starship-design: Cellular universe? Not!

[kyle <stk@sunherald.infi.net>]

Greetings all:

No offense to anyone, but I'm not buying this 'cellular automaton'
universe theory. It doesn't hold up in terms of what has been observed.
(i.e. warping of spacetime, etc.) There have been instances where space
has been warped in a laborotory environment, although very inefficient.
If the cellular theory held up, then the transmission projects of
Günther Nimitz would not work. I think that a fair theory incorporating
ZPF is this: Space has structure, not just chaos. Space itself is made
of something firm yet bendable. We simply haven't _quite_ mastered how
to bend it the way we want to to allow us to exceed the speed of light.
If you like, consider it not FTL, but increasing the speed of light
itself to allow travel at reasonable time periods. 

Everyone keeps saying that with subluminal speed you can get to the
stars in a human lifetime. Wrong. How long does it take to travel to,
say a star 500 light years away at near lightspeed? About 500 years! So
maybe the people on the ship age slower, but not the people on earth.
They'd be dead by the time you got there. (ironically, an FTL starship
may have already arrived there when your slowsip arrived.) Try getting
public funding for that. "The crew will get there alive, but sorry
folks, you'll all be dead by the time it arrives at the star."

Kyle Mcallister