Except there is no real reason why it should continue that way. If you look around you, there are lots of anti-science movements, less interest in academia, less investment in long-term ventures. The "easy" problems are solved, and the hard ones are still there. Sure we should continue to make progress, but also we could face disasters like never before (cue global warming, energy crisis, new cold or hot wars, etc). Personally I work harder than ever before I and I see lots of unemployed people around me. Not a good combination.

That is certainly what it sounds like from TFA.

So let's summarize this. Some rich person think they are smarter than everyone else and that they have the ills of the world figured out. Namely: a cure for cancer is just around the corner (based on what evidence?), so they choose a diet that is totally unproven to do anything good or bad, they plan to live forever and they will retreat to some mystical artificial island where they can do what they want and not be bothered by anyone not of their own kind. So far so good.

What I don't get is why they think welfare is bad. Obviously they don't need it, they're rich. But not everyone can be rich, this would be the same as everyone being poor. So given that in any society there will be richer and poorer people, welfare simply ensures that even the poorest get some minimum access to services, typically health care. This does not prevent richer people to get better services. Explain to me why this is bad? Given that rich/poor status is mostly a question of luck, being anti-welfare has always struck me as being selfish.

It is already illegal to work more than 35 hours a week in France, but it hasn't worked out so well.

Verrrryyyyy slow for a perfect system.

What is important in wikipedia? Obviously the content. The content is essentially provided by volunteers. The pages design is nothing special. Google provides the search. What does the WMF do? They host the content, and they are making millions while essentially doing nothing productive. Sure they must pay for bandwidth and hosting the data, but this is really very little compared with the money they spend on other things. The pages are each very lightweight. The full content of Wikipedia probably does not exceed a few TB. In today's age, any large company would be happy to host WP for nearly free in return for the goodwill it would generate.

I admit I feel cheated by the WMF intrusive, blatant and disrespectful grab for donations.

Thanks, I've read the book. The first part is a introduction to Mach effects. The second part reads like a lab book to a great extent (description of experiments, matching of theory to seen results, etc), leading to experimental descriptions to demonstrate the existence of these effects. The authors makes some interesting benchtop experiments. He sees some new physics happening, including very small reactionless thrust effect, in the order of a few microNewtons, that he cannot explain away with obvious side effects, like heating, varying electromagnetic fields, and so on. He has the theory for it, but not fully developed. It seems a little ad-hoc. This is still great, but this is not yet new real physics, and this is not yet useful. Someone else needs to redo the experiments and confirm them. We need to see if the effects can scale to something not so tiny.

The last part of the book is speculative with wormholes and so on. The authors is careful to draw attention to the work of others, well-respected physicists like K. Thorne. It is fun to read.

In summary, with the author's theory, if it were correct, and if it scaled, it *would* be possible to build Startrek-style engines. We are not *quite* there yet.

don't want to nitpick but the propagation delay is a bit more than 1 ns per foot. Light travels at 11.8 inch per nanosecond, i.e. 1.017 ns per foot.

Or, to paraphrase dear old Stalin, quantity is a quality all of its own.

Most *people* do that. If only it were limited to academics, life would be easy. But no. Taxi drivers, assistants, hairdressers, dentists, you name it.

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

We have built machinery that can be used to replicate the same machinery (e.g. 3D printers), but not by themselves. This is hugely difficult: even making simple plastics is hard work and requires lots of resources.

Not by itself. Enough said.

Many people on this thread mention the parallel between aviation progress in the first half of the 20th century and what is happening now with SpaceX, Virgin galactic, and so on.

The difference is essential though. In the beginning of the 20th century we simply did not know enough about fluid dynamics to make aerodynamic flight happen easily. This is still a tough field (turbulence, etc) however we have made huge progress. We can model it relatively well, we essentially know now how to simulate it, etc. The basic equations (Navier Stokes) have been known for a long time, and thank to a huge theoretical, computational and practical effort, we now have cheap, save, available, commercial flight for everyone.

In the case of space dynamics, things are actually fairly simple. We have known about minimum orbital speed, escape velocity, and so on since Newton. We've made measurable progress with chemical rocket engines since then 1950s, but the principles were known at the time. We know how much energy we need to expend to reach space. We know how to navigate space, We know how to do it.

We actually know that we *cannot* do it cheaply at present. What we need to reach a new level is a lot of basic research in materials to build space elevators, better ion drives, perhaps nuclear engines in the future. At the moment we cannot send humans effectively beyond low Earth orbit, and again, this is not cheap. It is not so much a question of entrepreneurship, it is a question of long-term, constant investments. As in several decades.

This is hugely misinformed. In the 19th century people built flying gliders and even a few prototype planes in their backyard. They did not need equivalent 19th century billionaire to bail them out, and very few of them died. This is because the physics of flying is easy and safe, once understood.

Now we already know that the physics of space travel is difficult and dangerous. We've been there. People have died. We have no easy solution. No amount of starry-eyed entrepreneurship is going to change that.