I think Entropic Gravity is looking very promising.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity

Verlinde claims that it is starting to make some sense of the Dark Matter and Dark Energy problem.
http://www.scilogs.eu/en/blog/the-dark-matter-crisis/2012-06-28/discussing-gravity-with-eric-verlinde

This theory could change a whole lot of things in physics. And might provide a way to finally bring Quantum Theory and Relativity together.

General Relativity actually adopted equations that would be consistent with Newtonian Gravity without deriving it from first principles.
And probably that is the problem with its current formulation. The Entropic Gravity might provide the deriviation and mechanism for it.

We don't even have a theory that works. We have GR that breaks down as soon as gravity becomes too high, or it becomes too low. It will also not work at too small distances. We have QM which does not work beyond small distances.

Most scientists are not even willing to consider that the theory is broken, but are happy to extrapolate in places where it doesn't go.

There are very few who are even trying to work on a Quantum theory of Gravity. Without which talking about Cosmology and Warp Drives is meaning less.

-anand

I wouldn't have much faith in this, precisely because it would have been done based on Newtonian gravity. It does not take care of the MOND phenomenology. With MOND in the picture things may be totally different.

MOND is an empirical equation which predicts the rotation curves based on the visible mass in Galaxies. It works beautifully at Galactic scales but does not work well at cluster scales.

We know that General Relativity (GR) and Quantum Mechanics (QM) both are mutually incompatible, which indicates that something is wrong in both of them. In addition GR does not work well when we get very high gravitational fields like a black hole. The equations lead to a singularity. It works beautifully when gravity is somewhat lower but doesn't seem to work well below a threshold, which leads us to the prediction of Dark Matter, with really weird properties to account for the lack of observation.

Also GR takes into account only one special constant speed of light or the maximum signal speed. It does not take into account the Planck's Length or the minimal wavelength of the signal. This is probably why it does not work well with QM. The modification due to taking into account the Planck's length may cause MOND we don't know.

-anand

1) A single income tax range applicable on all direct incomes. Specifically profits on investments should not count. Investments actually make money available to the system. No Tax on it will actually help by giving incentive to people to save.
2) A single per person tax deduction depending on the cost of living in an area. This covers poor people.
3) Luxury tax on all products that are more costlier than the bottom say 10% meeting all requirements. This will make richer people pay more taxes, but without any prejudice.

There should possibly be a pollution tax, but that is a subjective quantity and subject to corruption.

-anand

But the biggest problem is going to be finding a course that you can take without colliding with a wart at that speed. It will be difficult to avoid anything at that speed. Also there is the problem of energy. With speed your mass increase too, which requires more energy for the same amount of acceleration. It eventually gets very difficult to accelerate.

I know relativity can forever tie us to this rock. But maybe we could survive on colony sized space ships and mine the planets. I don't know if the nearest star system will be reachable in the very near future.

We will need a laser weapon to vaporize any speck that comes in our way, and hope that there is nothing large on our way.
Space exploration is not easy but I hope that we do it anyway.

First off we will need to fix this dark matter thing. If there is anything wrong with Newtonian equations of gravity at low accelerations (MOND, pioneer anomaly) then we will chart bad courses.

Actually google does everything thrice (not unlike the Ramans). And returns the result that reaches it first. So in effect it is even more fault tolerant than the Mainframe. And it does them at different locations not on a single Facility (as opposed to a server or a 1AAA sized Container).

You are underestimating Google.