Star Trek's Warp Speed -Expert Says It May Become a Reality

Some scientists are saying that warp drive might be possible after all.  Yes, it's obvious pandering to the Star Trek release, but be fair: these guys are career physicists.  Star Trek was theirs to begin with, and now it's cool we should at least give them press.  Especially when they want to talk about awesome things like faster than light travel.

Relativity states that it's impossible to move through spacetime faster than the speed of light - and many, many things have been observed which confirm this fact.  Almost all of them, in fact.  So the "simple" solution (for a sufficiently radical definition of "simple") is to move the spacetime instead.  Then you're not breaking the lightspeed limit, you're just picking up a piece of reality and throwing it faster than anything can ever move.

Which may already have happened.  Some models suggest that the universe's early rapid inflationary period may have included such superluminal speeds, so scientist Mark Millis says "Why can't we do the same?"  And despite how modern physics is almost entirely composed of reasons why we can't do exactly that, it's still a great question.

"If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not space drives?" ponders Mark.  Mainly because our drives don't conjure realities out of their exhaust ports, but we will be the first to say that incredible breakthroughs always sound insane before they actually happen.  We are totally behind Mr Millis and his attempts to evade reality's restrictions; we'd just prefer people sounded more sensible when they discussed it.

Any discussion of Millis's admirable aims tends to degenerate into "wooboowubwub DARK ENERGY! wubwub" or "If collapsed stars can bend spacetime, couldn't future engines?"  Sure, as long as the universe agrees that reducing decades of cosmological math into an analogy is a valid method of design.   We're all in favor of realising there may be some incredible breakthrough (in fact, that's kind of our entire job), but waving words you got off the cover of Nature around is not the route to credibility.

Will we ever get off the Earth?  We hope so - but if people here would smarten up a bit, we wouldn't actually have to.

Posted by Luke McKinney

Working on Warp Drive http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/090506-tw-warp-drive.html

Comments

[Jas]

Sorry Luke, but I agree with Hawking, we have no choice but to leave. At least some of us

[Andrew]

This is how the spaceship in Futurama works. I don't know the episode number but it is when the Doc clones himself and he is a kid and the doc at the same time.

[James Rich]

Agree with Stephen Hawking too, we simply must spread out! Whether or not we have any Cylopic crew members is still up for debate *giggle*

[Ron Colcombe]

I am nr 80 yrs young, in my earlier yrs at the end of the second world war, top aviation speed more or less 400mph it was speculated that anything going over the speed of sound would be destroyed by the sonic vibrations, look where we are now in 60yrs So speed of light travel it¡s a challenge

[Want_to_become_Astronaut]

haha, you are quite comical- "wubwub DARK ENERGY wub wub",
good point made here. I somewhat agree with your stance, but i moreso agree with your statement: "incredible breakthroughs always sound insane before they actually happen."

[Caitlin]

"wooboowubwub DARK ENERGY! wubwub"
hahahahaha!

why do we ever take scientists seriously when they make lame jokes like this?

You do raise some good points though I hate to say it!

I don't trust anyone who says "wooboowubwub DARK ENERGY! wubwub" in an essay.

[Caitlin]

"This is how the spaceship in Futurama works. I don't know the episode number but it is when the Doc clones himself and he is a kid and the doc at the same time."

That's kinda cool. Did he invent warp drive?

[Martin J Sallberg]

Alcubierre have proved theoretically that warp drive does not violate relativity. ESA have done an experiment (Towards a new test of general relativity), proving that a spinning supraconductor affects gravity. String theory among others predict that gravity and electromagnetism unify in higher dimensions. One probable explanation of the ESA result is that a small Meisner-against-Meisner pressure forced some of the electromagnetic field to leave normal spacetime. That effect could be made much stronger by placing several spinning supraconductors close to each other, each almost touching its neighbours. With many supraconductors, the Meisner effect would create an incrementally layered warp drive metric, where the lack of any one fixed event horizon would solve the problems of impossibility to turn off, Hawking radiation and that the distortion should destroy the spacecraft, that would be the problems with a more traditional Alcubierre warp metric.