Jacques Vallee's "Fast Walker," Advances in Meta-Materials & Type IV Low Power Warp Drive

"In his book SuperCosmos (pdf as of 2/18/04), Jack Sarfatti describes SpaceCraft using quotations from FASTWALKER by Jacques-F.-Vallee, which Jack Sarfatti describes as "... Vallee's essentially factual report thinly disguised as "science-fiction." ...". Here are excerpts from the quotes used by Jack Sarfatti:

'… The UFO ... is controlled by a non-human form of consciousness. ... ... it resembles a constantly moving film with an approximate optical depth of five microns [ 5,000 nm ], rather than a fixed metallic skin. ... the membrane seems to be agitated by random interface phenomena at the molecular level ... ... [Fastwalker is] ... saucer a hundred feet in diameter, silvery-gray in color, with an occasional glint of gold. The sound that came from it was a high-pitch melody that followed none of the known laws of music. The craft's surface shimmered under the spotlights, as if it were spinning rapidly. ... the disk had a superstructure like a cupola on its upper shell, with pulsing colors that resolved into successive levels of blue, red and green. ... Its physical shape seemed to change ever so slightly from minute to minute defying perspective, inducing a mild sense of vertigo ... The Fastwalker had changed shape again, and it began to glow with the intensity of a blaze. What they saw now was a rounded mass of light ninety feet wide and forty feet high. Its intensity resolved itself into successive layers of bluish and reddish radiation. ...the Doppler effect ... read … 1,801 km/h ... But it's not moving at all. ... inside the Fastwalker … the inside ...[is]... much bigger than the outside ...".

http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/ETyesUFO.html

Compare to

"In 1968 Soviet physicist Victor Veselago predicted that electromagnetic waves travelling through materials with a negative permittivity and a negative permeability would do the opposite. The frequency should drop for a source moving towards an observer and increase for a source moving away. This is because the magnitude of the Doppler effect is proportional to the refractive index of the medium through which the waves propagate. Whereas the refractive index of air and all other natural media is greater than (or equal to) one, the index of the artificial materials considered by Veselago was negative.
The inverse Doppler effect has already been observed at radio frequencies, by two physicists at BAE Systems in the UK in 2003. This work involved tuning the dispersion properties of an electrical transmission line, then bouncing a radio-frequency wave off a moving current pulse within the line and measuring the wave's frequency shift.
Optical observation a first ... Now, a joint team led by Songlin Zhuang of the Shanghai University of Science and Technology and Min Gu of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia has seen the effect at optical frequencies. To do this the researchers shone an infrared laser beam through a lattice of 2 µm diameter silicon rods attached to a moving platform and recorded the frequency shift of the light leaving the lattice. Being a photonic crystal, the lattice has a characteristic band-gap that forbids the passage of a narrow range of wavelengths, and the researchers say that by tuning the output of their laser so that its wavelength matched the edge of the bandgap they are able to negatively refract the laser light."
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/45366

My point here is that if Jacques's "fiction" actually has a factual basis in classified information, then it is folkloric evidence for my idea below that a yet to be designed superconducting meta-material may be the basis for a low power practical "Type IV Civilization" (M. Kaku) weightless warp drive without the time-dilation problem of conventional impulse propulsion with non-zero g-force.

I meant to add Ray Chiao whose work in superconducting electromagnetic-gravity wave transducers is interesting and of immense importance - again if, like the Haisch-Moddell patent it can be really made to work.

See - http://faculty1.ucmerced.edu/rchiao/2.cfm?pm=113&lvl=3&menuid=117

New Direction for Gravity-Wave Physics via "Milikan Oil Drops"

Conceptual Tensions Between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity: Are There Experimental Consequences?

Proposed Observations of Gravity Waves from the Early Universe via "Milikan Oil Drops"

Quantum Gravity: Planned Experiments at UC Merced

Can a Charged Ring Levitate a Neutral Polarizable Object? Can Earnshaw's Theorem Be Extended to Such Objects?

Time and Matter in the Interaction between Gravity and Quantum Fluids: Are There Microscopic Quantum Transducers between Gravitational and Electromagnetic Waves?

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/physics/news-quantum-vacuum-unlikely-alternative-energy-resource

Also John Cramer

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/292378_timeguy15.html

Going for a blast into the real past
If the experiment works, a signal could be received before it's sent

By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER

If his experiment with splitting photons actually works, says University of Washington physicist John Cramer, the next step will be to test for quantum "retrocausality."

That's science talk for saying he hopes to find evidence of a photon going backward in time.also Yakir Aharonov who just got a medal at the White House from POTUS for

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/01-back-from-the-future
Back From the Future
A series of quantum experiments shows that measurements performed in the future can influence the present. Does that mean the universe has a destiny—and the laws of physics pull us inexorably toward our prewritten fate?
by Zeeya Merali; photography by Adam Magyar
From the April 2010 issue; published online August 26, 2010

http://tinyurl.com/4uwn7cx

on advanced propulsion concepts - separate from rocket/solar/ion etc conventional propulsion concepts that the fellow from the Planetary Society into solar sails spoke of - that's not what I mean.

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdILmgJGuvw

I mean Type IV manipulating spacetime itself (warp drive and wormholes). We may be able to jump right away from Type 0 to Type IV.

If we don't try it certainly won't happen. Therefore, nothing lost in at least discussing it in our group.

I have one very specific idea that might work.

Specifically nano-engineered meta-materials that superconduct at very high temperature may greatly amplify the coupling of applied electromagnetic energy to the warping of spacetime.

Basically the idea is that the effective gravity-EM coupling in the material is (index of refraction)^4G/c^4

(index of refraction) >> 1 in a superconductor - slowing light to a crawl (for some frequencies) so that small power gives huge warping.

permittivity and permeability negative, e.g. if this can be done in DC limit then a charged capacitor will anti-gravitate (negative electrostatic energy density).

Now, none of this may work, but if we don't try nothing will happen.

Separate from above is the control of dark energy.

Both of the above escape the time dilation problem!

The following excerpt is from the Relativity Rocket section of the Usenet Physics FAQ.

"The proper time as measured by the crew of the rocket (i.e. how much they age) will be denoted by T, and the time as measured in the non-accelerating frame of reference in which they started (e.g. Earth) will be denoted by t.  We assume that the stars are essentially at rest in this frame.  The distance covered as measured in this frame of reference will be denoted by d and the final speed v.  The time dilation or length contraction factor at any instant is the gamma factor γ.

... Here are some typical answers for a = 1g. (1 g is comfortable rate of acceleration for human beings, since it is equal to Earth's gravitational pull)

  T(ship)            t(Earth)               d                         v                                     γ
  1 year            1.19 yrs               0.56 lyrs            0.77c                              1.58 
  2                    3.75                    2.90                   0.97                                3.99
  5                    83.7                    82.7                   0.99993                          86.2
  8                    1,840                  1,839                 0.9999998                      1,895
 12                   113,243              113,242             0.99999999996              116,641

So in theory you can travel across the galaxy in just 12 years of your own time.  If you want to arrive at your destination and stop then you will have to turn your rocket around half way and decelerate at 1g.  In that case it will take nearly twice as long in terms of proper time T for the longer journeys; the Earth time t will be only a little longer, since in both cases the rocket is spending most of its time at a speed near that of light.  (We can still use the above equations to work this out, since although the acceleration is now negative, we can "run the film backwards" to reason that they still must apply.)

Here are some of the times you will age when journeying to a few well known space marks, arriving at low speed:

4.3 ly                  Alpha Centauri                               3.6 years
27 ly                   Vega                                              6.6 years
30,000 ly            Center of our galaxy                       20 years
2,000,000 ly       Andromeda galaxy                          28 years