Warp Drive Without Unknown Physics
Who wouldn’t love to warp space? Sadly, the Alcubierre drive requires negative energy which most likely won’t be available. But American physicists propose a warp drive with a slightly less exotic mechanism.
Image by ParallelVision from Pixabay
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Let’s face it. The majority of us would love to travel among the stars. There’s a whole genre of science fiction based around this idea. But, as a classic quote by, Douglas Adams says – Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. And none of our current technologies can even make a dent in the distances between stars. And now for dozens of years, people have been hoping one day we will discover a space drive similar to ones found in Star Trek or Star Wars allowing us to become an interstellar civilization.
It was precisely Star Trek that introduced us to warp drive. This technology used in the story to allow for faster-then-light (FTL) travel is actually described in a lot of detail in many of its episodes including a warp core, warp reactor that uses matter/antimatter annihilation to generate power, regulation through dilithium crystals, and much more. Star Trek has the warp core produce warp plasma which is used in its engines to bend space itself by creating a warp field. As the spacetime around the ship is bent it can travel at super-luminal speeds while the ship itself is actually moving at sub-liminal speed in its warp bubble.
Interestingly enough, back in 1994 a Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre Moya – an expert on Einstein’s relativity – bent the equations of Einstein in his study and proposed a real warp drive in which a space ship would fly inside a bubble of warped space-time allowing it to circumvent the laws of physics to fly at super-luminal speeds from an outsiders point of reference. And yes, Miguel was inspired by Star Trek.
The Alcubierre drive doesn’t break any known laws of physics and should theoretically work. But it does have a problem. It requires immense amounts of negative energy. Something that we aren’t even sure exists. And we aren’t even talking about where to get it as negative energy is quite exotic physics. But recent research shows that there are theoretical possibilities that are slightly less exotic and a bit more practical. Though still very far from being used in the real world.
American scientists Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire from the Advanced Propulsion Laboratory took Alcubierre’s drive and came up with a new way to run it. They say that instead of using negative energy we could use massive gravity to warp space. All we would need is to take the gravity of a planet and crush it down so it would fit inside a ship. Truthfully, that’s not exactly in our grasp but at least there’s no exotic physics or substances that might not even exist involved.
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