Originally posted by Frogspondence
Zero point energy (aka vacuum energy) is a real thing, and has been done to death in science fiction. Outside of Stargate though, (ZPMs), I don't think there has been a serious attempt to harness it for power, because we really have no idea how to even start to go about it. Engineers aren't blind to a big power source or trained against it (actually ...[text shortened]... it all the time, but not as a serious power-source until we have space ships; probably.
I have this sneaky feeling we will run through chemical energy, then fission, then fusion, then anti-matter before we ever get to vacuum energy.
It turns out actually, that the design and theory phase is further along for anti-matter rockets than for fusion.
A recent piece in Scientific American suggests there may be a way to harvest relatively large amounts of anti-matter in Cis-lunar space with a wire cage affair several hundred meters across (think chicken wire) spherical shape and charged to attract anti-protons, so a positive charge of several hundred million volts and then further capturing mechanisms inside that eventually trapping anti-protons in a magnetic trap.
It is said the universe has one part in ten billion of anti-matter so for every ten billion tons of our stuff, there would be one ton of anti-matter and a lot of it floating through near space.
Space is so thin that anti-matter can go long distances without touching normal matter so there may be plenty of it to be harvested in space.
That kind of thing is a lot closer to reality than any kind of vacuum energy for sure, and will probably remain so for the next several hundred years if not longer, assuming we maintain a scientific civilization for that long, which is in some doubt I think.