Faster-than-light travel: Is warp drive really possible?

[ZiprHead]

A NASA scientist recently released a report analysing the feasibility of warp drive as a means of faster-than-light travel. Could this Star Trek technology really be possible?

In the Universe of Star Trek, humanity ventures out into the Galaxy on 5 April 2063 with the first ever journey on a ship capable of faster-than-light travel. The newly-invented ‘warp drive’ not only lets humans explore the cosmos, but attracts the attention of Vulcans and brings about our first contact with an alien species.

It’s been 54 years since we were first introduced to the Enterprise, and many of Star Trek’s futuristic technologies have since been invented, from handheld communicators to universal translators. Warp drive is the next obvious choice: Voyager 1, which has travelled furthest from Earth of any spacecraft, took nearly 35 years to leave the Solar System. Not exactly handy for interstellar travel.

Luckily for humanity, theoretical physicists have been working on it. In May 2020, NASA scientist Harold “Sonny” White released an internal feasibility report discussing the technology from the point of view of ‘early mission planning’.

The Alcubierre drive uses the same concept. The ‘bubble’ surrounding the ship is an area of space-time that is compressed in front of the ship and expanded behind it. As with gravity, you could create this distortion using a large amount of mass. Alternatively, thanks to Einstein’s E = mc2 (energy is equal to mass, times the speed of light squared), you could equally use a huge amount of energy.

Inside the bubble, space-time is completely flat, meaning the space travellers wouldn’t notice any strange, relativistic effects. The result is that the bubble of space-time is hurled across the Universe, with the travellers sitting comfortably inside their ship, speedometer still reading the same number.

Unfortunately, actually creating a warp drive is even harder than it sounds. “You have to have a very, very large amount of energy,” says José Natário, Associate Professor in mathematics at the Instituto Superior Técnico in the University of Lisbon.

Power shouldn't be an issue. We just need some dilithium crystals.

 

[Harry Bosch]

A NASA scientist recently released a report analysing the feasibility of warp drive as a means of faster-than-light travel. Could this Star Trek technology really be possible?

In the Universe of Star Trek, humanity ventures out into the Galaxy on 5 April 2063 with the first ever journey on a ship capable of faster-than-light travel. The newly-invented ‘warp drive’ not only lets humans explore the cosmos, but attracts the attention of Vulcans and brings about our first contact with an alien species.

It’s been 54 years since we were first introduced to the Enterprise, and many of Star Trek’s futuristic technologies have since been invented, from handheld communicators to universal translators. Warp drive is the next obvious choice: Voyager 1, which has travelled furthest from Earth of any spacecraft, took nearly 35 years to leave the Solar System. Not exactly handy for interstellar travel.

Luckily for humanity, theoretical physicists have been working on it. In May 2020, NASA scientist Harold “Sonny” White released an internal feasibility report discussing the technology from the point of view of ‘early mission planning’.

The Alcubierre drive uses the same concept. The ‘bubble’ surrounding the ship is an area of space-time that is compressed in front of the ship and expanded behind it. As with gravity, you could create this distortion using a large amount of mass. Alternatively, thanks to Einstein’s E = mc2 (energy is equal to mass, times the speed of light squared), you could equally use a huge amount of energy.

Inside the bubble, space-time is completely flat, meaning the space travellers wouldn’t notice any strange, relativistic effects. The result is that the bubble of space-time is hurled across the Universe, with the travellers sitting comfortably inside their ship, speedometer still reading the same number.

Unfortunately, actually creating a warp drive is even harder than it sounds. “You have to have a very, very large amount of energy,” says José Natário, Associate Professor in mathematics at the Instituto Superior Técnico in the University of Lisbon.

Power shouldn't be an issue. We just need some dilithium crystals.

Nah. Just toss two black holes together each time you need to do the jump and you'd have all the power that you need! Easy stuff.

 

[WAB]

A NASA scientist recently released a report analysing the feasibility of warp drive as a means of faster-than-light travel. Could this Star Trek technology really be possible?





Power shouldn't be an issue. We just need some dilithium crystals.

Nah. Just toss two black holes together each time you need to do the jump and you'd have all the power that you need! Easy stuff.

Main thing to remember: no red shirts allowed on away teams!

 

[DBT]

If you could travel forward in space but backward in time? But then it may still take many years to reach your destination from your perspective even if you arrived home from your journey a minute after you left? The unbreakable rules of relativity?

 

[barbos]

This shit again?
It's not only not feasible it's flat out impossible.

 

[DBT]

This shit again?
It's not only not feasible it's flat out impossible.

It's interesting to speculate.

 

[SLD]

This shit again?
It's not only not feasible it's flat out impossible.

It's interesting to speculate.

It’s not impossible. It happened before. During the inflationary universe. What drove the expansion of space itself? Is that basically what an Alcubierre drive Is Doing? It’s expanding space behind it to move away at an extraordinarily fast speed. Not sure if we can ever harness the power of inflaton field, but FTL isn’t prohibited obviously.

 

[Bronzeage]

Will they use Bistromath, or go straight to the Hyperimprobability Drive?

 

[Bomb#20]

According to Wikipedia, to build an Alcubierre drive our starship engineers would have to lay their hands on some negative mass, a.k.a., Unobtainium.

 

[barbos]

This shit again?
It's not only not feasible it's flat out impossible.

It's interesting to speculate.

It’s not impossible. It happened before. During the inflationary universe. What drove the expansion of space itself? Is that basically what an Alcubierre drive Is Doing? It’s expanding space behind it to move away at an extraordinarily fast speed. Not sure if we can ever harness the power of inflaton field, but FTL isn’t prohibited obviously.

Even if you can harness power of inflation the way you like it would still have to violate special/general relativity causality to be useful.
Alcubierre drive does not let you FTL travel in any practical way. Even if you manage to make it would be practically useless. You can travel fast but you have to start your engine first and time to start your engine is such that you would get faster by sublight engine.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

According to Wikipedia, to build an Alcubierre drive our starship engineers would have to lay their hands on some negative mass, a.k.a., Unobtainium.

Just invent the concept of anti-Higgs bosons and you'll be fine.

 

[Toni]

For sure, they should make speeder bikes.

 

[DBT]

I imagine that particle collisions would be an ever bigger problem as you get to relativistic velocities, even gas or dust particles could do a great deal of harm.

 

[repoman]

What if you could go into the 4th spatial dimension and zip around like a 3-d person can in Flatland?

The better analogy I would be for a Flatlander to be plucked out of its universe have a trip in ours and then get put back. Would it even know what was going on or be able to get back to 3d space unaided?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I imagine that particle collisions would be an ever bigger problem as you get to relativistic velocities, even gas or dust particles could do a great deal of harm.

High relativistic travel would be a major nightmare to protect the ship. However, warp drives do not have this problem.

(To illustrate how big the shielding problem is, there was a question over on StackOverflow about a 1 ton ball of tungsten heading from the edge of the solar system for the Earth at 99.99% of lightspeed. The question was what happens to the Earth--and amazingly the answer is not at all catastrophic. It's vaporized in 7 minutes and the gas is rapidly dispersed.)

 

[DBT]

I imagine that particle collisions would be an ever bigger problem as you get to relativistic velocities, even gas or dust particles could do a great deal of harm.

High relativistic travel would be a major nightmare to protect the ship. However, warp drives do not have this problem.

(To illustrate how big the shielding problem is, there was a question over on StackOverflow about a 1 ton ball of tungsten heading from the edge of the solar system for the Earth at 99.99% of lightspeed. The question was what happens to the Earth--and amazingly the answer is not at all catastrophic. It's vaporized in 7 minutes and the gas is rapidly dispersed.)

A large mass and thick atmosphere helps. A spacecraft hull hasn't got that buffer.

 

[repoman]

I imagine that particle collisions would be an ever bigger problem as you get to relativistic velocities, even gas or dust particles could do a great deal of harm.

High relativistic travel would be a major nightmare to protect the ship. However, warp drives do not have this problem.

(To illustrate how big the shielding problem is, there was a question over on StackOverflow about a 1 ton ball of tungsten heading from the edge of the solar system for the Earth at 99.99% of lightspeed. The question was what happens to the Earth--and amazingly the answer is not at all catastrophic. It's vaporized in 7 minutes and the gas is rapidly dispersed.)

you mean eroded by the solar wind? that would make sense, since the edge of the solar sytems is hours if not days away depending on the definition.

 

[DBT]

I imagine that particle collisions would be an ever bigger problem as you get to relativistic velocities, even gas or dust particles could do a great deal of harm.

High relativistic travel would be a major nightmare to protect the ship. However, warp drives do not have this problem.

(To illustrate how big the shielding problem is, there was a question over on StackOverflow about a 1 ton ball of tungsten heading from the edge of the solar system for the Earth at 99.99% of lightspeed. The question was what happens to the Earth--and amazingly the answer is not at all catastrophic. It's vaporized in 7 minutes and the gas is rapidly dispersed.)

you mean eroded by the solar wind? that would make sense, since the edge of the solar sytems is hours if not days away depending on the definition.

Good point.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I imagine that particle collisions would be an ever bigger problem as you get to relativistic velocities, even gas or dust particles could do a great deal of harm.

High relativistic travel would be a major nightmare to protect the ship. However, warp drives do not have this problem.

(To illustrate how big the shielding problem is, there was a question over on StackOverflow about a 1 ton ball of tungsten heading from the edge of the solar system for the Earth at 99.99% of lightspeed. The question was what happens to the Earth--and amazingly the answer is not at all catastrophic. It's vaporized in 7 minutes and the gas is rapidly dispersed.)

you mean eroded by the solar wind? that would make sense, since the edge of the solar sytems is hours if not days away depending on the definition.

Eroded by the interplanetary medium. The collisions are energetic! It takes 7 minutes to dump enough energy into it to vaporize the whole mass. Of course it radiates away some but nowhere near enough to keep it from being promptly destroyed. Slower speeds obviously mean an object lives longer but you can't get anywhere near c without major heat problems.

 

[DBT]

With interstellar travel, it may not be a case of erosion. It may be a sudden and catastrophic collision with a clump of interstellar debris.