Nope. It's serious. Read up on Heim Theory and such. If you google/wikipedia a bit, you'll see that Burkhard Heim was genuinely trying to create viable plans for Star Trek-esque propulsion systems, mostly by exploiting the quirky relationship between electromagnetism and gravity. Some consider him to have been nothing more than a scamming crackpot, and some of his theories have been shown to be wrong, but some of it has actually been experimentally verified. He died a few years ago, but he did actually make a few significant discoveries that may eventually be useful. Anyway, I'm no expert, but I would wager that that design wouldn't work, but it was a serious attempt and not merely viral advertising.