Theworldwasweknowit

Wednesday, 28 May 2014

Every Cancer Can be Cured in Weeks explains Dr. Leonard Coldwell

Monday, 26 May 2014

Killers webbies

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/25-killer-websites-that-make-you-cleverer-2.html

Thursday, 24 April 2014

The end of FB

The End Of Facebook – FB Caught Scamming Its Users | Collective-Evolution http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/04/18/the-end-of-facebook-fb-caught-scamming-its-users/

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The End Of Facebook – FB Caught Scamming Its Users

April 18, 2014 by Joe Martino. 67 Comments. Share on Facebook Twitter I write this as our FB page with 420,000 fans only has the ability to reach a few thousand people with every post; less than 1% of the fans we worked so hard to acquire.When Facebook was first starting out years ago, it was a great tool for connecting people. Originally aimed at connecting students, Facebook was a means by which you could stay caught up with old friends and acquaintances. As it got bigger, more and more people were able to join Facebook, effectively creating a platform where people could instantly connect with one another and share information. Soon enough, communities popped up, people with like minds and interests were able to share new bits of information easily and even spread awareness about causes. Facebook became a huge tool in waking people up to various things going on across the world as people in one country could share what the media wouldn’t cover in another country. Users were able to help change the world through Facebook.Then Facebook went public. The moment any company goes public something happens, money becomes more important than it ever was. Now Facebook had to answer to its shareholders and show revenue increases each year. They needed to constantly grow. The unsustainable model that has destroyed our world in such a big way now made its way into an online tool that was waking people up to everything wrong with the world and what followed is extremely unfortunate. Facebook began limiting what users were able to see as they wanted people to pay for their posts to reach people. Most of this was done to Facebook pages, but it affects everyone.As the graph above illustrates, the more money Facebook wanted to make, the more they limited users ability to see what they liked on Facebook and the more Facebook page owners lost the ability to reach people. Cutting organic reach from 20% of your following to about 1% means that messages that matter can’t be shared through Facebook as easily. Not only that, users are constantly upset with the fact that Facebook keeps changing how their platform works and having the user experience worsen as each month goes by. Imagine signing up for a magazine that covered something you are interested in and you specifically ask to keep having it sent to you and then suddenly they only gave you access to things you don’t care about. This is the new Facebook.If that wasn’t bad enough, as Facebook pushed out their new advertising models, they promised increased Likes, reach or engagement from users should you decide to pay for it. Personally we (CE) have tried this a number of times and the results are so shockingly poor you can’t even believe they offer it as a service. We’ve dumped hundreds into Facebook’s advertising models at various points only to reach another couple of people or gain a handful more likes to our page. How could such a model be sustainable? It’s not. but it gets worse, later we found out that Facebook actually sends ‘Likes’ to fan pages that aren’t even from real accounts. Imagine paying for a customer to engage with your content, but in reality that customer is a robot and never will. So yes, your fan numbers might go up but that account will never engage or view your content. Sounds like a bit of a scam to me. Paying for something and being told you are getting it but not.Find out more about that below.Once we even made a meme about how Facebook was cutting organic reach and limiting what users could see. It was a very tasteful meme with no profanity, just information. When we tried to pay to boost this post, Facebook not only denied the advertising request but they deleted our post all together. How’s that for censorship? Facebook doesn’t even want users to know what they are doing to them.So what can we do? How can we get back to sharing important information and messages with the world? Unfortunately I don’t have that answer. Currently we sit with 420,000 fans on Facebook yet most of our posts only reach about 2000 – 5000 of them. That’s less than 1%!One option is to go to Facebook pages you like and where it says “Liked” click on it and select “Get Notifications.” This will ensure that posts from that page will have a higher chance of showing up in your news feed.When you are on that page, do your best to share as much content as possible to increase the reach of that material.Maybe it’s time we create another platform? Or in a mass way force Facebook to change it’s model? What do you think?You can like us on Google+ or join our mailing list (see sidebar) to follow us more easily as well.Want to see how backwards Facebook’s model is? Check this out. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter

About the author

Joe Martino

I created CE 4 years ago and have been heavily at it since. I love inspiring others to find joy and make changes in their lives. Hands down the only other thing I am this passionate about is baseball. Feel free to email me at joe@collective-evolution.com

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67 comments on “The End Of Facebook – FB Caught Scamming Its Users”

Pingback: Internet wie lepiej. | Filip DawidPingback: Blog | Jessica Molčan | This Whole Facebook KafuffleEricApril 22, 2014 at 5:35 pmOne person’s “scamming users” is another person’s freeing their newsfeed of clutter. Newspaper ad sales collapsed when Craigslist came along, so marketers had to adapt to new ways for trying to reach customers. That’s always how it is. Get over it. The Internet isn’t some magic place where everything is supposed to be free because it’s all made of fairy dust. the Internet is made of people, and people are the same no matter what platform they’re on. If FB works for you, yay, keep using it. If it doesn’t, go somewhere else. End of story. ReplyAndy Akins (@theandyakins)April 22, 2014 at 11:08 amYou all realize that there are a billion people on Facebook, right? Many people who have 1000+ friends and 250-500 page likes. If the newsfeed showed EVERYTHING, you would NEVER see the things you care about. It sucks that they place less priority on business, but Facebook was originally for friends to connect not businesses to advertise. You should know better than to expect a free advertising platform. You want more views? Create better content. Quality > Quantity. There are plenty of pages still doing really well. The nature of advertising anyway isn’t going to be where everyone see it. There are hundreds of billboards I drive by everyday that I never look at; no ad will ever impact 100% of its potential reach. That’s why you don’t ONLY use Facebook; you use it as part of a bigger campaign. ReplyAuntieBellumApril 23, 2014 at 12:47 amAnd that’s Facebook’s problem because why??? I liked pages because I wanted to see their posts. All of them. If it overwhelms me, that’s none of Facebook’s damn business. ReplyMark AaronApril 22, 2014 at 9:54 amthe thing that negates this is that each user can customize their feeds to suit their needs. also facebook is always tweaking their algorithm that delegates the stream. personally, I love what they’ve done with mine and how I’ve set it up. and there’s simply not going to be a site with this sophistication in a very very long time unless it’s Google Plus or Twitter. that’s the reality. ReplyPingback: The End Of Facebook – FB Caught Scamming Its Users | The Right Of The PeoplejohnApril 21, 2014 at 3:01 pmcheck out Diaspora* -an open source, distributed (not all on one companie’s private servers) social network poised to be the “Facebook killer”… what we call a “Facebook profile” should just be an extension of your email address mailbox, and should utimately be “rolled into” the next major upgrade of TCP/IP/http/email protocols (Web 3.0?) ReplySerenityApril 21, 2014 at 2:27 pmFacebook is supposed to be free for users. I am a facebook user. I also happen to be an author with a page. I’m not asking for facebook to advertise me, I would expect to have to pay to advertise through facebook. All I want is for facebook to allow ALL of the other users who have liked my page the chance to see the content I put up. It *should* work just like the newsfeed does for a user’s friends. Things go up there, you see them, maybe you miss a couple because you weren’t online that one night or whatever… that’s all cool… but facebook is limiting the percentage of people who even have a chance to see the content. I shouldn’t have to pay them to allow those who have liked my page to see my content. I should only have to pay if I want to ADVERTISE through Facebook. Like, I don’t expect the newspaper to print my ad for free, but I also expect that they won’t limit views by taking down (hiding) my printed page that I push-pinned to the free bulletin board outside. ReplybooseyheyApril 21, 2014 at 12:47 pmThe FBI should investigate the car bomb in Beirut in 1985 which killed 80 people and injured over 200 others which was reported in the NYT as being the handiwork of the CIA. “William J. Casey, the former Director of Central Intelligence, personally arranged for Saudi Arabia to sponsor a car bomb attack against a Lebanese Shiite religious leader believed to be involved in terrorism, according to a new book” (By Stephen Engelberg, “Casey Reported Behind ’85 Lebanon Bombing”, New York Times, September 27, 1987).The CIA should investigate the FBI’s role in most domestic terrorist plots in the USA. “In his new book, “The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism,” Aaronson argues that the U.S. government is responsible for “hatching and financing more terrorist plots in the United States than any other group.”"If there’s any better example of terrorism in the world today then it’s the FBI, the CIA, the US military-industrial-complex, and the US Federal Government. ReplyPingback: The END OF FACEBOOK – FB Caught Scamming Its Users | Revere Radio NetworkDanApril 21, 2014 at 12:37 pmWE have the exactly the same issue with one of clients holiday rentals business, we spent good time and money growing our fan base to 3,000,000 over 6 years, and now are pages posts get 100s to at the very most 3000 ish, views.As a web agency we used to encourage businesses to create FB pages, but to be honest depending on the type of business you have, you rarely get anything from it, and with these recent changes Facebook has become a waste of time and money, we have now moved everything to Google Plus and wont be going back.Facebook is dead for us. and anyone with half a brain should move away as well, although I am not saying Google are that great either, although compared with FB, I know who I would rather get in to bed with. ReplyBillApril 21, 2014 at 12:19 pmwah wah wah… Facebook is pay to play, stop crying, if you aren’t making money from it then your audience targeting is completely wrong… I know this because my clients make sales and money daily from Facebook ads… Go back to the drawing board and stop complaining…. Replybwatts4April 21, 2014 at 12:40 pmwhich page do you run Bill? ReplyDanApril 22, 2014 at 12:06 pmWhatever Bill, I assume you work for FB, otherwise you would tell us which page you do sooooo well from lmao ReplyPingback: The End Of Facebook – FB Caught Scamming Its Users | Disclosure News OnlineAdrian JohanssonApril 21, 2014 at 7:51 amFacebook is useless today.I’m a photographer and the best Photo-Meet of the year fell apart because it was organized on facebook and people just didn’t get informed about it in time.So yea I’m looking for alternatives. ReplyTracy W.April 21, 2014 at 7:18 amI manage a small chiropractic office. We had a month long health related boot camp in January of this year. When I noticed that posts were not being seen, we paid to boost the event invitation. We received a grand total of 5 new LIKES to our page and 20 event attendees that never showed up. As I looked through pages of the “attendees”, I notice they didn’t seem real. Their only FB interaction was nothing but liking pages, and they never post pictures or comments. This was the case for all 20 fake attendees. Are these people that get paid to LIKE pages and respond to ads? I think they are on Facebook’s payroll. ReplyLafiApril 21, 2014 at 5:39 am“but it gets worse, later we found out that Facebook actually sends ‘Likes’ to fan pages that aren’t even from real accounts.”Can you explain how you found out? ReplyKris WilkinsApril 22, 2014 at 5:18 amhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjagHi Lafi.. people have been doing tests.. check out the link from Veritasium.. it’s good he explains what actually happens. ReplyavihackzApril 21, 2014 at 3:45 amnyc one Replynickhood67April 20, 2014 at 10:30 pmBut there ARE other platforms. Platforms that emerged out of the Occupy Movement such as http://www.worldtruth.org andhttp://www.zurker.com(which is currently suspended for some suspiscious reason) ReplyCarrie osburnApril 20, 2014 at 8:10 pmI don’t know if it will do anybody any good but I stayed this if anyone is interested.http://www.change.org/petitions/facebook-release-the-organic-views-reach ReplyAmaan “El Tuerto” AliApril 20, 2014 at 6:32 pmSame here faceboook destroyed my 300k + page, it was a non profit fan page. now im using Google it’s way better here. ReplyHeather MarieApril 20, 2014 at 2:39 pmShared! ReplyChrisApril 20, 2014 at 11:57 amI do not blame them for charging in for reach. Why should they work hard to not make astronomical profits like any other big company in this country. ReplyEricApril 20, 2014 at 10:13 amI closed my FB account years ago. It’s a total scam. I’m glad you are waking up to this. Replybradmiller_April 20, 2014 at 10:12 amIt’s a pay to play space. No surprise that this was coming. Don’t be surprised if other social media networks such as Twitter follow suit in the near future. With recent M&A, Facebook seems to be a couple steps ahead of every other social media platform and even a step ahead of tech giants likeGoogle, Microsoft, etc. Unfortunately for you, it does not seem FB is going anywhere anytime soon. ReplyPingback: The End Of Facebook – FB Caught Scamming Its Users | Random Candidate Older Comments

Tuesday, 22 April 2014

Banking

US Intelligence and the Fate of the Private Pre-War International Banking System | Global Research

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-intelligence-and-the-fate-of-the-private-pre-war-international-banking-system/5378602

Tuesday, 8 April 2014

http://www.bornagainpagan.com/photos/022-agnostic-ho

http://www.bornagainpagan.com/photos/022-agnostic-holidays.html
#atheist #atheism #godless

Thursday, 27 March 2014

Economic scam

The Economic Scam of the Century

by MIKE WHITNEYThe leaders of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Tim Johnson (D., S.D.) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R., Idaho), released a draft bill on Sunday that would provide explicit government guarantees on mortgage-backed securities (MBS) generated by privately-owned banks and financial institutions. The gigantic giveaway to Wall Street would put US taxpayers on the hook for 90 percent of the losses on toxic MBS the likes of which crashed the financial system in 2008 plunging the economy into the deepest slump since the Great Depression. Proponents of the bill say that new rules by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) –which set standards for a “qualified mortgage” (QM)– assure that borrowers will be able to repay their loans thus reducing the chances of a similar meltdown in the future. However, those QE rules were largely shaped by lobbyists and attorneys from the banking industry who eviscerated strict underwriting requirements– like high FICO scores and 20 percent down payments– in order to lend freely to borrowers who may be less able to repay their loans. Additionally, a particularly lethal clause has been inserted into the bill that would provide blanket coverage for all MBS (whether they met the CFPB’s QE standard or not) in the event of another financial crisis. Here’s the paragraph:“Sec.305. Authority to protect taxpayers in unusual and exigent market conditions….If the Corporation, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, determine that unusual and exigent circumstances threaten mortgage credit availability within the U.S. housing market, FMIC may provide insurance on covered securities that do not meet the requirements under section 302 including those for first loss position of private market holders.” (“Freddie And Fannie Reform – The Monster Has Arrived”, Zero Hedge)In other words, if the bill passes, US taxpayers will be responsible for any and all bailouts deemed necessary by the regulators mentioned above. And, since all of those regulators are in Wall Street’s hip-pocket, there’s no question what they’ll do when the time comes. They’ll bailout they’re fatcat buddies and dump the losses on John Q. Public.If you can’t believe what you are reading or if you think that the system is so thoroughly corrupt it can’t be fixed; you’re not alone. This latest outrage just confirms that the Congress, the executive and all the chief regulators are mere marionettes performing whatever task is asked of them by their Wall Street paymasters.The stated goal of the Johnson-Crapo bill is to “overhaul” mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so that “private capital can play the central role in home finance.” (That’s how Barack Obama summed it up.) Of course, that’s not really the purpose at all. The real objective is to hand over the profit-generating mechanism to the private banks (Fannie and Freddie have been raking in the dough for the last three years) while the red ink is passed on to the public. That’s what’s really going on.According to the Wall Street Journal, the bill will“construct an elaborate new platform by which a number of private-sector entities, together with a privately held but federally regulated utility, would replace key roles long played by Fannie and Freddie….”“The legislation replaces the mortgage-finance giants with a new system in which the government would continue to play a potentially significant role insuring U.S. home loans.” (“Plan for Mortgage Giants Takes Shape”, Wall Street Journal) “Significant role”? What significant role? (Here’s where it gets interesting.)The WSJ:“The Senate bill would repurpose the firms’ existing regulator as a new “Federal Mortgage Insurance Corp.” and charge the agency with approving new firms to pool loans into securities. Those firms could then purchase federal insurance to guarantee payments to investors in those bonds. The FMIC would insure mortgage bonds much the way the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. provides bank-deposit insurance.”Unbelievable. So they want to turn F and F into an insurance company that backs up the garbage mortgages created by the same banks that just ripped us all off for trillions of dollars on the same freaking swindle?You can’t be serious?More from the WSJ: “Mortgage guarantors would be required to maintain a 10% capital buffer against losses and to have that capital extinguished before the federal insurance would be triggered.”10 percent? What the hell difference does 10 percent make; that’s a drop in the bucket. If the banks are going to issue mortgages to people who can’t repay the debt, then they need to cover the damn losses themselves, otherwise they shouldn’t be in the banking biz to begin with, right?This is such an outrageous, in-your-face ripoff, it shouldn’t even require a response. These jokers should be laughed out of the senate. All the same, the bill is moving forward, and President Twoface has thrown his weigh behind it. Is there sort of illicit, under-the-table, villainous activity this man won’t support?Not when it comes to his big bank buddies, there isn’t. Now check out this clip from an article by economist Dean Baker. Baker refers to the Corker-Warner bill, but the Crapo-Johnson fiasco is roughly the same deal. Here’s Baker:“The Corker-Warner bill does much more than just eliminate Fannie and Freddie. In their place, it would establish a system whereby private financial institutions could issue mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that carry a government guarantee. In the event that a large number of mortgages in the MBS went bad, the investors would be on the hook for losses up to 10 percent of its value, after that point the government gets the tab.If you think that sounds like a reasonable system, then you must not have been around during the housing crash and ensuing financial crisis. At the peak of the crisis in 2008-2009 the worst subprime MBS were selling at 30-40 cents on the dollar. This means the government would have been picking up a large tab under the Corker-Warner system, even if investors had been forced to eat a loss equal to 10 percent of the MBS price.The pre-crisis financial structure gave banks an enormous incentive to package low quality and even fraudulent mortgages into MBS. The system laid out in the Corker-Warner bill would make these incentives even larger. The biggest difference is that now the banks can tell investors that their MBS come with a government guarantee, so that they most they stand to lose is 10 percent of the purchase price.” (“The disastrous idea for privatizing Fannie and Freddie”, Dean Baker, Al Jazeera)Just ponder that last part for a minute: “The bill would make these incentives even larger.”Do you really think we should create bigger incentives for these dirtbags to rip us off? Does that make sense to you? Here’s more from Baker:“The changes in financial regulation are also unlikely to provide much protection. In the immediate wake of the crisis there were demands securitizers keep a substantial stake in the mortgages they put into their pools, to ensure that they had an incentive to only securitize good mortgages. Some reformers were demanding as much as a 20 percent stake in every mortgage.Over the course of the debate on the Dodd-Frank bill and subsequent rules writing this stake got ever smaller. Instead of being 20 percent, it was decided that securitizers only had to keep a 5 percent stake. And for mortgages meeting certain standards they wouldn’t have to keep any stake at all.Originally only mortgages in which the homeowner had a down payment of 20 percent or more passed this good mortgage standard. That cutoff got lowered to 10 percent and then was lowered further to 5 percent. Even though mortgages with just 5 percent down are four times as likely to default as mortgages with 20 percent or more down, securitizers will not be required to keep any stake in them when they put them into a MBS.”Hold on there, Dean. You mean Dodd Frank didn’t ”put things right”? What the heck? I thought that “tough new regulations” assured us that the banks wouldn’t blow up the system again in five years or so. Was that all baloney?Yep, sure was. 100% baloney. Once the banks unleashed their army of attorneys and lobbyists on Capital Hill, new regulations didn’t stand a chance. They turned Dodd Frank into mincemeat and now we’re back to square one.And don’t expect the ratings agencies to help out either because they’re in the same shape they were before the crash. No changes at all. They still get paid by the guys who issue the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) which is about the same as if you paid the salary of the guy who grades your midterm exam. Do you think that might cloud his judgment a bit? You’re damn right, it would; just like paying the ratings agencies guarantees you’ll get the rating you want. The whole system sucks.And as far as the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, well, you guessed it. The banks played a role in drafting the new “Qualified Mortgage” standard too, which is really no standard at all, since no self-respecting lender would ever use the same criteria for issuing a loan or mortgage. For example, no banker is going to say, “Heck, Josh, we don’t need your credit scores. We don’t need a down-payment. We’re all friends here, right? So, how much do you need for that mortgage old buddy, $300,000, $400,000, $500,000. You name it. The sky’s the limit.”No down payment? No credit scores? And they have the audacity to call this a qualified mortgage?Qualified for what? Qualified for sticking it to the taxpayers? The real purpose of the qualified mortgage is to protect the banks from their own shifty deals. That’s what it’s all about. It provides them with “safe harbor” in the event that the borrower defaults. What does that mean?It means that the government can’t get its money back if the loan blows up. The qualified mortgage actually protects the banks, not the consumer. That’s why it’s such a farce, just like Dodd Frank is a farce. Nothing has changed. Nothing. In fact, it’s gotten worse. Now we’re on the hook for whatever losses the banks run up peddling mortgage credit to anyone who can fog a mirror.We’ll leave the last word for Dean Baker, since he seems like the only guy in America who has figured out what the hell is going on:“In short, the Corker-Warner plan to privatize Fannie and Freddie is essentially a proposal to reinstitute the structure of incentives that gave us the housing bubble and the financial crisis, but this time with the added fuel of an explicit government guarantee on the subprime MBS. If that doesn’t sound like a great idea to you then you haven’t spent enough time around powerful people in Washington.”The Johnson-Crapo bill doesn’t have anything to do with “winding down” Fannie and Freddie or “overhauling” the mortgage finance industry. It’s a bald-face ripoff engineered by two chiseling senators who are putting the country at risk to beef up Wall Street’s bottom line.It’s the scam of the century.MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be

The Economic Scam of the Century » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/26/the-economic-scam-of-the-century/

Saturday, 22 March 2014

Warp drive

http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive
*How NASA might build its very first warp drive*
George Dvorsky

Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein's law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work.

The above image of a Vulcan command ship features a warp engine similar to an Alcubierre Drive. Image courtesy CBS.

The Alcubierre Drive

The idea came to White while he was considering a rather remarkable equation formulated by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. In his 1994 paper titled, "The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity," Alcubierre suggested a mechanism by which space-time could be "warped" both in front of and behind a spacecraft.

Michio Kaku dubbed Alcubierre's notion a "passport to the universe." It takes advantage of a quirk in the cosmological code that allows for the expansion and contraction of space-time, and could allow for hyper-fast travel between interstellar destinations. Essentially, the empty space behind a starship would be made to expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction — passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration.

White speculates that such a drive could result in "speeds" that could take a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks — even though the system is 4.3 light-years away.

In terms of the engine's mechanics, a spheroid object would be placed between two regions of space-time (one expanding and one contracting). A "warp bubble" would then be generated that moves space-time around the object, effectively repositioning it — the end result being faster-than-light travel without the spheroid (or spacecraft) having to move with respect to its local frame of reference.

"Remember, nothing locally exceeds the speed of light, but space can expand and contract at any speed," White told io9. "However, space-time is really stiff, so to create the expansion and contraction effect in a useful manner in order for us to reach interstellar destinations in reasonable time periods would require a lot of energy."

And indeed, early assessments published in the ensuing scientific literature suggested horrific amounts of energy — basically equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter (what is 1.9 × 1027 kilograms or 317 Earth masses). As a result, the idea was brushed aside as being far too impractical. Even though nature allowed for a warp drive, it looked like we would never be able to build one ourselves.

"However," said White, "based on the analysis I did the last 18 months, there may be hope." The key, says White, may be in altering the geometry of the warp drive itself.

A new design

In October of last year, White was preparing for a talk he was to give for the kickoff to the 100 Year Starship project in Orlando, Florida. As he was pulling together his overview on space warp, he performed a sensitivity analysis for the field equations, more out of curiosity than anything else.

"My early results suggested I had discovered something that was in the math all along," he recalled. "I suddenly realized that if you made the thickness of the negative vacuum energy ring larger — like shifting from a belt shape to a donut shape — and oscillate the warp bubble, you can greatly reduce the energy required — perhaps making the idea plausible." White had adjusted the shape of Alcubierre's ring which surrounded the spheroid from something that was a flat halo to something that was thicker and curvier.

He presented the results of his Alcubierre Drive rethink a year later at the 100 Year Starship conference in Atlanta where he highlighted his new optimization approaches — a new design that could significantly reduce the amount of exotic matter required. And in fact, White says that the warp drive could be powered by a mass that's even less than that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

That's a significant change in calculations to say the least. The reduction in mass from a Jupiter-sized planet to an object that weighs a mere 1,600 pounds has completely reset White's sense of plausibility — and NASA's.

Hitting the lab

Theoretical plausibility is all fine and well, of course. What White needs now is a real-world proof-of-concept. So he's hit the lab and begun work on actual experiments.

"We're utilizing a modified Michelson-Morley interferometer — that allows us to measure microscopic perturbations in space time," he said. "In our case, we're attempting to make one of the legs of the interferometer appear to be a different length when we energize our test devices." White and his colleagues are trying to simulate the tweaked Alcubierre drive in miniature by using lasers to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million.

Of course, the interferometer isn't something that NASA would bolt onto a spaceship. Rather, it's part of a larger scientific pursuit.

"Our initial test device is implementing a ring of large potential energy — what we observe as blue shifted relative to the lab frame — by utilizing a ring of ceramic capacitors that are charged to tens of thousands of volts," he told us. "We will increase the fidelity of our test devices and continue to enhance the sensitivity of the warp field interferometer — eventually using devices to directly generate negative vacuum energy."

He points out that Casimir cavities, physical forces that arise from a quantized field, may represent a viable approach.

And it's through these experiments, hopes White, that NASA can go from the theoretical to the practical.

Waiting for that "Chicago Pile" moment

Given just how fantastic this all appears, we asked White if he truly thinks a warp-generating spacecraft might someday be constructed.

"Mathematically, the field equations predict that this is possible, but it remains to be seen if we could ever reduce this to practice."

What White is waiting for is existence of proof — what he's calling a "Chicago Pile" moment — a reference to a great practical example.

"In late 1942, humanity activated the first nuclear reactor in Chicago generating a whopping half Watt — not enough to power a light bulb," he said. "However, just under one year later, we activated a ~4MW reactor which is enough to power a small town. Existence proof is important."

His cautious approach notwithstanding, White did admit that a real-world warp drive could create some fascinating possibilities for space travel — and would certainly reset our sense of the vastness of the cosmos.

"This loophole in general relativity would allow us to go places really fast as measured by both Earth observers, and observers on the ship — trips measured in weeks or months as opposed to decades and centuries," he said.

But for now, pursuit of this idea is very much in science mode. "I'm not ready to discuss much beyond the math and very controlled modest approaches in the lab," he said.

Which makes complete sense to us, as well. But thanks to these preliminary efforts, White has already done much to instill a renewed sense of hope and excitement over the possibilities. Faster-than-light travel may await us yet.

Top image: CBS Studios Inc. Spearpoint, zamandayolculuk.com, Harold White, Flickriver.1140 replies |