Ask yourself these questions then you might be able to formulate an idea of which way you want to go with this idea.

Bryan

Now, here's a cool power source:

First, open a wormhole and keep it open permanently by inserting a tube made of exotic matter. (This is simple enough if you're already using wormholes for interstellar and time travel.)

Drag one end (A) of the wormhole and immerse it facing up in a water tank beneath a waterwheel. Drag the other end (B) of the wormhole and place it facing down above the waterwheel.

Since the water pressure at A will be greater than the air pressure at B, water will flow from A to B, exiting above the waterwheel, thus causing it to spin. Attach a dynamo to the waterwheel to produce electrical power.

Of course, you will lose some water to evaporation, but essentially it's perpetual motion.

In fact, you could take it even further. Before setting up the waterwheel, take wormhole end B, accelerate it to a large fraction of the speed of light, and then bring it back. It is now in the past relative to wormhole end A.

Place A in an empty water tank under a waterwheel. Place B above the waterwheel. Since B is in the past relative to A, the water that comes out of it will be water that falls into A in the future.

Now, if water does end up in A, it will show up in the past at B. And if water shows up in the past at B, it will fall, turn the waterwheel, and then end up at A. And, as I've already said, if water ends up at A it will show up in the past at B.

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So if you're lucky, the water will just start pouring out of B, and you won't have to bother adding any water yourself.

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I like the gravity idea and it seems to me it might work, but not as the only source of power. I think you would have to power up the ship by some other means and then once you get going use gravity to maintain speed. Consider: in order to use the gravity from your destination to "pull you in" you would have to be far enough away from where you left from (and anything else in the area) that the gravitational force between you and your destination would dominate. Or....like tidal power.

Oh, this is cool! So, if you have a large space station and it is spinning, as it passes by planets and stars you can use the oscillating force to generate some kind of power - just like the moon creates tides on the earth and in some places, like in France and Nova Scotia, they have tidal power plants. Ok, this will work. But, I think it would have to be on a large scale, hmmmm, have to think about this. Great idea djvdakota!

However, as for being simple and plentiful in the universe? Only if one can assume that the universe is peppered with many many planets that have massive amounts of carbon based plants that have been pressed into coal over millions of years. I admit, it could be true. I certainly don't know!

I do agree that having a culture change from a "better" form of energy back to coal or oil is a good way of showing a digression.

edit: Regression, regression, I mean.

As for coal and oil, we all need to remember where these resources come from. Living matter, oil and coal originally were plants and animal, well at least plants. So if you go to a planet that never had plants and animals, coal and oil are not going to be available. Also coal and oil do tend to take a long time to form, a newer planet will not have coal or oil in it's infancy stage.

If you are not sure what would power your space ships, then just come up with a fancy tech sounding word, and never explain it. This trick has worked for many authors over the years, it can work for us as well. I just finished a book a few weeks ago that used a power source that was never explained once. It was a self renewing device that provided large amounts of energy. Besides a minor bit of curiosity, I wasn't concerned that no one gave me a detailed description of how it worked.

Another good idea for anyone who writes sci fi, pay attention to the science web sites. Look at the new discoveries and the potential for those discoveries. A little imagination can turn those possibilities into some incredible items to be used in stories. I would also suggest reading Einstein's theories, or at least and explanation of them. If you spend small amounts of time keeping up with what we are doing right now with science, you will find the amount of research you need to do will be much lighter.

http://www.infinite-energy.com/
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/coldfusion.html

We'd probably start having wars over water instead of oil for our fuel needs if this came true. Or rather, who "owns" the water. Unless we came up with a spectacular way of storing all the energy that can be produced.

Not necessarily. There are some theories that petroleum is actually abiotic in nature (i.e., it's not the result of decayed piological matter, but rather is created deap in the earth by non-biological processes.) See "Alternative Theories" on theis page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Used_oil

You are absolutely right about the water ownership issue. We can see a shadow of it today in the use of natural gas to power cars. If such became universal reality the price of natural gas would become so high we wouldn't be able afford the gas needed to heat our homes and water.

And I really like the idea of a portable personal power source. Kind of like the technology of portable personal telephones was thirty years ago. Did you even see the correlations in your comment about them--the comparisons between your tiny power source and cel phones? The variety of sizes and colors. Even power source kiosks in the malls--Verizon Power Plugs!

Thanks, djvdakota! Glad to hear the brain juices are flowing. No, I didn't even think about the parallel to cell phones! I can just imagine it, everything suddenly becomes "Power". Power belts, Power neclaces, Power shoes. And can you imagine all the kitchy kinds of Personal Power Kiosks "perfect for your home or business"? Ack! Commercialism.

Have you read OSC's Character and Viewpoint? If you haven't, DO IT!

It would be interesting if we moved to Natural Gas instead of Oil. It would definatly be a different world. Since Russia has about 80% of the world's Nat Gas, and is rather rare in the middle east.

I think if Cold Fusion was turned plausible the Oil Barrons would have a hand in it. In fact they should be pushing for it they're just lazy.

I love the perpetual motion idea, but I think there would have to be Water inserted at some point. But then if you had a machine that could generate water out of nowhere, energy would be a minor concern, you could rule the universe. First you get the water then you get the power.

Can you just imagine having a war with Tesla Death Rays?

The thing is, you need very little in the way of infrastructure to be able to use oil as a fuel source. Waterwheels and such may have even lower prerequisite requirments, but good sites for hydro are quite limited (and do have a substantial environmental impact). Anyone here ever cook over a log fire? I have, and I've used 'em to keep warm at night too. That's a power source older than waterwheels, even.

How about muscle power fueled by food? I know darn well that most of you still use that as a practical power source. That's even more primative than burning logs.

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First, open a wormhole and keep it open permanently by inserting a tube made of exotic matter. (This is simple enough if you're already using wormholes for interstellar and time travel.)

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Drag one end (A) of the wormhole and immerse it facing up in a water tank beneath a waterwheel. Drag the other end (B) of the wormhole and place it facing down above the waterwheel.

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And I'm not going to get into your paradox, except to say that it involves a non-consistent solution, and so far physics has determined that you can't force a non-consistent solution by using a wormhole. Also, as above, you can't beat a gravitational gradient just by using a wormhole.

I think a better thing would be to just take a regular black hole on the threshhold and figure out a way to collect the Hawking radiation. 100% matter to energy conversion, small package, easy refills with any sort of matter.

Fusion is also a good one. After all, if you have a containment failure, you just fry your generator, you don't let loose something that's going to eat the whole damn planet. That seems a lot safer, somehow.

One idea that I find particularly interesting is based on the fact that at the molecular level, ye olde laws of thermodynamics break down a bit. So you could theoretically create a thermo-electric molecule that would simply absorb heat and turn it into electricity. Presto! Tiny batteries that run off your body heat.

Water...there's quite a bit of it. Hydrogen is abundant throughout the known universe, and you can create oxygen easily enough through sustained fusion. We can already do it by sustained neutron bombardment.

But again, all these more advanced technologies require lots of infrastructure. If I'm out in the boonies and I want to have extra heat, I chop up some logs for a fire. If abiotic geological hydrocarbons are available locally, then I'll burn that (maybe...depends, actually). If I'm building a simple mechanical power source and I don't have any plutonium handy (and that stuff is kinda hard to get sometimes), I'll use petrol for a fuel source, right?

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but i doubt it could be 'collected' in a bucket like water.

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You know, years ago, no one thought that you could stop light. Now they can, and better yet it has some side effects that can create a communication system that can determine if someone has interfered with it along the way. Give them some time and they will have a unbreakable encryption system, well at least for a while.

I just wanted to point out that the only thing that is impossible is the things we haven't learned how to manipulate yet. I would have to do a bit of research, but I thought Einstein said gravity was an actual particle, or a form of energy. (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). So could we one day collect and use it...maybe.

As for anti-matter, it isn't impossible either. I can understand not wanting to use it because of it's star trek misuse. But as long as you stay away from warp drives, anti-matter could be a viable energy source. As long as it is contained and used in a controlled manner, it would provide massive amounts of energy.

Just a few thoughts.

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Gravity is not a form of energy, it's a field that effects the energy of things in it. It can be used as an energy source in a one-way sort of process. The obvious example is to drop something and have it accelerate. It's one-way because, once it's down, you need to supply energy to get it back up. A more science-fictional use is to lower some mass into a black hole by means of a pulley driving some machinery. The theoretical effectiveness of this technique would equal that of anti-matter (which is a lot more than it's made out to be in Star Trek, except that it wouldn't give you warp drive no matter what). Another use for gravity is to create an artificial gravitational field, and use that to propel your ship. This could allow you to go faster than the speed of light (with respect to the outside universe, not with respect to the space around you).

As to the graviton (not "gravitron") approach--that is a lot more complicated, and no one understands it, except me. What the physicists think they know is that the gravitational field is made of "virtual" gravitons. This means they don't have any energy, and can't be detected as waves or particles. In order for a graviton to become "real," a mass has to accelerate. This produces what is officially called a gravity wave. Like any quantum entity, it also has particle properties. Actually, most gravity waves are each made of multiple gravitons (just like most light emissions contain more than one photon). If you don't understand this, don't worry, it doesn't make sense. This is just what they think. Also, before you use anti-matter as an energy source, consider that it would be more efficient to directly use the energy of whatever you used to produce the anti-matter in the first place.

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[antimatter] wouldn't give you warp drive no matter what

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I understand that a man called Alcubierre worked out something approximating a warp drive, but it required matter with negative mass. Antimatter has the usual positive mass, I believe.

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If you don't understand this, don't worry, it doesn't make sense

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The actual process that we use to create anti-protons and positrons currently uses more energy than you could get from the anti-particle annihilation--but this is not a theoretical barrier. In the actual process we use, most of the energy is simply wasted, it doesn't help with the conversion at all. The amount of energy directly absorbed by the particle being converted is very small compared to its annihilation energy.

So if you had a more efficient means of converting matter to antimatter, it would be entirely practical to derive energy from an antimatter reaction. In a sense, it is just like fusion. The theoretical initiation energy is far less than the strong force energy released by the reaction (which is why H-bombs work at all). But in a practical sense, controlling that initiation short of just slapping a liter of heavy water with a small fission bomb isn't very easy.

It is a problem of scale. It is easy enough to deliver the initiation energy for a few fractions of a gram of deuterium/tritium and get out more than you put in. But to deliver the energy for micrograms at a time is rather more tricky.

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ie its cheaper to get out of the ground, provides more energy, but is harder on the environment than oil... if such a thing could exist

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I'm still confused by particle-wave duality

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Actually, you can simply convert regular protons and electrons into anti-protons and positrons.

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Actually, you can simply convert regular protons and electrons into anti-protons and positrons.

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But it wouldn't violate any conservation laws.

Let's say you have a process that takes only a small amount of energy to convert protons to antiprotons and electrons to positrons. You then combine them to form anti-hydrogen.

Combining the antihydrogen with regular hydrogen results in mutual annihilation of the matter and antimatter, producing a huge amount of energy -- far more than the energy used to turn the protons into anti-protons and the electrons into positrons.

But you have not violated conservation of matter and energy, because the energy of the reaction does not come from nothing; it is the result of the conversion of matter into energy. You would produce the same amount of energy if you could directly convert two regular hydrogen atoms from matter to energy. Converting one atom to anti-matter merely gives us a way to convert both atoms to energy, it does not create energy that did not exist before.

As for conservation of charge, imagine a really simple process that gets a proton to emit a positron and absorb an electron. You would end up with a positron and an antiproton. One positive charge and one negative charge, same as before.

For cgamble; coal, whale (or most any animal derived) oil (including Oilent Green), wood, straw...I could go on at length. There are many, many, many things that we could burn get more cheaply and pay a higher long term price from using as fuel.

The actual process that we currently use to make anti-protons and positrons is basically as Eric describes, though the proton first absorbs an electron, then emits a positron, as I recall.

Thinking about it, it would be interesting if you could get a bunch of protons to absorb electrons, then have half of them emit electrons while the other half emit positrons. Thus you get annihilation without bothering about storing the antimatter...which has always been the tricky part.

Survivor, I like your bomb....mind if I used it sometime?

That doesn't make sense unless there is a new term of equivalent meaning but more recent derivation. What are we supposed to say when we mean matter composed of anti-particles?

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A proton has a baryon number of 1; an antiproton has a baryon number of -1. Changing a proton to an antiproton violates conservation of baryon number. Electrons and positrons have a similar conserved property called electron number. The reason protons can emit positrons is that at the same time they emit a neutrino, and neutrinos also have electron number.

"As for conservation of charge, imagine a really simple process that gets a proton to emit a positron and absorb an electron. You would end up with a positron and an antiproton."

This process would yield a positron (and 2 neutrinos), but it would not yield an antiproton. A proton is made of 2 up quarks and 1 down. A neutron is made of 1 up quark and 2 downs. When a proton emits a positron (and a neutrino) you get a neutron. But when the neutron absorbs an electron (which would require a lot of energy, and emit another neutrino), you'd get some particle made of 3 down quarks, whereas an antiproton is made of the antiquarks of a proton. The triple down quark particle is sufficiently unstable that it is called a resonance, and it decays quickly into a neutron and some sort of meson, by creating an up quark and an anti up quark.

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It's particle physics, for crying out loud. None of it is simple. Some people think we should resort to tacking on extra fundamental forces to explain this stuff. Let's not divert ourselves into a discussion of such things here.

The point is that we do turn protons into anti-protons, even though the current process is very crude. Bosons are plentiful little beasties. CP violation is a tiny little thing. There is no theoretical barrier to a more efficient method of creating (and collecting, our current collection methods are terrible too) quantities of anti-particles.

For myself, I doubt the machinery to do this will be small enough to reasonably fit on a spaceship (and I like things that can go BOOM!), so I make anti-matter at space stations and store it...like a form of high energy fuel, eh?

Simple, simple. No, it isn't simple for the boys doing the math, but it is simple enough to write.

My suggestion: NegaMatter(TM)

Radio Frequency (RF) Trap for Confinement of Ion Plasmas in Antimatter Propulsion Systems Using Rotating Wall Electric Fields

See the schedule at http://ehw.jpl.nasa.gov/events/nasaeh04/

I do feel a certain responsibility to clarify the whole antimatter thing, though. It's not that he suggested a new term -- he just said don't put antimatter in your stories. I suppose if for some reason you were writing about something that involved antimatter, he'd have no qualms about using it. I think was he implied was simply write stories that don't use it. (Because it makes them feel old)