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Warp Drive Might Be Less Impossible Than Previously Thought
runner_one writes "Harold 'Sonny' White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium that warp drive might be easier to achieve than earlier thought. The first concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy, studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter. But recent calculations showed that if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring the warp drive could be powered by the energy of a mass as small as 500 kg. Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more."
I'll believe it when I see time travelers from the future who have used their warp drives and FTL travel to come backward in time to tell us about it. (According to special relativity, the ability to travel faster than light is equivalent to the ability to travel backwards in time.)
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I love it when people say things are impossible. Then they go whizzing backwards into forgotten history as the impossible becomes the norm. Tomorrow will be like today. The future will be surprising.
People have used metamaterials to achieve results that seem to violate the laws of physics (such as materials having a negative refractive index). Speculating that such an exotic material could be produced is not hand waving. Just because we don't know how to do something today doesn't mean we'll never figure it out.
And no, the energy argument was not secondary. Before you could argue that even if we could make the materials necessary it would require a prohibitive amount of energy to work. Now the argument is only about the materials needed.
It's funny how Sci-Fi becomes reality on a relatively short time scale. Think about the stuff on Star Trek that is reality today, granted not exactly like ST, but damnably close. The MRI is in my opinion the preeminent scanning technology now. And cell phones and hand held radios - they're all essentially SDR's now. My little Yaesu VX-7r is a quad band radio, and I remember back in 1992 my Kenwood TH-28 was only a dual band and didn't have a general coverage receiver on it like my little Yaesu.
I would happily throw 90% of the human race under a bus for a working warp drive.
No, nothing can go faster than the speed of light because it will violate causality. Which is more or less forbidden by the entirety of physics.
It is true that faster-than-light travel would mean that we have causal sequences whose order is frame dependent, but would that be a violation of causality?
Yes, it does. Someone will observe you traveling faster than light, going from point A to point B faster than light would travel the same distance. If nobody sees you traveling faster than light, then how can you say you did so at all? And the whole point of relativity is that the laws of physics have to hold everywhere. That observer, depending on their own velocity in space-time, potentially see you arrive at your destination before you left, violating causality according to them. Given a few such warp ships, you could even arrange it so that that person would receive a message they had written and sent with you before they had actually written it. And then causality is broken for everyone.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."