Biological Power Sockets and Metabolic Appliances
It once occurred to me that there would be a great deal of convenience in having a portable power outlet. Batteries run out. Solar-powered gadgets are finicky. Also, what if you didn’t have to pay for the power consumption? Maybe I’ve just been thinking too much about The Matrix…but really, wouldn’t it be cool if you could just plug stuff into yourself? Most gadgetry doesn’t really take very much power, especially if it’s engineered well. You could use the energy of your body to power a properly built laptop. Somebody is bound to turn this into a no-work dieting solution, and really it would work quite well. People with eating disorders would be sure to misuse it, but what else is new? This would, however, make overdosing possible for workaholics.

Playing with the Planets
Presented with the proposition: “Give me a lever long enough and a place to put it, and I could move the Earth,” I was willing to not consider too deeply the motives for doing this. That problem aside, the somewhat interesting question of “Where do we get the gravity?” pops up. Finally I just decided that was inherent in “a place to put it.” However, I could never quite forget the problem and finally came to the point of questioning the motives. In actuality, this would be a very stupid thing to do. The Earth is positioned in delicate perfection, and even a slight disturbance of our placement could end life as we know it. This endeavor is not merely stupid, but fatally so. However, if the Earth ever got knocked out of orbit, say, by a comet, this could be useful. This reverse thinking eventually led to the startling realization, simple as it is, that such efforts need not be limited to the Earth. Especially in other solar systems, the ability to move a planet into a precise orbit so that Earth conditions are mimicked would be revolutionary…not saying that it would be easy, that it will happen in our lifetimes, or that it would happen at all (I’ve heard much better solutions for finding new frontier), but it would make for a cool story.

Time Travel
My little brother (8.5 yrs my junior and a little too smart for his own good) is always pestering me, because I’m a physics major, with all sorts of far-fetched questions. He has for along time wanted to know why it is impossible to travel backwards in time. I have always heard that this would simply take more energy than exists in the universe. Once I saw Feynman diagrams explained in an astronomy course, and also in some pop science books I was reading. Basically, there is the idea that a particle and its antiparticle, say an electron and a positron, are actually the same particle but the antiparticle is traveling backwards in time. I forget how this works, but the Feynman diagram shows how traveling backwards in time is basically the same as going faster than light. By E=mc2, it obviously would take a lot of energy to convert mass to light (which I think is basically what happens if you go the speed of light); in fact, I don’t remember this exactly, but I’ve seen the expanded calculus version of that famous equation, and there is an inverted term that becomes 1/0 if you go beyond light speed, which is the mathematical reason you can’t do it: Energy Required then goes to infinity. That is the most absolute answer than I’ve been able to give. However, it is my understanding that at the quantum level (beneath Plank dimensions), time travel happens all the time. I’ve always wondered if this could be harnessed – for energy purposes, computing purposes, or even macro time travel purposes. 

However, back to my little brother: he wanted to know if by the amazing lever used above, you could propel some mass to light speed (i.e. just make the lever long enough). I’m guessing that in doing the calculation, you would end up with a lever bigger than the universe, or an infinite lever (‘cuz we really don’t know how big the universe is). Still, I keep coming back to gravity problem whenever I think of how to calculate this and prove it. Where would you put the lever? And since the lever is so long, all matter in the universe is going to come into play in determining gravity at various points along our lever. Throughout most of space, gravity is negligible. Taking the average gravity of the universe, we’d get something pretty small to be using for this. Can you even get a force without gravity? Well, I guess a force is meaningless without mass, and the existence of gravity is the existence of mass. So, I guess that our approximate vacuum would make the force approximately meaningless…whatever that means…basically, even if you COULD build an infinite lever, could you ever make it move at all? But we can move in space, and really without gravity it is much easier…ok, I’m officially stumped now; my mind is just breaking down over this…

The other explanation of time travel that I’ve heard is the idea of identical twins, or at least twin clocks, being separated, one travels quickly and the other travels slowly. Due to shrinkage/expansion effects explained by relativity the size of time changes such that the more quickly moving twin doesn’t age as quickly as the other twin and will end up younger. This seems deceptively like going back in time but it is not. They are both always moving forward in time, just at different rates. Their relative situations invoke relativity and give us the same effect as time travel.

Actually, come to think of it, there is nothing particularly special about time travel. We’re always time traveling. The thing to marvel at is that we can’t stop, and even changing our rate is difficult.

Another thing that I thought of: according to the laws of angular momentum and relativity, tall people on rotating planets will live slightly longer…or rather their heads will. Of course, there is an inherent inverse proportionality between thinking speed and head longevity, so things cancel and it doesn’t matter. Not that it really would’ve anyway…