Yes, actually. Every dollar that NASA spends has the potential to accomplish something for humanity. To my eye, even the vast potential benefits of this technology are more than washed out by the tremendously low probability that it will turn out to be real.

I absolutely do not want NASA to give money to every person who comes to their door claiming to have a recipe for a warp drive. There has to be some threshold of viability, or else all of the folks with home-brewed theories of everything who spam my inbox (I'm a theoretical physicist) could secure their own grants. I honestly have no idea what about this project put it over that threshold, but it seems to imply that the threshold is too low. I want NASA to spend some money on speculative ideas! But surely there are speculative ideas out there that don't require us to rewrite all the laws of physics. Let's fund those.

You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but I think NASA has struck an appropriate balance between skepticism and curiosity. After results claiming thrust from the EM drive were given by paid lab testing and a Chinese study, NASA threw a miniscule amount of effort at this, expecting it to fail. It generated positive results, so they threw in a hair more. This will continue until either very rigorous, well-funded studies duplicate these results, or they are invalidated at a lower- or mid-tier levels of rigor.

There should be a reasonable threshold at which we are willing to test ideas that would upset traditional scientific knowledge, or we risk displaying the mental rigidity which we mock in the religious and scientific orthodoxy of ages past. Obviously the perfect candidate idea for such testing would be one in which a sound theory was already present, but there have been examples of profound changes in theory that came about due to strange observations - consider the motion of Mercury and higher-temperature superconductors.

I too am excited about the possibility of life in our solar system, and I hope NASA gets probes to Europa, Titan and Enceladus as soon as possible, but these projects don't have to compete. The small amount of funding this has received so far is unlikely to be the difference between go and no-go for life-seeking probes.

Given the small amounts involved, it's worth the money just to figure out the source of experimental error. NASA isn't giving money to random kooks off the street, these are actual physicists in labs doing the work.

Not only is it not random kooks off the street, it's the Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory, a group NASA set up for the express purpose of exploring exotic and unlikely propulsion concepts.

They've done a small experiment on this particular concept and gotten interesting results. It would be utterly baffling if a group set up to explore such things explored them and then quit when they got interesting results.

Steuard is too polite to point this out himself, so I will do it for him: he is a physics professor. That the amount of money is small is a measure of how incredibly unlikely he thinks any useful result would come from the experiments.

Thank you for the pointer, I have a bad habit of not noticing usernames anyway. That said I still think my argument is valid, if you are seeing an incorrect result in a simple experiment it's still worth lab time figuring out which of your instruments or equipment is introducing it, even if you have 0.00% confidence that it's anything special or interesting.

Steuard himself would hopefully point out that although being a physics professor grants his opinion a greater weight than those of us who are less informed, to claim that he is automatically correct would be fallacious.

Politeness in this regard is preventing appeals to authority.

I personally disagree. The money has been allocated to a section of NASA designed to research exactly this sort of theory. Pulling funding from these people would be like telling Ernest Solvay to put away his wallet.

I am not saying he is automatically correct. I am saying that one should consider his profession, expertise, his level of skepticism, and then reconsider priors.