This is not a pleasant subject, this idea of retrofitting our current method of space propulsion to move to a “quark chemistry” type of entropy reduction model. Probably the biggest barrier to me personally, is that I’m actually pretty good at quantum chemistry, but quantum chromodynamics is a little bit too complicated for me to understand. It’s not necessarily that one is more difficult than the others, but rather than quantum chemistry is usually taught by chemists, while quantum chromodynamics is taught by the same physicists that tend to teach covariant relativity, or quantum electrodynamics. They’re smart people if just for the reason that they found a way to find someone to pay them to do covariant relativity and quantum electrodynamics for a living. But chemists tend to teach physics better than physicists for the same reason that engineers tend to teach math better than mathematicians … because the chemist learned physics to do chemistry, and because the engineer learned math to engineer. For many students (perhaps most students) an instructor that takes a blue-collar approach to teaching the tools of the trade will teach better to the majority of students. Yes, the mathematics Ph.D. will have learned her most important things about math from a fellow mathematician, but the nursing student, the accounting student, the engineer looking to learn Linear Algebra or Topology for their job? Put them in an engineer’s math classroom and they’ll likely absorb it better.
So we have this need to not bring the mass with us from Earth, but rather gather it as we merrily roll along through the ocean of below ground-state energy. Without getting too technical, we can get a rough idea of how much Bosonic energy there is above the ground state for us to harvest for our line of family-friendly tourist boats … figure that outer space averages 2.7 Kelvin. That’s dead nuts money, brother man! 2.7 Kelvin! Yeah, it’s colder than a supermodel’s titties, but 2.7 Kelvin is 2.7 Kelvin, right? Of course, I should compute this with covariance, but I’m a dumbshit, so just using straight root mean square, we have a mass = kT/c^2, for the bosons at 2.7 Kelvin, so we’re looking at a mass of what, about (1.38×10^-23 * 2.7)/9×10^16, which is about 4×10^-40 kg, per converted Boson. That’s kind of small, it’s just the same photon mass equivalence that I found with thermodynamics instead of Relativity, which I tend to do, because thermodynamics is a proven market leader in the field of Family Fun Space Tourism. Relativity is a huge downer in the Family Fun Space Tourism business, we prefer to call it “The R-word.” That’s a joke with us here at Space Force 7. We like to have fun here, and not just with tequila.
Anyway, so say we have a photon flux density of 1×10^16 photons per second per square meter … I just picked that flux as being something that seems tractable to acquire if the path is chosen carefully, but I could be off by a few orders of magnitude. So if our synthetic funnel area cross section is say 1,000 square meters, we’re looking at 1×10^19 photons per second. So per second, we’re pulling some 4×10^-21 kg of mass into our “snowball catapult.” Use our energy onboard to both fund the entropic reduction from the UD Bosons to the UUD and DDU Femions, and then some more energy to raise the temperature of that converted mass up to say 4,000 Kelvin, and we’re looking at a velocity for those new Femions of about 4 meters per second. That isn’t great, and the mass-transfer with a 10,000 kg tourist boat is only about 1×10^-24 m/s.
That’s even slower than the mass gathering method, and we still need to do all that work to decrease the entropy from Bosons to Fermions.
And that’s why this is not a pleasant subject. It’s because Mother Nature shits all over our plans to zip around the universe. So ultimately, we need a better way than this. The limitation is that 2.7 Kelvin isn’t a lot of energy, and in space, most of the energy is where we can’t touch it, below the ground state. Even if we didn’t know anything about quantum mechanics, we can see there is a substantial ground state by just looking at the temperature of the background radiation in space, it’s only 2.7 Kelvin, and yet the temperature even in Miami on a lovely day in December might still be some 300 Kelvin. So the difference between a lovely day spent drinking Haitian Sunrises at a lovely bar in Wynwood, and instant death in the furthest reaches of space is only some 300 Kelvin. BUT … the amount of below-ground state energy is about the same in both places. This should demonstrated to all those who visit Moira Jane’s Cafe in Coconut Grove, that what we see as our universe of energy is barely a thin crust of available energy over an ocean of locked-up energy below the ground state, h-bar omega, time 1/2 if absolutely necessary.
“So then let’s just take some of the energy from the below the ground state,” says the science fiction nerds who think that wanking to Carrie Fisher dancing around for Captain Kirk is somehow a substitute for actual training. It never has been, it still isn’t. We can’t touch that energy because the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle keeps showing us that we can’t. And if we can’t touch it, we most certainly can’t build inexpensive production machines that exploit it. So we have to stick with “quark chemistry” for now, lick our wounds and accept our losses. But when one door closes, another opens, and that’s what we have to go on here. For all we know, the Pirelli results are misguided and wrong-headed, but it seems they are closer than many of the rest of us, given nothing more then the longevity of their research. So if we move from Pirelli’s work toward a method of interacting weakly with manufacturable devices that cost no more in inflation-adjusted dollars than a Fuji 488, 2-stroke, 2-cylinder, 2-carb engine cost in 1972, then we’re in the ballpark at least.
If that’s the case, then fuck it, let’s just interact weakly, grab the neutrinos while grabbing them is entropically favorable, possibly while they’re either at the apex or the trough of an oscillation. Then we have a deep well of mass to pull from, without worrying about scraping our faces against the ground state barrier. Neutrinos are the way to go for gathering mass, but they come with the undeniably difficult problem of engineering a way to interact weakly and grab that mass. That’s a highly nontrivial problem, and we’ve barely started working in it, other than a handful of low-energy physicists that are far more intelligent than I am, but generally tend to converge on “Hell’s teeth man, this is very difficult work!”
Thus for now, the Family-Fun Enterprise at SpaceForce7 has decided to license our weakly-interacting neutrino coupling technology from the ladies at Zouk Machine. For those who don’t have time to watch the whole video, please forward to 2:10 where Zouk Machine explains in words and body movement how their new weakly-interacting neutrino technologies can be built for a moderate cost as crate-engines into tourist boats of all sizes …