[TML] How dumb an idea is this?

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 3/3/08 7:13 PM, "royce at efn.org" <royce at efn.org> wrote:

> Greetings,
>  Traveller ships running on dark matter.  How dumb an idea is this?
>  I keep looking at those cool looking rocket exhaust tubes on the back
> of the illustrations.  I keep getting a nagging feeling about waste
> heat.  What if I could hit both birds with one stone?
>  What if the reactor is cooled by a flow of "dark matter" that is
> magically scooped up from surrounding space?  And what if the vessel's
> reaction mass is likewise magically scooped up from surrounding "dark
> matter"?
>  Yes, I get the point that the distinctive quality of dark matter is its
> lack of interaction with regular matter.  But if we can assume the
> invention of jump drive, then why can't we assume the invention of a
> dark-matter-interactor?
>  Just a thought.  Please feel free to shoot it to pieces.  Maybe I'll
> learn something from it, like studying the particles flying out of a
> subatomic collision.  :-)
>  Sincerely,
> Asher Royce
> 
> PS  If someone else already thought of this, which seems likely, then I'd
> like to hear about that, too.

Point of order!

Dark matter *is* supposed to interact with other matter.  At the very least,
the whole point of dark matter is to explain how there appears to be more
gravitation going on in the universe than the bright matter explains.
Whether it interacts with matter in non-gravitational ways is still
conjecture.

What it *doesn't* do is emit or reflect enough EM radiation for us to
directly observe.

In any case, it's all conjecture.  Some basic observation may yet invalidate
the whole field.  Some astronomers & physicists don't think it even exists.
Just a few weeks ago, I read part of a paper explaining away much of the
issue of rotational speed of galaxies.