Hover Vehicle

Kendaraan yang dapat melayang merupakan impian di masa depan. Sebut saja film yang dibintangi oleh Tom Cruise "Minority Report".

Saat ini "melayang" bagi sebagian orang sudah menjadi kenyataan. Sebutlah paragliders yang memanfaatkan angin untuk melayang. Suatu sarana olah raga individual yang mungkin bisa dimanfaatkan di masa depan untuk pergi ke tempat kerja dengan cara melayang. Bagi yang berdomisili di daerah Puncak dan berkantor di Jakarta, cara pergi ke tempat kerja dengan cara melayang mungkin bisa dimanfaatkan, daripada bermacet ria di jalan tol.
Contoh lain adalah hovercraft. Kapal ini didesign dengan cara melayang di atas permukaan air. Dengan memanfaatkan kantong udara di bagian bawah dengan semburan udara ke bawah, maka kapal ini dapat bergerak di air maupun di darat, dengan cara melayang sedikit di atas permukaan.

Teknologi terbaru dari cara melayang adalah magnetic levitation (maglev). Teknologi ini sudah diterapkan untuk angkutan massal kereta di beberapa negara. Negara pertama yang menerapkan teknologi ini adalah Inggris, dan sudah menyebar ke beberapa negara seperti Jerman, Jepang, China, dll (lihat wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_train). Transportasi inilah yang banyak diekspose dalam film Minority Report.

Di masa depan mungkin melayang akan menjadi kenyataan. Mobil dan motor pribadi tidak hanya bergerak horizontal mendatar, tetapi juga dapat bergerak vertikal dengan memanfaatkan tenaga yang dapat menghasilkan medan anti gravitasi.

Untuk saat ini sayangnya kita hanya bisa bermimpi, mengingat untuk melayang memerlukan energi yang cukup besar. Untuk melayangkan seekor katak saja dibutuhkan medan magnet sebesar 16 tesla yang akan berpengaruh besar terhadap lingkungan yang bermagnet, seperti kartu kredit, alat pacu jantung dll. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_levitation).

Time Travel is Possible?

Dalam banyak film fiksi ilmiah, hal yang paling ditonjolkan adalah perjalanan menembus waktu. Bukan fiksi ilmiah namanya jika tidak ada satu adeganpun yang menggambarkan time travel.

Sebut saja Back to the Future, Star Trek, dll. pasti ada satu fenomena perjalanan menembus waktu. Pertanyaannya sekarang mungkinkah fenomena ini?

Albert Einstein dengan teori relativitasnya menemukan bahwa apabila kita bisa bergerak dengan kecepatan sama dengan kecepatan cahaya, maka waktu akan terasa berhenti. Apabila kecepatan cahaya terlampaui, maka waktu akan mundur.

Tetapi menurut saya, sangat naif apabila pengertian tersebut berlaku umum. Hal yang perlu diingat adalah bahwa cahaya adalah gelombang energi foton yang tak bermassa. Sesuai dengan persamaan Einstein yang terkenal E=mc2, jika m=0 maka energi yang diperlukan untuk melaju dengan kecepatan cahaya adalah minimal. Jika m adalah seberat manusia dewasa, misal 65 kg, maka energi yang diperlukan untuk bergerak dengan kecepatan cahaya adalah 65 x 9.10^16 = 5.850.000.000.000.000.000 Joule atau setara dengan ledakan sekitar 1.500 megaton TNT atau 75 ribu kali kekuatan ledakan bom atom Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

Jadi, untuk saat ini pergerakan materi hingga kecepatan cahaya masih sesuatu yang mustahil. Elektron (m=9,10938188 × 10^-31 kg) yang dipercepat saja hingga saat ini belum bisa bergerak hingga menembus angka 300.000 km/s. Mungkin kelak jika sudah ditemukan suatu teknologi yang dapat membawa materi bergerak secepat cahaya tanpa efek samping yang maha dahsyat, hal ini akan terwujud.

Water Powered Vehicle A Reality

If there just isn’t enough oil to go around, then let’s turn our energy needs to something that is overly abundant on the planet. Water seems like a good choice for an energy source, and many have tried. It looks like Genepax Co, a Japanese company, has been able to get a car to run on water. The engine gets its power by supplying water and air to the fuel and air electrodes.

What’s really happening is that this is nearly a hydrogen powered car, but you don’t need to find the one or two lonely hydrogen refueling stations. Genepax has created what they call a “membrane electrode assembly” (MEA) that is able to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen using a chemical reaction. I’m not sure how it works exactly, and Genepax isn’t saying, but they claim their process can produce hydrogen for a longer time.

My favorite part about this little car is that you don’t need to have a pressurized hydrogen tank sitting in the back of your vehicle. Forget about how difficult it would be to refuel, why would I want a bomb in my trunk? I’m far more comfortable with a few jugs of water that get split up during the driving experience. It’s really too bad that being in the northeast eliminates many of these smaller, energy efficient, cars from practical use. Although I did see an electric car yesterday…I’ll have to make a note to ask those people how it handles come the blizzards in December.

The cost of the engine itself is around $18,000, which puts this little car on the impractical list. But Genepax hopes that if it can go into mass production the cost will reduce down to as little as $4,600.

Dikutip dari
http://www.cinemablend.com/technology/Water-Powered-Vehicle-A-Reality-10855.html

Teleportation Breakthrough Brings "Star Trek" Closer to Earth

Teleportation, the movement of objects or elementary particles from one place to another, more or less instantaneously, without traveling through space, is a very popular fictional concept, appearing in numerous sci-fi productions, "Star Trek" being probably the most famous.Now, a team of scientists set a new record by sending bits of information over a distance of 89 miles, from the Canary Island of La Palma to the neighboring island of Tenerife, using quantum teleportation. The distance is 10 times greater than the previous attempt at teleportation through free space.

This extraordinary feature was accomplished by using an interesting phenomenon known as "quantum entanglement," in which the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated.In fact, one aspect of this phenomenon, called quantum teleportation, or entanglement-assisted teleportation, is a technique that transfers a quantum state to an arbitrarily distant location using a distributed entangled state and the transmission of some classical information.Robert Ursin of the University of Vienna and his team, performed the record-breaking experiment, where tiny packets or particles of light, photons, were used to teleport information between telescopes on the two islands. "We really wanted to show that this can be done in the real world and our dream is to go into space and try it there. This was a feasibility study funded by the European Space Agency," Dr Ursin said yesterday. "In principle, such experiments may in future be used for teleporting information between places, but our system is not capable of transporting matter," he said."We think Star Trek is really very good science fiction but I'm afraid teleporting people is not possible with current technology. But we could use some scheme to teleport information."Science fiction fans will be disappointed to learn that no one expects to be able to teleport people or other macroscopic objects in the foreseeable future, for a variety of engineering reasons, even though it would not violate any fundamental law to do so.

By Lucian Dorneanu, Science Editor Softpedia

Dikutip dari:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Teleportation-Breakthrough-Brings-Star-Trek-Closer-to-Earth-56491.shtml