twin miracle (“paradox”): that a returned twin clock is younger than its stay-put sibling. The transversal Doppler effect described in the same 1905 paper was equally new. At the end of this miraculous year stood the improved Weber law (E exactly equal m times c-square) destined to become tragically consequential when Lise Meitner would recall its strength 34 years into the future. Two years after the miraculous year, there followed Einstein’s biggest discovery in the present author’s mind: the gravitational clock slowdown near the bottom of a constantly accelerating rocketship compared to a twin clock in its tip. It implies a second twin paradox (spending time downstairs lets you stay younger in Alan Lightman’s phrase).

This bundle of subsequently observationally confirmed predicted effects is an eternal heritage. Maxwell’s advice: go back to the origin of an already discovered gold vein since it is there that others inevitably originate is still valid. This is the excuse for the new notion of “Einstein mining.”

Continue reading “Einstein Mining” »

Recently, I met Josh Hopkins of Lockheed’s Advanced Programs, AIAA Rocky Mountain Region’s First Annual Technical Symposium (RMATS), October 26, 2012. Josh was the keynote speaker at this RMATS. Here is his presentation. After his presentation we talked outside the conference hall. I told him about my book, and was surprised when he said that two groups had failed to reproduce Podkletnov’s work. I knew one group had but a second? As we parted we said we’d keep in touch. But you know how life is, it has the habit of getting in the way of exciting research, and we lost touch.

About two weeks ago, I remembered, that Josh had said that he would provide some information on the second group that had failed to reproduce Podkletnov’s work. I sent him an email, and was very pleased to hear back from him and that the group’s finding had been published under the title “Gravity Modification by High-Temperature Semiconductors”. The authors were C. Woods, S. Cooke, J. Helme & C. Caldwell. Their paper was published in the 37^th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference and Exhibit, 8–11 July 2001, Salt Lake City, Utah. I bought a copy for the AIAA archives, and read it, reread it, and reread it.

Then I found a third team they published their lack of findings “Gravity Modification Experiments Using a Rotating Superconducting Disk and Radio Frequency Fields”. The authors were G. Hathaway, B. Cleveland and Y. Bao. Published in Physica C, 2003.

Both papers focused on attempting to build a correct superconducting disc. At least Wood et al said “the tests have not fulfilled the specified conditions for a gravity effect”. The single most difficult thing to do was to build a bilayered superconducting disc. Woods et al tried very hard to do so. Reading through Hathaway et all paper suggest that they too had similar difficulties. Photo shows a sample disc from Woods’ team. Observe the crack in the middle.

Continue reading “Gravity Modification – What Went Wrong?” »