faster than light travel

Yeah rite.....what about the 7 month delay in the departure lounge....vacumn toilets out of order. kids squabbling......

For Ryanair to be involved the technology would have to be cheap.

Come to think of it I agree with the sentiments of earlier posts - for Governments to get involved it would have to be cheap!

The sad truth is that a lot of the advances in technology since 1900 in particular have been spurred on by the military either due to outright war or 'Geopolitical' reasons - eg Radio, Radar, Integrated Circuits, Jet engines . Even US space technology initially depended on a cadre of ex-Nazi rocket engineers made redundant by the closure of the V2 rocket programme at the end of WW2.

Proof of concept stage will only be reached if a military or strategic advantage is within sight (no pun intended). Maybe the impending shortage of hydrocarbons might see acceleration (again no pun) of a means for interplanetary travel to Jupiter's moons, some of which are now thought of as containing vast quantities of black gold.

{snipped}Warping spacetime though is another matter - all matter warps spacetime. So maybe if we can isolate, trap and or create Higgs particles and use.{snipped}

Dr. Randell Mills has suggested yet another GUT in which he quite agrees with you. He offers a free PDF copy at
www.blacklightpower.com/theory/bookdownload.shtml
The label on the link says, "Entire book."

One interesting aspect of his GUT is that everything (particle, wave, field, etc) can correctly be described by an equation. One impliciation of this situation is that space, time, mass, and energy are not necessarily real. That is, because this universe, and every aspect of it, can be accurately described by one or another equation, then this universe, in toto, might be a virtual reality.

The idea, that we are in a virtual reality, has been spreading more quickly since 1993.
On the off-chance that this idea has not yet come to your attention, the details of it can be found at:
Wikipedia, overview
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulism
Nick Bostrom, 2002
www.simulation-argument.com/
Brian Whitworth, 2007
www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/200...r&nsref=blogtech

In addition to those arguments, one way to explain the apparent fact that space and time and mass and energy are quantized would be to say that their quantization is a result of the fact that the 3-D monitor, in which our virtual reality is displayed, has a finite spatial screen resolution, and a finite repetition rate.

However that might be, it remains that known virtual realities are not self-originated. If they were self-originated, then they would be natural realities, that is, realities without an originator. It also remains that known virtual realities are not self-sustained. If they were self-sustained, then they would have become natural realities which is a contradiction by definition.

So if it were the case that this were a virtual reality, then it would logically follow that there is an originator of this virtual reality. It would also logically follow that this virtual reality would have a sustainer. In the case that the originator of this virtual reality were to be a character in another virtual reality, then the ultimate sustainer would be the originator of the virtual reality in which all other virtual realities were nested.

An additional result, if this were to be a virtual reality, would be that it could be tailored to each character. That is to say, not everybody would necessarily experience the same version of this virtual reality. They would, if this were a natural reality; but not necessarily in the case that this were to be a virtual reality.

This list of consequences to this being a virtual reality is not complete. For instance, on the topic of UFOs, many aspects of that topic can be immediately understood if we suppose that this is a virtual reality. Ditto for visions, Fortean events, time travel, faster than light travel, and many additional topics which otherwise remain incomprehensible.

One interesting consequence is that this idea offers an explanation of why, when anything unusual happens, we immediately turn to the nearest person and ask, "Did you see that?" We do that as if we innately know that this is a virtual reality, and that we therefore might not all experience the same version of it.

However that might be, the idea that this is a virtual reality seems to have the potential of explaining many circumstances which have otherwise baffled us. So let us closely examine this idea in order to get the maximum possible benefit from it.

I'm off to get a virtual Starbucks with some virtual money...

I'm off to get a virtual Starbucks with some virtual money...

Ha! Thanks for the chuckle. I certainly would agree that the idea of nested virtual realities is new and therefore discomforting.

One discomforting aspect of the idea is that it provides a glimpse of us being in an endless welter, seemingly cut off from the originator of the virtual reality in which all other VRs are nested. So it is perhaps helpful to emphasize that regardless of how many virtual realities are made by how many copies of the orginator of all originators, it nevertheless logically remains that all of them are sustained in the imagination of the originator of all originators, so said entity is unavoidably always aware of everything and everybody.

Virtual realities. mmmmm....

I agree in principle to this accord. I believe that we are all capable of creating our own reality - mine is no doubt different than yours, and where they overlap (shared reality if you will) is what you termed "natural reality". We are all capable of fixing in place a quantum event merely by observing it - prior to the observation what was reality, did it exist? Can you define reality as the fixation of quantum events in a localised region of spacetime reinforced by shared observations which eventually lock reality in place at least for a brief period of time?

"The never ending days of being dead" by Marcus Chown touches briefly on virtual reality, as in maybe we are all taking part in a big computer simulation type idea. This to me is a bit bogus (though not impossible) as it brings up the problem of origin, i.e. are we a simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation inside a sumulation ad infinitum.

BTW thanks for the link to Mills book I must download and read it.