ecliptic said:
I think you mean zero-point energy. Also just because you have unlimited energy doesn't make everything off the bat possible. They still got to invent the stuff.
Yeah, zero-point, thanks. Anyway, it does make a lot of things quite possible right off the bat, but I will agree that it would take a while to graduate to near-light speed travel from the 'free' power plants that would likely be the first use, unless somebody decided to use it for a weapon. If they did try to build a weapon, that thing would put antimatter to shame. Each cm^3 of empty space has, according to the lowest calculations, about...oh....
Enough power to provide 10^45 joules (or 3.17*10^31 kilowatts for
1,000 years). That's a lot. That's opposed to the 9*10^16 joules that antimatter gives out
per kilogram. That makes one cm^3 of zero-point about 10 octillion (10^11) times more powerful.
So, it would make the discovery of nuclear energy...well, look like the advent of iron over bronze.
EDIT
Oh, here's the energy of one cubic centimeter of empty space in megatons;
3.36x10^27. That's more than a billion times the yield of the largest explosion ever made by man. Wow, that's a lot. That's enough to move planets.