Wooists Launching Woo Machine to Perform Woo
Because we can't ever get enough from the Perpetual Motion crowd
A company called IVO Ltd. hasn’t quite gotten all the memos about the laws of physics. Among these is Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which holds that whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite force on the first. This is why you can’t pick yourself up by your bootstraps, and it’s also why you can’t motor yourself around in space without expelling reaction mass.
But IVO is following in the grand tradition of perpetual motion machine builders, and believes they’ve circumvented the way the universe works. They have secured a rideshare atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, scheduled for June of this year, to launch their test spacecraft which contains the magical motor they’ve named the IVO Quantum Drive (its inclusion of the term “quantum” means that it’s actually sciencey). It relies on an “alternate theory of inertia” and requires no fuel or reaction mass. None of the IVO team admits having any relevant experience.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. This is an old class of imaginary machine called a space drive, long a tool of science fiction authors. Space drives are those that require no reaction mass, and since that’s (sadly) impossible, they have remained in the realm of science fiction. But every so often, non-experts with creative ideas, uninformed and unimpeded by the actual sciences involved, come up with ideas for such contraptions.
Here’s what always happens, and what I suspect will happen in this case. Although we don’t know what their objectives are with the launch, we presume they are to validate that their spacecraft can power itself and move independently in space. It will fail to do so. Yet the chances are virtually zero for any such inventors to ever admit the failure. They are generally so invested in their idea — financially, emotionally, psychologically — that they persuade themselves something else must be at fault. They will insist their device is actually sound, and its failure will either be denied or attributed to some confounding external factor.
I’m going to dub this Space Theranos.
My hope is that the money they’re spending is their own, and not that of any trusting non-expert investors. If it is, then I encourage those investors to please consult with any physicist before losing their money.