Article: Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space.
Michael Kratsios, Director of White House Office of Science and Technology, April 14, 2025
This is being interpreted as some to suggest the US has secret technology that can manipulate spacetime (i.e. a warp drive, or anti-gravity), possibly of alien origin.
More context, emphasis mine:
Article: A gap lies between our moment and the speed of transformation America experienced midcentury. Progress has slowed. Yes, large language models astonish us, rockets still turn our eyes upward, and satellites envelop the globe. But as we look forward to America's 250th birthday celebration next year, our progress today pales in comparison to the huge leaps of the 20th century. Consider the country of fifty years ago.
As the nation approached its bicentennial, Americans looked forward to electricity too cheap to meter. By the end of 1972, 30 nuclear plants were operational, 55 were under construction, and more than 80 were planned or ordered. That same year, the Apollo 17 astronauts became the 11th and 12th men to walk on the moon. Five years before, the X-15 rocket plane had set a speed record for a crewed aircraft of Mach 6.7. America was flying higher, faster, and farther than ever before…
[...]
Stagnation was a choice. We have weighed down our builders and innovators. The well-intentioned regulatory regime of the 1970s became an ever-tightening ratchet, first hampering America's ability to become a net-energy exporter and then making it harder and harder to build. We seem to have lost focus and vision, to have lowered our sights and let systems and structures and bureaucracies muddle us along.
But we are capable of so much more.
Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space. They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.
[...]
It is the choices of individuals that will make the new American Golden Age possible: the choice of individuals to master the sclerosis of the state, and the choice of individuals to craft new technologies and give themselves to scientific discoveries that will bend time and space, make more with less, and drive us further into the endless frontier.
The focus of the speech is arguing that the burden of regulations (things like the EPA, building regulations, and worker rights) stifles innovation. He uses the "time and space" metaphor to both harken back to previous accomplishments (trains, planes), and to talk about future possibilities (flying cars, drones, supersonic planes)
It's not a new metaphor, going back over 150 years, here's a book from 1956 glorifying the railways for their "conquest of space and time"
The oldest I found
Article: May 31, 1844:
Prof. Morse's Telegraph has already, during the first week of its operations, been proved to be of the greatest public importance. Time and space has been completely annihilated.
Similar usages:
Article: the ability of the internet to manipulate time and space in a sense, similar to previous communications revolutions such as the telephone
Article: [the telegraph] compressed time and space, separated information from geography, increased globalization, jumpstarted journalism, and tightened imperialism. But the role of the cable did not stop there.
Article: the technology of recording and reproducing the world, along with the new ways in which it could frame, orient, and manipulate time and space
Article: the telegraph ... was able to restructure time and space, in relation to both social and commercial life
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