…the only way to use (teleportation) as a secret weapon is to allow our enemies to bankrupt themselves thinking they can produce a teleportation machine.
The Air Force is to be applauded for investigating technologies that may have value for national security…But wormholes, negative energies, warped space-time, etc., require futuristic technologies centuries to millions of years ahead of ours. The only thing going down the wormhole is taxpayers’ money.
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Samizdata quote of the daySeptember 3rd, 2005 |
 3 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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The story is even more bizarre than the quote suggests. I wrote up a post over on Chicagoboyz detailing the weird intersection of government incompetence and media bias.
Anyone who knows a bit about information theory and physics/biochem knows that teleportation is going to be a very very energy- and information-intensive thing to do and will probably never be possible, but I really can’t see a problem with the US military doing a quick reality check just to be sure.
It’s not as if they wasted tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a team of scientists and engineers as so many other government projects do. X-33, anyone? This was a one man project and he produced a 79 page paper after three years. That’s comparable in both time and size to a PhD thesis, both of which seem entirely reasonable. I’d expect to read that the total cost of paying his salary and project overhead was $100k or so a year for a total project cost of $300k. And, being the government, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a good bit higher than that. A million, say. Which would be a drop in the bucket for the US military and they might well regard it as money well spent.
The actual cost? $25,000.
That’s very very reasonable.
In fact I don’t know what the guy was doing for three years, but he sure wasn’t living off the proceeds! Probably he spent no more than 3 – 6 months on it, and the report will read more like a novel than a scientific paper.
It’s really hard to see what the fuss is about.
Bruce-
Entirely agree.