"Do Me A Favor, Hurry Up That Warp Drive" - Science Magazine On Trump's Cavalcade Of Dumb
EDIT
While scientists are trying to share facts about the epidemic, the administration either blocks those facts or restates them with contradictions. Transmission rates and death rates are not measurements that can be changed with will and an extroverted presentation. The administration has repeatedly saidas it did last weekthat virus spread in the United States is contained, when it is clear from genomic evidence that community spread is occurring in Washington state and beyond. That kind of distortion and denial is dangerous and almost certainly contributed to the federal government's sluggish response. After 3 years of debating whether the words of this administration matter, the words are now clearly a matter of life and death.
And although the steps required to produce a vaccine could possibly be made more efficient, many of them depend on biological and chemical processes that are essential. So the president might just as well have said, Do me a favor, hurry up that warp drive.
I don't expect politicians to know Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism or the Diels-Alder chemical reaction (although I can dream). But you can't insult science when you don't like it and then suddenly insist on something that science can't give on demand. For the past 4 years, President Trump's budgets have made deep cuts to science, including cuts to funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH. With this administration's disregard for science of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the stalled naming of a director for the Office of Science and Technology Policyall to support political goalsthe nation has had nearly 4 years of harming and ignoring science.
Now, the president suddenly needs science. But the centuries spent elucidating fundamental principles that govern the natural worldevolution, gravity, quantum mechanicsinvolved laying the groundwork for knowing what we can and cannot do. The ways that scientists accumulate and analyze evidence, apply inductive reasoning, and subject findings to scrutiny by peers have been proven over the years to give rise to robust knowledge. These processes are being applied to the COVID-19 crisis through international collaboration at breakneck, unprecedented speed; Science published two new papers earlier this month on SARS-CoV-2, and more are on the way. But the same concepts that are used to describe nature are used to create new tools. So, asking for a vaccine and distorting the science at the same time are shockingly dissonant.
EDIT
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6483/1169.full
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
Even with the most recent version of a warp-field geometry proposed for the Alcubierre-drive, it still takes apocalyptic amounts of energy to create the field.
Plus, we still haven't figured out how to steer or stop the spaceship, once the drive has been turned on, without turning it into an interstellar WMD.
Plus, building the warp-core of an Alcubierre-drive requires materials with exotic physical properties that do not exist in the known universe.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)good luck with that.
Why not just take a shortcut through some higher dimension, above and beyond space-time, to reach Próxima Centauri, Arcturus or wherever, almost instantaneously?
hatrack
(59,583 posts)Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)we could get that done years ago in the future! Trump & family could be here since and for ever!
3catwoman3
(23,968 posts)...food replicators and transporters, too.
Collimator
(1,639 posts)Warp drive, transporters--anything to get either him or us out of here. This particular corner of the space-time continuum is simply not large enough for both us and Trump's ego.
Somebody has to leave town.
Lord Ludd
(585 posts)Wouldn't want to beam someone up who winds up with a leg sticking out of their head. (It was many years after watching Star Trek that I learned about Werner Heisenberg & quantum indeterminacy.)