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Stealth Now Old Hat - USAF Looks Into Teleportation
Lest you think that our friends at DARPA are the only ones interested in science-fictional possibilities, the USAF recently took delivery of a new study regarding the military potential of teleportation.
The Teleportation Physics Study was done by Eric Davis of Warp Drive Metrics. Its purpose -
"This study was tasked with the purpose of collecting information describing the teleportation of material objects, providing a description of
teleportation as it occurs in physics, its theoretical and experimental status, and a projection of potential applications. The study also consisted
of a search for teleportation phenomena occurring naturally or under laboratory conditions that can be assembled into a model describing the
conditions required to accomplish the transfer of objects."
The author broke down the various possibilities in this way:
("Old School" Teleportation Technology)
Even though I was disappointed with the outright dismissal of Star Trek-style teleportation (sheesh!), I was briefly encouraged by the fact that he offered solutions that meet the definition of vm-teleportation:
"The first solution can be found from the class of traversable wormholes giving rise to what I call a true “stargate.” A stargate is essentially a wormhole with a flat-face shape for the throat as opposed to the spherical-shaped throat of the Morris and Thorne traversable wormhole, which was derived from a spherically symmetric Lorentzian spacetime metric that prescribes the wormhole geometry."Unfortunately, despite a lot of very impressive math, he seems to settle on p-teleportation as the most likely recommendation for further study, saying
"P-Teleportation, if verified, would represent a phenomenon that could offer potential high-payoff military, intelligence and commercial applications. This phenomenon could generate a dramatic revolution in technology, which would result from a dramatic paradigm shift in science. Anomalies are the key to all paradigm shifts!"I know what you're thinking; more wasted government money. However, a quick look at the distribution list thoughtfully included at the end of the report shows that a copy was sent to Gregory Benford, physicist and highly respected sf author. Maybe we'll get a good story out of it.
In the meantime, read what it would be like to step through a wormhole; check out Frank Herbert's description of a vortal tube from his 1969 novel Whipping Star.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 11/1/2004)
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