NASA Attempts to Take the Science Fiction Out of Warp Drive

That space perhaps isn't of constant "density", that it's maybe "stretchable" is nothing new. Not to any sci fi books reader at least…
What's new is that NASA is researching the possibility. And if it happens to be not just an idea but a real thing that could be called "warp technology", that'd be awsome.
Thanks for sharing that!

In the meantime, another Star Trek technology is in development - the universal translator. And I'm not talking about google "translate now" cheap dictionary to dictionary conversion idiocy. It's Microsoft that is working on it and for whatever reason they didn't make a bombastic story about that like Apple would do. Here's the link and the hidden gem in it starts at 6:30, realtime speech conversion from english to chinese:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-nlQqFCKg
I'm really not sure why this thing didn't happen to be a breaking news all over the internet.
 
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One attempt of an "universal translation" I once read about wasd using Aymara as the key/bridge language, because it has only regular verb forms, nothing irregular.
And that was ... yes, it's already 20 years ago since I read it in an magazine.
 
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IMO you can't use existing languages as a bridge. That's where google translator already fails. ;)
You should develop a completely new one.
 
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I remember reading years ago that the warp drive was definitely within the scope of our understanding of physics, it was just that the amount of energy needed to power a functioning warp drive exceeded the known amount of energy in the entire universe. Would be amazing if they could make it work thought.
 
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I remember reading years ago that the warp drive was definitely within the scope of our understanding of physics, it was just that the amount of energy needed to power a functioning warp drive exceeded the known amount of energy in the entire universe. Would be amazing if they could make it work thought.

Aye Captain, 'tis merely a tiny engineerin' problem that!
 
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Esperanto is useless in IT. It's words are taken from existing languages and doesn't have for example 12 words for a different type of snow (eskims have 12 of varieties while my language covers only two types of snow). Esperanto's gramatics is also not rich enough to cover just about anything possible.

If you know anything about databases then "collating sequence" is not a strange term for you - it's used to assure sorting records to different alphabets since relying on ASCII can be used only for english. Symbols used in other alphabets are not sequentially added to it, so words beginning with for example Ä would be at the end of the list instead of getting a spot right after those words that begin with A.
Collating sequence doesn't have to be even a bit similar to ASCII, you may put a symbol A on the spot where brackets stand, for example. The point is that machine doesn't care for someone's patriotic feelings nor cares if something exists in reality. Nor should we actually be.

Something similar can be developed for realtime language translator, so you practically "upgrade" or "downgrade" english gramatics and dictionary to be used for translation to some specific language. But the problem here is that the goal is not to make translate english to any language, but translate any language to any language. So instead thousands of "collating sequences", a completelly new, universal one, nonexisting one, should be designed.

Yea, I'm aware that would stop the idiocy "my language is superior" by different kinds of nationalists and patriots, but get real. No existing language can be compatible with all existing languages out there. If it was, hell, the star-trek-like universal translator software would exist ages ago.
 
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