John set out to explore the galaxy in humanity’s newest high tech space craft, the gamma ray burst drive, powered by pure energy in the form of bursts of gamma waves.





With each release of a high energy gamma wave, the emitting atom would receive a little kick back from that gamma ray, and that kick back would be transmitted all down the line, pushing John’s high tech space craft forward a fraction of an atom width at a time. The energy from each kickback would be stored by all the atoms in line, and they would gain more and more energy with each they received. The atoms in John’s high tech space craft were gaining and then conserving momentum.





As the velocity of John’s space craft increased, so did his conserved momentum, and the amount of gamma ray power required to move the increasing mass of his ship grew and grew in size as it became harder and harder to accelerate the increasingly heavy craft through space.





As John began to approach relativistic velocities, his space ship began to length contract, getting skinnier and skinnier, while his energy requirements became just enormous because of the growing massiveness caused by all that conserved momentum.





As John’s craft approached light speed, it shrunk down to the width of a piece of paper while his energy requirements became almost infinite. John was losing his three dimensional shape, and had almost become a two dimensional flat surface. The only thing preventing this was that the last kick his space craft would need to reach light speeds and exit the three dimensional universe would require infinite energy, and John did not have that much fuel in his tank.


After some deliberations, the Space Fleet Council decided that this whole business of conserving momentum in space craft was to expensive given the amount of energy that it consumed. The decision was made to design and test a brand new space craft design.





The new design called for the installation of dark energy holes in the space craft, so that all the extra momentum added to both John and to his space craft would be sucked down that energy hole, and then recycled and used to power John’s engines instead of being stored as momentum and causing John and his craft to gain a gazillion kilotons in extra mass during acceleration.

The Law of the Conservation of Momentum

There is this law of the universe called the Law of the Conservation of Momentum, and it is a very good law. A planet in orbit around some star, such as the earth, has a bunch of that stored momentum in every atom on the planet, which is good, because without that stored momentum no planet would long remain in orbit around any star.

Conservation of momentum is also a handy thing to have around the house, so that when you put down a fork, you don’t have that fork floating up into the air and then bouncing around the kitchen, and you also don’t have the cups and saucers refusing to sit on shelves in your kitchen cupboards.

Yes, that Law of the Conservation of Momentum is a very good law when it is applied to the natural world, but it sure seems like a lousy way to be thinking about designing a space craft, when you consider just how much fuel it would require to accelerate some space craft when that space craft was storing a bunch of that useless momentum.

Now the law of the Conservation of Energy, that law you cannot break, but it would seem to me that the other one, the one about ‘Conserving Momentum, that one you can break, provided that you remember not to break the first law which cannot be broken.

The only way that someone could convince me that conserving some of that momentum in a space ship is a real good idea is if someone could convince me that once a space craft is coasting through empty space there would be some reason a space craft would need ‘conserved momentum’ in order to maintain velocity. Remember this is a void, empty space, and big nothing, and there really doesn’t seem to be anything to stop a person from coasting along through a big nothing. Now if there was a magnetic gravitational field around the area, and you don’t have any of that ‘conserved momentum’ I can see how that would make you a sitting duck, but then you can deal with that problem with constant acceleration. A little math would determine whether it is cheaper, as far as burning energy goes, to continuously accelerate a space craft through some magnetic hole or to burn energy conserving momentum in that space craft so that you would have the extra hefty mass to just glide right by some magnetic hole with the engines off.