Regarding the flying car thing--we can build those any time--many prototypes of combined flying/ground vehicles exist, most commonly resembling some form of helicopter. The real problem is not building them, but operating them--can you imagine the air traffic control problem with a hundred million unscheduled takeoffs and landings in America every single DAY? Plus the problem of somebody trying to fly while drunk...I doubt that personal flying vehicles will be viable until they can be computer-controlled--it is just too hazardous to have your average idiot flying around irresponsibly--flying without hitting anything takes a lot more competence than driving without hitting anything.
Spacecraft Jumps
- Thread starter ninja
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Quite frankly, its all theoretical right now. We don't know if there are any wormholes within a useable distance of us. We're only guessing at the stability, as we've never seen one or the evidence of one (they may not even exist). And we don't know what kind of special equipment might be required to travel through one, or whether or not special equipment would be required. For all we know, 1000 years from now, starships could be traveling from star system to star system using 'wormhole enlargers', or better yet, 'wormhole creators'. Its all just so much speculation at this point, and the information I provided was merely to give a background to one of the more common forms of intersteller travel in science fiction.
Well, negative mass/energy has some weird properties that, quite frankly, have yet to actually be observed. Chief among these is that an object possessing negative mass has negative inertia--that is, it actually RELEASES energy by accelerating rather than ABSORBING it. That implies that once you start such an object accelerating, it will continue to accelerate with no visible energy input forever. And the REALLY odd thing is that, since its "negative mass" increases relativistically as it approaches the speed of light, it would require ZERO energy to break the "light barrier" instead of the infinite amount of energy that normal matter requires. This gets even weirder because Einstein's equations imply that TIME becomes negative at speeds greater than that of light...in which case any object that accelerates past the Light Barrier would go into reverse time and decelerate (its acceleration is in reverse time as well), causing it to teeter back and forth on the Light Barrier, time and acceleration reversing every time it crosses C.
True, Einstein requires that the universe be closed (curves in on itself and is finite).
As for the teleportation bit, I doubt that it will be possible to do Star Trek type teleportation in which an object is disassembled and then reassembled, first because of the immense amount of data necessary (If you could enocde one byte of info on each atom of your memory chips, then it would still take several tons of memory chips to hold all the relavant information on the quantum state of a human-sized object), second because there are too many problems with noise, etc. interfereing with the signal (building in the redundancy needed for perfect error correction would increase the already-prodigous data load tenfold or more), and third because it is unlikely that you could disassemble/reassemble an object away from a transporter chamber (thus you would need a transporter on both ends).
What I think would be much more likely is the concept of creating a space warp/gate (similar in concept to a wormhole) linking the transport chamber to the destination. Then it becomes a simple matter of stepping through the gateway--no need to go through all the problems of analyzing and disassembling/reassembling your transported object.