Yeah, believe it or not. Two articles in the current Aviation Week and Space Technology (March 1, 2004)

Unfortunately, complete articles online are subscriber only (why aren't YOU subscribing to one of the best space magazines out there?) I don't have my hardcopy in the mail yet.

A short excerpt:

At least two large aerospace companies and one U.S. Defense Dept. agency are betting that "zero point energy" could be the next breakthrough in aerospace vehicle propulsion, and are backing those bets with seed money for ZPE research.

If their efforts pay off, ZPE-driven powerplants might enable Mach 4 fighters, quiet 1,200-seat hypersonic airliners that fly at 100-mi. altitudes as far as 12,000 mi. in about 70 min., and 12.6-hr. trips to the Moon.

One of those companies, BAE Systems, launched "Project Greenglow" in 1986 "to provide a focus for research into novel propulsion systems and the means to power them," said R.A. Evans, the project leader, in a technical paper last year. Although funding levels have been modest, Greenglow is exploring ZPE as one element of the program's "project-directed research," according to John E. Allen, a consultant to BAE Systems.

At least one large U.S. aerospace company is embarking on ZPE research in response to a Defense Dept. request, but the company and its customer cannot be identified yet. National laboratories, the military services and other companies either now have or have had low-level ZPE-related efforts underway.

Wow.

A bonus speculation on the Fermi Paradox:

A science fiction show called "Lexx" (not bad, but an acquired taste) had an alien civilization classify the planet Earth as a Type 13 civilization, one with several distinctive characteristics. The most important of these is that they almost universally destroy themselves by using powerful accelerators to attempt to find the mass of the Higgs bosun particle, and the planet collapses into something about the size of a pea.

I suspect that human civilization will not end in war or environmental catastrophe, but along the lines of the sister on "Dexter's Laboratory" going "what does THIS button do?"

If this happens a lot, the galaxy might be kind of sparse in technological civilizations.

One really good reason for getting conventional space flight going is to be able to do research into what holds matter and space together somewhere safe--like maybe the asteroid belt. Or Pluto.

The good news is that, assuming the universe is full of civilizations, we already have good evidence that no amount of fiddling around with time and space will destroy the universe. It still seems to be here.

Now, if we are the only advanced civilization in the Universe, that's another story.