Saw the pics Doc. They're calling it the IXS Enterprise. Not a bad looking ship. Wouldn't mind taking the trip although I doubt I'll be here for that one.. Two weeks to the Centauri system...cool. 

You just KNOW they WILL succeed.....mere minutes/hours/days/years.....

....after you're dead.

lol.  the way these concepts are being presented to the public in and of themselves lack genuineness.  im no astrophysicist, but ive studied A LOT of physics, and after spending just one hour reading through the fine print ive found so many holes in this its not funny.  its all bs.  the community of folks on the planet that could actually contribute to a serious discussion on these matters is so small, that this is definitely not it (unfortunately).  lets all throw more of our money, time, and energy at these guys though, and disregard the fact that 60% of this planet still lacks clean drinking water.  what a waste.  lol.  sorry for being the party pooper, flame away.

Clean drinking water for everyone is a matter of culture, not technology.  Throwing money at the problem is something the UN already does, it accomplishes far less than NASA is likely to on this.

I'd defend NASA's budget usage sometime after hell froze over, but pissing away money on social issues without actually understanding the cause is something society already does in far greater volume than their paltry budget.

And if you take into consideration that space technology has already reformed so many things in your everyday life, what if one day it will solve clean water problem with some cool tech/method they find out accidentally.

Anyway, this ship looks so awesome, looking at it makes me feel like we are already in the age where we can reach the stars

Agreed.

And this is absolutely awesome research. I actually watched the video, where Sonny White explains their interferometer tests and results, even though i understood shit. Apparently they are trying to generate warp-bubble and detect it, thus prove its existence, therefore confirm the validity of the concept, right? But I still dont understand how exactly are they generating the bubble itself in the first place? Dont they need some kind of negative or exotic energy to do that? And that actually exist? How do you create one? 

clean drinking water is a matter of education and technology distribution, not culture (such a general statement that im not sure what you mean, politics?).  are you really suggesting that nasa has contributed more to the welfare of the world than the un?  short story..  i have a good friend who worked very high up in the un most of his life.  one day they got an appeal by a small african country for a few billion dollars to fund the development of hospitals and vaccinations because they were suffering from mass epidemics.  instead of just funneling the appeal to the banks, my buddy put together a small team of people to actually go to this country and determine the cause of these epidemics.  turns out most people were still just shitting on the side of the road, and insects were carrying diseases in mass.  so my buddy and his team traveled from town to town, teaching people how to dig holes in the ground that turned at an angle at the bottom so that insects couldnt find their way out.  only once every person in a town had demonstrated that they understood this concept would they then be given a toilet seat to place on top.  these toilet seats were made from corn, grown in this very same country.  needless to say, billions of dollars were not needed, and he estimates that by now millions of lives have been saved.

what percentage of the eagleworks budget would it take to distribute lifesaver bottles around the globe?

yes

not yet, at least in the volumes required.

Nope...not disregarded at all. Here:

http://nocamels.com/?s=water+purification

I'm sure helpful research occurs elsewhere as well...

I feel like if you pulled apart everything the NASA does, most of it wouldn't make sense to me. I do, however, think I'm too clever to fall for the obvious "here's a pretty spaceship, give us money" ploy.

cool link, thank you.  dont miss the lifesaver bottles link in my previous post (this one links to a ted video).

=]

Exactly.

This is just a version of an Alcubierre drive:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

Now, the Gizmodo article was very misleading.  There were A LOT of problems besides just the energy problem being discussed here.  For example, there was also the exotic matter issue that you correctly bring up.

There are fairly strong theorems which indicate that in order to create a warp bubble, you need exotic matter.  As defined here, exotic matter is matter which violates laws of physics (essentially negative mass in this case).  Thats a bit of a problem.

Now you can do some handwaving and hope that quantum mechanics lets you work around this.  After all, you can play some games with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and get local areas with "negative" energy.  But then you are combining quantum mechanics and general relativity, and we don't have a theory of physics which successfully does that.

Thats not to say that any of this is a waste of time, of course.  Just that I wouldn't exactly get my hopes up.  The chance of any kind of payoff is extremely low since you would need some kind of new physics for this to work.

To answer the question of how this experiment is trying to get around the exotic energy requirement:

There are a few approaches you can take.  The most likely thing to do is to create negative pressure.  For example, something like the Casimir effect might do the trick.  I don't think that you could really extract such energy though...

Reading the author's paper, it looks like they are trying to use dark energy.  Dark energy is essentially a negative pressure term in the expansion of the universe.  They are trying to use this to create the warp bubble.  Yeah...thats pretty speculative on their part.

(I don't think that dark energy would ever work for spaceship since its energy density is so low, but there are about a billion hurdles before that would be an issue)

I'm sure glad we didn't fall for that penicillin, round earth, airplane, telephone, television, computers and walking on the moon nonsense either.

In my opinion, humans will never leave this planet. Not as the beings we are familiar with anyway.  Humanity will spread across the universe but only once we divorce ourselves from our meat.

When ship meat to Mars, for instance, if I can send robotic drones to Mars and have hookups here on Earth that let me experience and manipulate Mars as if I was there? 

Or, in the unlikely event we can't solve the communication lag (17 minutes for a signal to get to Mars) we just digitize our consciousness and move it to different locations.  

It seems more likely we'll do that than come up with a magic FTL system.  Heck, I'd put more stock in quantum entanglement or some other remote matter manipulation technology coming up.

I can't imagine humans in a century running around in the flesh still.

Hard for me to imagine folks having sat in Europe and creating America with robots/drones that way...while some lessons might be learned virtually, far more will be learned from actual physical presence much like the difference between learning music theory from a book and playing in an orchestra.