Venture Capitalists swear by it and everyone seems to want to disrupt some industry or other.
The idea is that if you can find some new technology that breaks the mold of an old industry, then the new disrupting company will get to own that massive business or what is left of it.
Fortunes can and are made with distruption. Apple did it to the music business. Google did it to the print industry. The list of billion dollar triumphs is long.
Imagine for example someone found a way to get Gold out of sea water. Don’t laugh, Howard Hughes funded a project to do just that.
Why?
There are 8 kilos of Gold in a square miles of sea water and there are 140 million square miles of sea. That’s a lot of Gold, so lets go!!!
The trouble is, no one has found the disruptive technology for that. Dagnabit, or rather thank goodness, as a few million extra tons of gold won’t do the Gold price any good at all.
There are plenty of disruptive technologies that don’t exist that get sold on the stock market. There are the cures for cancer, the emerging technology that are always on the brink of setting some industry on fire but never do. The stock markets of the world are plagued with these hopeless pump and dumps and some run for years. However every now and then one actually does come along.
The big one of course was the internet, it was technology that had been gestating for decades and most people didn’t know why they would need such a nerdy abstract thing. Why would anyone bother with email for goodness sake? Then boom, no one could do without the internet, web etc.
Then you can think about fracking. One moment we were all going to have to eat mud and revert to barbarism because peak oil had arrived and then suddenly oil was coming out of every earthly orifice. Who would have thunked it?
Even disrupting the taxi cab trade can generate bazillions of value, or at least according to the magician financiers that can incant billion dollar valuations for explosive start ups.
Disruptive technology is where its at!
So how about a warp drive? Like in Star Srek. An engine that simply makes on directional force. Things that move don’t make one directional force to push them along, they grind against stuff and stick to Newton’s 3rd law of equal and opposite reaction.
A force engine wouldn’t bother with that, energy in, would turn into directional force and off it would go without reaction. It would be a cable less elevator. Newton said you can’t have this and while Jules Verne could come up with such a thing in his head, to have a force engine you’d have to invent it over Newton’s dead body.
This of course is possible because:
Newton is dead
Einstein kind of rained on his parade
Someone claims to have come up with a force engine called an EmDrive,
Nasa is testing the idea and is mumbling that it might just work. Let’s focus on the word MIGHT.
Some Chinese physicists are firing lasers down cables and they bend in a way that also suggests the idea MIGHT work.
This information wasn’t released on April 1st
The impossible is looking improbably and that might turn into something amazing.
The reason I’m writing this is, if this force engine were to work, every industry you invest in will be turned upside down
Inventing a time machine would be more dramatic but not a lot more. A force engine would be like inventing fire.
For starters we could all leave the planet and not for $10,000 a kilo but for cents. Space craft could move using electricity from solar panels and not by throwing stuff out the back to get a Newtonian move on, as currently is the case. We could all up sticks and leave out planet and this alone is enough to change everything even before you get flying cars zipping around, floating cities and all the SF stuff they used to airbrush onto paperbacks in the 70s.
So keep an eye on this one, because if there is a get around to Newton’s 3rd Law, then the internet is going to look like a small event and Uber about as significant as a smear of sweat on your mobile screen.
It can’t work of course, but the whole reason Nasa is bothering in the first place is, if it does, then the consequences are truly awesome for everyone.
So we should all watch what happens next to the EMdrive, because NASA saying “maybe,” if it were bad news, would be like NASA saying “maybe” a meteor is going to slam into earth in 2 years and we are all going to die.
Good news however does travel that fast, but with a EMDRIVE force engine, maybe it would.