Friday, October 14, 2005

Air Force needs dilithium crystals



I just stumbled on this article that says the Air Force spent $25,000 last year on a study of teleportation physics to transport people and cargo through space.

In the words of the great William Shatner himself, "You're gonna die."

Sorry. I mean, "It's just a tv show."

They do know there's a war on, right? I want transporters as much as the next guy, but if we're looking to Star Trek for ideas here's some things I want first:

Food replicators
Containment fields
Holodecks
Green Orion slave girls
Universal translators
Medical units that heal broken bones in two seconds
Phasers
Warp drive
Pointy sideburns
Androids
Blood wine
Nicole DeBoer

There's no better punchline than this quote right in the article itself:

"I would say that something is wrong with the way the Air Force allocates its research money, at least on this topic," said Phil Schewe, the chief science writer at the American Institute of Physics.

Amen, Phil. Amen.

5 comments:

Brian Kunath said...

For $25,000, they'll be transporting people and cargo through space using Hyundai physics. As long as they don't try to fill the tank all the way up.

Anonymous said...

Transport over Dr. Bashir for me...

Anonymous said...

nextel already has the star trek communicator device nailed - i just wish the little nextel chirp sounded more like the star trek chirp.

we also need some sort of firewire port hardwired into our heads like the matrix - i'm sick of all this reading of books and having to learn stuff. i'd much rather upload content into my brain and immediately benefit from the knowledge. why the hell do i have to read a 600 page users manual to learn how to work the remote controll to my cable box and still not know what the hell i
'm doing?

Brian Kunath said...

Murphy, your remote control must be unneccesarily complicated. Six hundred pages is simply too much information. And after completing that tome, to still not know what you're doing suggests the manual was poorly written.

Anonymous said...

Hmm. $25,000 is less than 1/1000 of a penny for every person in the counrty, or less than $.00001

Heck, if we cna have transporters faster, I say multiple my contribution by 10,000. I'll gladly kick in a buck.