Modern Western intellectual tradition tends to discount the technological capabilities of ancient societies. One of the reasons for this is the fact that very little in the way of hardware or documentation has survived down thru the centuries. Sometimes knowledge was deliberately hidden or destroyed. But every now and then, we stumble across evidence of amazing technical sophistication from long ago.

Batteries in Ancient Baghdad

Jars with copper cylinders and corroded iron rods were discovered in 1936 near Baghdad, Iraq in ruins over 1750 years old. When they were rebuilt and filled with wine, they generated a voltage.

Museums contain copper vessels with a thin coating of silver that appears to have been electroplated. The batteries could have accomplished this.

There are old Egyptian papyri that show a man stepping into a pool with fish that generated a weak electrical current which relieved pain. The batteries may have been used produce pain relief similar to the fish.

Baghdad batteries

Computers in Ancient Greece

About 100 years ago, a few coral encrusted lumps were brought up by sponge divers from a 1st century BC ship wreck in near Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. X-rays revealed that one of the lumps contained 32 gears.

When a detail examination was performed and the function of the geared mechanism simulated, it turned out to be a clever astronomical calculator that could display the phase of the moon and the position of the sun in the Zodiac. It may also have displayed the motion of the planets. It was far beyond the technical abilities that the makers were thought to have possessed.

Kythera

Moving Blocks in Ancient Lebanon

There is a Roman temple at Baalbek, Lebanon that was built on the ruins of a far older structure of colossal stone blocks. These blocks were 14’ by 14’ by 68’ and may weigh up to 2,000 tons. Given all of our modern technology, it would be extremely difficult for us to move that piece of rock today. We have no idea of who carved them or how they moved them from the quarry to the temple location.

Baalbek Stones

Ancient Optics

There is plenty of evidence in museums that indicates many previous civilizations knew about the optical properties of glass lenses. There are ancient writings that have been very hard to translate because the archeologists refused to believe that older cultures which worked glass thousands of years ago could never have noticed how light passing thru glass can magnify the appearance of objects. Ancient records of planets and moon were written before modern astronomy that could only have been known through the use of telescopes. Tiny engravings were done that would have required magnification. Mention is made of devices that must have been primitive glasses to correct vision defects.

Telescopes

Steam Engines in Ancient Egypt

Hero of Alexandria created a crude steam turbine around 130 B.C. It was used to open temple doors. However, the ancients had plenty of slave labor so such devices never became serious energy sources. He also invented a water organ, a wind powered organ, a fire engine and a coin-operated device.

Egyptian Steam Engines

What is easily seen in the historical record if one pays attention begs the question of what other great technological capabilities the ancients had that we have lost knowledge of.

A couple of years ago, the Ansari X Prize was offered to encourage private development of space flight.

Ansari_X_PRIZE

Recently, the organization that offered the Automotive X Prize was created to challenge inventors to create commercial vehicle that could get the equivalent of 100 miles to the gallon.

Automotive_X_PRIZE

I am not an engineer but I have always been interested in technological forecasting. In a standard automobile, about 25% of the fuel is used to move the body, engine, drive train and fuel tank. About 74% of the energy is lost in the drive train and transmission. Only 1% of the fuel is used to move the passenger and cargo.

Here is my idea for a better passenger vehicle.

1. Build the body from advanced composites such as those being developed by Fiberforge. They are lighter than steel, can be recycled more easily and rebound better under impact.

Fiberforge

2. Put the motors in the wheels. This eliminated the entire drive train including the transmission. These motors can also act as brakes and generate electricity to recharge the batteries while slowing the vehicle.

the hybrid mini

3. Use the latest in battery technology such as the new nano-electrode batteries that charge in 5 minutes, deliver more power in bursts and are much lighter than conventional batteries.

nano electrodes

4. Leave a space with standard mountings for adding a small engine and fuel tank. This could be a light weight internal combustion engine made with ceramic materials, a Sterling steam engine, a fuel cell, etc. Because this engine is just used to charge the battery, it can be operated at maximum efficiency. This will help to extend the range and provide for circumstances where a connection to the grid for recharging is not available.

5. If all the operational components are mounted on a standard sized bed, then the body and passenger compartment could be easily customized leaving a lot of room for individual tastes.

It is estimated that the energy consumed by a car charged off the electrical grid costs about 20% as much as the energy consumed by a gas powered vehicle for the same number of miles traveled.

India recently announced a $3,000 mass production car and China followed with the announcement of a $2,500 mass production car. With 2 billion people looking for cheap cars in India and China, we HAVE to shift over to a cheap electric car as soon as possible or global warming will really kick into high gear. (Not to mention the threat of wars fought over dwindling oil supplies.)

Cheap cars

       I have always been fascinated by astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, etc. Knowing more about our neighborhood, as it were. But we generally think of these subjects are spectator sports. We look, we catalog, we theorize, we look again. And that about does it. However, that is not always the case.

        Sometime ago, I read about a theoretical explanation of powerful blasts of energy coming from a dense rotating star. The idea was that there was a dust cloud around the star and a very intense magnetic field. The star was rotating so rapidly that out in the dust cloud, the magnetic field  was being swept along faster than the speed of light. This resulted in a “luminous boom” effect, analogous to a sonic boom in our atmosphere. And the result was the observed burst of energy.

        The English astronomer who coined this theory had a son who was an electrical engineer. He thought about his father’s idea and decided that he might be able to duplicate the effect with technology. His idea was to have a disk with elements around the rim. If he could switch them on and off faster than a pulse of light could travel around the rim of the disk, he should be able to create the luminous boom effect.

        One of the possibilities for this technology would be a transmitter whose power did not diminish with distance to the same degree that our current communications systems suffer. In other words, a very powerful transmitter in a small package. He might be able to create a cell phone that could reach all the way to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. No more cell towers. Cell phone service anywhere on the planet.

        Years later, I happened across a brief mention of a company that had purchased an old abandoned air base in England. They were setting up receivers along a runway to measure the attenuation of a signal transmitted by a new technology they were developing. Wonder if it was the astronomer son?

A great deal of ink has been spent justifying and condemning torture in the “war on terror”. This is a waste of paper. We can get the intelligence that we need from prisoners without torture, which is often unproductive any.

1.There is a brain scanning technique that can tell very accurately when someone is lying. When you are telling the truth, you pull facts from memory and speak them. When you are lying, you have to remember what is true, fabricate the lie and then speak it. There are brain areas that are active when you lie that are not active when you tell the truth.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/lying.html

2. There is another brain scanning technique that can tell when someone recognize something. All you need to do is wire someone up, show them images of what you are investigating and their brain will tell you when they see something they recognize. They don’t even need to speak!

http://www.bookrags.com/Neuroimaging

3. There is a third technique that can tell when someone thinks they remember something but they are wrong and the memory is false.

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002606.html

4.And finally, there is a technique that can utilize magnetic fields to block or interfere with brain function in a specific location. I wonder what would happen if someone was trying to lie while the brain stimulator was interfering with areas that are needed for concocting a lie?

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=171201506&cid=PT-popular-leftcol

With these techniques, a great deal of useful information can be extracted without threatening or torturing the subjects.

The equipment is expensive but so is the incarceration of many suspects in Gitmo and overseas in other countries. If the purpose of holding these people is really about getting information, we can do that easily. On the other hand, if the purpose is revenge, punishment and/or intimidation, then perhaps torture IS required to meet the goals of the US administration.

      I have been reading science fiction since I was a kid. A lot of the stories happened in other star systems. When I got older and started reading physics books, I realized that Relativity theory seemed to rule out faster than light travel. As the years went by, I kept an eye out for any theoretical technology that might permit the human race to travel to the stars in less that decades or centuries.

      Last March, I was invited to speak about FTL drives at Norwescon, a local science fiction convention. Before I went to the convention, I told Barbara that, with my luck, someone else on the panel would have expertise in the area and would challenge my presentation. When I got to my panel, the other panelist scheduled for that panel was not there. Instead, there was a guy from a previous panel in his place.

      I said, “What happened to Ted?”. The other guy said, “He died last week.” Being the smart ass that I am, I said, “Some people will do anything to get out of being on a panel.” The response was, “He was a friend of mine.” About then I felt like a real jerk. Then he said, “He would have appreciated the joke.” I introduced myself as someone with a general interest in science and technology. He introduced himself as a member of the Air Force laboratory for advanced space propulsion systems for 10 years. SIGH!

      Anyway, I want to share three possible FTL drive systems in this post.

1) A German rocketry expert named Heim was severely injured in the Second World War when his munitions plant exploded. He spent many years working on a new theory of physics but only published in German. Very esoteric math but the basic idea was that an extremely intense magnetic field might be able to overcome gravity.

    Another physicist named Droscher added more dimensions to Heim’s theory and said that a ship that was accelerated to near the speed of light by Heim’s system could then leap into another dimension he called “parallel space” where it could travel at speeds above 1 light year per day.

     With a month to accelerate and a month to decelerate, a 90 day trip could reach out 30 light years. This would allow us to explore a lot of nearby stars. The Heim- Droscher concept won an award at a competition for new ideas in space propulsion recently. The math is very hard to follow and our technology is just getting to the point where it might be possible to create the necessary magnetic fields to test the theory.
 
http://www.hpcc-space.de/publications/index.html

2) In 1994, an English physicist named Alcubierre postulated that if it were possible to contract space-time ahead of a ship and expand it behind the ship, then the area of space-time surrounding the ship could be accelerated beyond the speed of light. There would be no acceleration effects on the ship. This approach would take an enormous amount of energy.

     Chris Van Den Broeck came up with the idea of contracting the bubble of space-time containing the ship down to the size of an elementary particle. This would require a tiny fraction of the energy the original concept required. Unfortunate, no one knows how to manipulate space-time in the ways that would be required to utilize the theories of Alcubierre and Van Den Broeck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

3) A physicist named Andrew Bender just published a book that explains his approach to FTL drives. Basically, he suggests that we need to create enough transuranic element 115 to create a cube 3 meters on a side. Usually the transuranics last for nanoseconds when created in the lab. But, there is an isotope of 115 that could be stable.

     His drive system would inject anti-protons into the cube of 115. This should create a spherical standing gravity wave that would isolate a bubble of space-time from the rest of the universe. Then, by distorting the bubble, the surrounding space-time would be forced to propel the bubble considerably faster than light. There would be no acceleration effects on the ship. This technology which Bender calls “slipstring drive” is based on an extension of string theory and seems to offer the best approach at present for an FTL drive.

http://www.slipstring.com/

     As I feared, the other panelist at Norwescon challenged any of the systems that I mentioned. He said that they would result in a violation of causality and that was not permitted under Relativity theory. Basically, the problem is that if you can exceed the speed of light, you can travel in time. That might lead to nasty paradoxes such as killing your mother before she became pregnant with you.

 However, causality is under assault right now at the University of Washington. An acquaintance of mine by the name of John Cramer is working on an experiment that might transmit information into the past. If his experiment shows that causality can be violated, then the prospects for FTL drives are considerably brighter.

http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/NLS/NL_signal.htm

Scotty, give me warp 7 !!!!

For decades they have been blathering about creating clean fusion power. It is always just around the corner. The US has spent billions of dollars in the last 50 years and still has no workable fusion reactor.

http://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion50yr_dean.pdf

Now we hear about an engineer with a new approach to hot fusion. He started work on this system back in the Eighties, got a government grant for research for 11 years, met every milestone and proved the validity of his approach. The next step would be to build a full scale working fusion power plant for about 200 million dollars. So, of course, the government cancelled any further funding for his project. As he points out, 200 million dollars is well within the reach of a lot of different countries and, since he owns the patents on his technique, he is free to cut a deal with any country that wants to develop real fusion power.

http://www.askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/2006-9%20IAC%20Paper.pdf

 One of the reasons I am excited about his approach is that it would also be suitable for a space propulsion system that would have 10 times the specific impulse of any other system developed to date. http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/school/InterStellar/Explorer_Class/Bussard_Fusion_systems.HTML