This recent presentation from Kepler Airospace claims that Einstein was on the right track and a goes even further, stating that gravity can be manipulated through EM. I've graduated in Physics but not quite sure what to make of it.
I'm cheering them on, but I'm not confident that the technology works, based on the people involved. I don't think the new physics underlying this work are published in a peer-reviewed physics journal.
Given how easy it seems to reproduce, someone had better explain this effect if it's not what is claimed there...
PS: this looks like anyone could reproduce or refute it in their basement for a few hundred dollars given all the details in the slides. I'm hoping some amateurs step in.
It all seems to suffer from some of the issues the EM Drive saw: the proposed effect is tiny and very, very difficult to tease apart from environmental and system noise. I hope I'm wrong.
If all major governments keep it secret, the conclusion would be that the phenomenon wants it that way. The US wouldn't be in charge. But apparently something changed.
There may not be much of a difference left then between machines and biologicals. Generations would alternate like a jellyfish does between polyp and medusa. No need for generation ships.
Another point I like to make is that the craft we observe, assuming we do, definitely do not need to be the actual interstellar craft, why would they be. We wouldn’t do
it like that, why would they. Instead they could be local probes dispatched from another craft, or even local probes manufactured by the master probe.
Lastly, let’s assume we see mach 50
speeds on the craft, that’s still not a significant fraction of the speed of light.
In the country I work it goes like this: the employers are members of an IT association, once a year each employer sends over the anonymous salaries for each job title. The associations aggregates them and sends back the distribution, which HR then uses as a reference. Similar result, but no direct collaboration between employers needed. You can even buy the report for each position as an employee for a fair price.
This sounds similar to what RealPage does in the U.S. with apartment rents: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r.... After the Propublica story came out, the U.S. Department of Justice started investigating it as essentially collusion-via-3rd-party.
The system survived the partitions, there was no widespread blackout.
Further, the system is not organized by the EU, but the ENTSO-E and contains e.g. countries from North Afrika.
There was no blackout _yet_, but it was very close.
According to the German Bundesnetzagentur (the equivalent of the FTC/EIA), the number of times where they have to intervene with the grid due to grid instability is constantly rising due to Germany shutting down nuclear and coal plants.
> There was no blackout _yet_, but it was very close.
Where do you get that from? None of the sources reported a close blackout, as far as I understood it there was a lot of emergency capacity left. We weren't even in the emergency frequency range, as the other commenter pointed out.
Even the linked article just states that those interventions got more often after shutting down coal+nuclear, but it's not critical, it _only_ costs money to compensate the operators: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redispatch_(Stromnetz)
It's probably much less money than all the nuclear subsidies.
Nuclear power went from 20GW to 10GW.
Hard coal went from 28GW to 22GW.
Ok, but gas went up from 23GW to 29GW. Brown coal stayed the same.
Renewables went up by by 50GW for PV and 50GW for wind. Consider that wind often hits a 50% capacity factor. That is 25GW in additional power just from wind alone.
Some of those plants may not be running continuously but they are still useful for emergency responses.
It is a choice, spend a fortune on nuclear power that nobody wants in their own backyard, or deal with a less stable grid due to solar and wind energy.
It's perfectly possible to have a stable grid even with solar and wind.
The problem is that neither nuclear nor coal power stations are load following and "base load" has lowered over the years (industry has moved to Asia, devices became more efficient, etc.).
Stand-by power (like natural gas powered generators) hasn't been built up the way the way it should have been. Same goes for smart grid technologies and buffer storage; not to mention the maniacs (especially in South Germany) who basically protest everything - from nuclear power, to wind power, to required infrastructure like north-to-south high-voltage transmission lines.
It's way too oversimplified to reduce the issue to just wind and solar.
