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[PsiFive]

Down here in Melbourne a local radio station had a physicist on explaining what understanding the Higgs boson could mean for practical applications. Didn't hear all the interview but he was talking about objects the size of supertankers being put into orbit for next to no cost and being flung at relativistic speeds to Mars in 20 minutes if it meant a way could be found to alter the mass of something and, say, reduce it to almost zero for the duration of a flight to Mars. The bad news is he also said practical spin offs of pure research can take a century or two to come about. 

Sound familiar?  I'm getting in the freezer now. Someone come along and wake me in 2189.

[Swordfishtrombone]

That would be very cool, but it's highly speculative at this point - there's no guarantee that I can see that it's going to be even theoretically possible, or, if it is theoretically possible, that it would be practically possible. Maybe altering the higgs field to reduce the mass of an object, for example, would take so much energy that it would require the yearly output of the sun to make an elephant way the same as a mouse. That would put the technology permanently beyond any practical application.

I hope not though - I hope that such a thing turns out to be both theoretically, and practically possible. True "mass effect" fields would have a huge number of potential applications.

[Himo]

Just hang about for a bit and hope we get uplifted by the salarians

[Druggis]

Keep in mind that without the liberal application of Element Zero or "Eezo", none of the mass effect technology we see in the game would exist. This holds true for everything from biotics to kinetic barriers to ship drive cores. Considering there is no known real world analogy for Eezo, it would be impractical at best (it would require humongous amounts of energy) or at worst, impossible.

[PsiFive]

Just to clarify, I wrote the OP more in humour than hope. The last line and smiley was supposed to show tongue in cheek, and of course whatever the practical spin offs turn out to be it's likely that few of us will be alive to see them anyway.