Prominent Theoretical Technologies
Technologies that feature prominently in the Orion's Arm setting include:
- Nanotechnology, and sub-atomic analogues.
- Extremely advanced artificial intelligence.
- Space megastructures.
- Production and manipulation of averaged null energy condition-violating negative stress energy tensor fields, including quintessence and scalar quantum field fluctuations, for use in reactionless space drives and wormholes.
- Stable wormholes, allowing apparent faster-than-light travel between star systems, though they must be transported to the systems at sublight speeds (with physical limitations intended to prevent time travel).
- Several types of reactionless sublight space drive, including almost all of the types described by NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program, though in the setting most of these are in the process of being replaced by various space drives, including Displacement, Halo, and Void drives, which are themselves based upon the ESAA/Van den Broeck metric solution to the Alcubierre/Natario warp drive.
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Famous quotes containing the words prominent and/or theoretical:
“I should say that the most prominent scientific men of our country, and perhaps of this age, are either serving the arts and not pure science, or are performing faithful but quite subordinate labors in particular departments. They make no steady and systematic approaches to the central fact.... There is wanting constant and accurate observation with enough of theory to direct and discipline it. But, above all, there is wanting genius.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the world over, living on anticipation.”
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