User blog comment:Nra 'Vadumee/Retirement/@comment-5135903-20130403174618/@comment-5135903-20130413122217

Good point. Let's see...

If only small numbers of particles were collided at a time, then the energy requirements would be a lot lower (they say the collisions in the L.H.C. are the equivalent of two grasshoppers hopping into each other). Due to the First Law of Thermodynamics that would also mean that the total energy of the Hawking radiation from the back holes would be negligible.

As for the lithium, I actually mention that the much more stable lithium niobate (LiNbO3) is used due to its optical properties for creating squeezed light.

The flash-freezing idea would be a little harder to explain away. If the creature had cavities inside it's cells (like a vacuole in a plant cell) that were filled with a low pressure gas, then special bioluninescant organelles in the cells could create coherent light that rapidly cools the gas inside the cavity in a similar way to laser cooling techniques, this would in turm quickly flash-freeze the cell (making the creature give off a massive flash of light in the process).

Another way this flash-freezing may work is using A.T.P. molecules in actomyosin complexes in cells. In the paper Does quantum mechanics play a non-trivial role in life? (under 'Decoherance Evasion') it is mentioned that the metabolising of A.T.P. in actomyosin complexes in cells has this wierd effect of giving the actomyosin an effective temperature of 1.6x10^-3 degrees centigrade. Perhaps by saturating the creature's cells with actomyosin a flash-freezing effect could be achieved by suddenly metabolising the A.T.P.?

In terms of the energy requirements for F.T.L., physicist Chris Van Den Broeck devised a way of reducing the energy requirements of a warp drive to as low as a few grams by using a metric to make the warp drive smaller on the outside(like the TARDIS), meanwhile, Richard Obousy has shown how energy requirements can be significantly reduced again by using manipulation of higher dimensions, rather than mass to curve spacetime. By applying Obousy's idea with Van Den Broeck's metric, energy requirements for a warp drive could theoretically be reduced to less than a joule! Easily within the energy output of a living organism!

Of course, Nra'Vadumee is completely right, there's no hope of a biological means to faster-than-light travel (even a technological mans is hard enough!), but that doesn't mean you can't have fun figuring out how it might work!

P.S. I have a strange definition of "fun."