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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."
Eject the core!
To all those anti-warp drive downers.. HAHAHAHA!!!!
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
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?
So this is about 100 times human energy consumption.
Still that's a shocking reduction from the mass of Jupiter.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
BTW: what is exactly ment with: warp drive could be powered by the energy of a mass as small as 500 kg In what time frame? I guess if you "annihilate" so much mass instantly ... you get indeed warped pretty hefty.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes, that's only the entire world's yearly electrical production in energy required. Much more possible. 10^19J.
Does this theory at all reduce the chance that when the Warp Drive ship arrives at its destination that it will emit a huge gamma ray burst? This planet destroying side effect would sure put a damper on any kind of arrival party for the warp drive ship.
use the Naquadria drive
I thought that it was a cup of tea, not a donut, that led to FTL travel...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
...only takes 1.21 gigawatts...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
to travel back using the gravitational pull of Earth's sun to perform the slingshot in time to this post and make a "First Post".
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I'm simply convinced that there is no way this massive universe is here without there being a practical way to travel it. There absolutely has to be a way.
So you are an Intelligent Design believer?
Now if they can just nail transporter / replicator technology we'll be set!
I call first member of Starfleet!
Look, I'm no scientist, but I am a top technician/engineer. I would be happy to be the test monkey and keep GOOD notes!
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936_2011016932.pdf Follow-up: http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/daydreaming-beyond-the-solar-system-with-warp-field-mechanics/
Please.
Dog is my co-pilot.
did the star trek ever explore the mechanics of his first warp flight? I remember one really bad movie where the crew of TNG met him but it was entirely superficial in regards to the technology.
"Harold 'Sonny' White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium"
After a line like this there needs to be math, lots of math, it's the whole "extraordinary claims require..." bit.
/. apparently), but i thought this was about testing our ability to confirm relativity (warp up space-time), rather than breaking it (FTLT, that would be excellent if we had infinite energy, if so we would have infinite time so the energy would be negligible?)
I'm probably the layman here (i still have some faith in
guess you were travelling at impulse
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Even a little bit impossible is still entirely impossible in my book.
sure there is. cryogenic freezing. hell of a lot more likely to be plausible than warp drives. you can get anywhere at walking speed if you or the universe doesn't die in the mean time...
While this formulation puts energy requirements within practical reach, actual use for FTL travel still runs into the problem of effectively censoring the ship out of existence on account of an inability to pop the bubble once formed, never mind the Hawking Radiation.
Call me when they get the demand down to the output rating of my Mr Fusion.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm simply convinced that there is no way this massive universe is here without there being a practical way to travel it. There absolutely has to be a way.
So you are an Intelligent Design believer?
That would be Intelligent Traveling believer.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
That's great news, but there were a number of other difficulties with the Alcubierre drive, iirc. I don't see how this gets around any of those, like the spacetime "bubble" becoming filled with lethal radiation or the inability to create a bubble with a pre-existing non-superluminal mass inside it.
So, more possible... but still impossible. Alrighty, then. :)
Yeah! Count me in!
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.
I remember reading a somewhat later paper on an analysis of the Alcubierre warp drive that pointed out that a side effect of the space-bending was that there was no reason that the inside of the "warp bubble" had to be smaller than the outside, reminiscent of a certain blue box, so that you could conceivably fit a starliner (or a star for that matter) within an atomic-scale warp field, radically reducing its cross-sectional area and the hard radiation resulting from the annihilation of matter that enters the warped space. They don't mention anything about the size of the theoretical ship in the article, which makes me wonder if the energy requirements scale with warp bubble size, and if so if they factored in asymmetric dimensions. If not, well then I could see a future for planet-movers...
Regardless though 500kg of mass-energy is *nothing* for something like this, only 4.5e19 J, or about 10% of annual global energy consumption. Though one problem I remember was that it's impossible to stop the "warp drive" from within the bubble, requiring instead some outside mechanism to return the contents to normal space, which could be a challenge considering that you won't be able to see a FTL vehicle coming to catch it. And heaven help you if you miss, though they didn't mention anything about steering so perhaps it would be possible to loop around for another attempt.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The power requirements for warp drive will diminish by a factor of 23 every year.
My bet is on something similar, but instead of freezing our bodies, we just upload our minds into the ship and modify our perception of time in software.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
if compressing the space in front of you ALSO compresses the time dimension of spacetime, causing you to travel faster through time as well, keeping you in your light cone. Travelling this way would not be any different from the conventional way (and enjoying lorentz time contraction while you do so), except instead of rocket propulsion you have wave propulsion.
I know that a warp drive is exciting and all, but after they figure how to move an entire spaceship faster than the speed of light, they'll have 500 more problems before they can get anywhere near interesting with it. Transmitting data, on the other hand, is probably a lot easier, and there's a lot of cool real world uses for it. For example sending back images of astronauts hanging out at that Earth-like planet that is 20 light years away.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
you can get anywhere at walking speed if you or the universe doesn't die in the mean time...
The JOEs ('Just One Earth'ers) claim that since nobody's invented and developed a car, all we'll ever have is walking, and their feet hurt, so we're not going 2 kilometers away, so give up already and finance our $PET_PROJECT_OF_THE_MINUTE. The 'Warpers' say 'Why walk when we're in the process of developing a HumVee?'
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
There's about 1 hydrogen atom / proton per cubic meter. Even at sub-c speeds, they create seriously radioactive friction. And running into a grain of sand at some % of c would have the effect of a large bomb. So, you not only have to warp space, you have to move the matter IN the space, and do it at >c velocity. Since matter can't move >c, you can't get the protons and occasional neutrons and sand grains and other interstellar detritus out of the way. A grain of sand hitting anything at 10c would be catastrophic, and within a few hours of colliding with the interplanetary and interstellar medium would turn the ship into a glowing radioactive dead thing.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Ultimately it may require making custom atoms to do specific tasks and possibly have very unusual configurations of subatomic particle. Just look at how different nano particles react compared to natural forms of the same elements. It may mean building atoms with opposite spins of particles or configurations of quantum particles that don't occur in nature. They've managed to build atom by atom but this would be orders of magnitude more difficult. We don't even have a science for affecting quantum particles let alone building them like tinker toys. It's a little like building a gravity drive that doesn't require mass. With current science it's impossible but when you start hand fabricating sub atomic particles all bets are off.
A brief history of the future with warp drives:
Cult/terrorist leader: We are now on a holy mission to destroy the infidels. Aim the ship at the planet earth.
Engage!
The planet Earth goes boom and intelligent life evolves somewhere else in the galaxy to repeat this cycle.
The article doesn't explain what the warp drive actually does. As far as I can tell the idea can be roughly phrased as "rather than making a long journey, cause the road in front of you to become short, then make a short journey". The drive would contract spacetime between the object and its destination to make it really small. Apparently to do this, one has to also affect spacetime behind the object, expanding a region of it. Once spacetime is distorted appropriately, the long journey becomes short. Seems vaguely plausible - as much as physics ever does.
On the other hand, the process of distorting space time should propagate at the speed of light at best. So the ship would spend a standard amount of time bending space-time and not moving, then move a short distance and arrive at the destination. And then after the trip, we'd still have all this distorted space-time to either fix or leave stretched.
I think something is either impossible, or possible. It's binary, and like a binary system, you can't have something between 0 and 1.
You could argue that maybe the possibility is unknown (tri-state logic), but then the value is null, to indicate unknown.
Nearly not untrue!
Give me a little more non-fake false hope, and I'll use the slingshot effect to go back in time and uncancel the original series!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Since the actual kinetic energy of a ship traveling this way would not be proportional to the square of it's velocity, it's hard to say what would happen if were to collide with another body.
The picture in TFA looks like it could be the prototype of a vulcan ship!
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
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.
Depends on metric expansion of space. If you want to get somewhere receding from you faster than the speed of light you'll never get there as spacetime expansion is supposedly exponential.
A unicorn shitting cheeseburgers would be more economical.
I would think that the warping of space would be the big issue, not the kinetic energy. How much warping would it take to throw off the atmosphere or a chunk of the crust? What would happen if a chunk of the planet was temporarily missing and gravity forced the planet to round out--and then the piece comes back? No extra energy would be needed, just the gravitational potential energy stored in the planet.
Ssshhh... You're supposed to forget about all that and enjoy the virtual simulation of ancient times you're currently emeshed in until the proximity alarm wakes us.
Who is John Cabal?
White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory. ...
"We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said.
I can imagine how it might go:
White: "More ... power! We ... have ... got ... to get that ... table up ... to ... warp factor ... 0.00000001!"
Technician: "Aye, professor, but I'm already given 'er all the power we've got. She can' take no more"
Grad student: "My calculations indicate a slim chance of success if we reverse the polarity."
Technician: "I canno' do it. You'll blow the whole rig fo' sure!"
White: "We ... have ... no other ... choice. Reverse ... polarity!"
(All occupants of lab now alternately grab railings to the left then to the right.)
The final shape should actually end up looking not like a toroid, but a disc, or... "flying saucer" if you will. The absolute first thing we should do with them though is send them back in time and play mind tricks on generations past, otherwise we'll miss many decades of inspiration on Hollywood films which ultimately serve to desensitize the populace towards first contact.
however, once I learned that the American public collectively spends more on new cell phones each year than they do on NASA's budget, NASA spending money on silly things like this bothers me a lot less.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
dark matter is a form of exotic matter. maybe there are other forms already available in nature that we can capture and put to use
So, what you're saying is, the answer to the Fermi Paradox is "Religion"...
500kg mass-energy sounds like an awful lot.
That's about 4.5e19 J, or about 0.5% of the world's oil reserves. Might be actually doable.
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
Okay, raise your hand if you didn't know already that the shape of your warp field has to be precisely perfect for it to work efficiently? That was on 3 if not 4 star trek series multiple times :-P
TFA said they're going to try to construct a tabletop version. Only thing is, the whole concept rests on constructing (and containing) a ring of exotic matter. They don't have any of that, do they?
Religion had to have the right answer to something.
So we just need anti-gravitons? I'm on it.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
"In fact, I propose that anti-matter has negative mass, not opposite charge as generally accepted."
That might have been a viable theory half a century ago or more. But antimatter has been observed to have positive mass.
Step 1: Maths says maybe, if one ignores lack of negative mass
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Engage at Warp 2
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
As evidence that less impossible is still truly impossible, there is Fermi's Paradox. If it's possible for living things with minds like ours to have evolved elsewhere, and if practical interstellar travel is just out of our reach, we have to wonder why they aren't visiting us.
You can do all sorts of crazy things if you start allowing random theoretically-possible particles to exist in your systems. For example, tether a charged ball of negative inertial mass to a same-charged one of positive inertial mass, and they both take off accelerating indefinitely toward c with no energy input ;) The negative inertial mass ball experiences an attraction toward the positive ball, while the positive one experiences a repulsion.
The sort of craziness that comes out of most imaginary particles is, to me, highly suggestive of their nonexistence. Most seem like the sort of thing that could end up destroying the universe or at least leaving some pretty darned big signs of their existence. And given that the universe has built some pretty massive particle colliders on its own...
No, she's fine. My associate is vomiting for a totally unrelated reason.
Season 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The episode was call "Where no one has been before" and it required the presence of a Traveller to make it work.
But incidentally, Wesley reconfigures the wave to a donut shape.
"less impossible" ? Does that sound a bit like 'slightly pregnant'? Possibility is a binary state- on, or off; no shades of grey allowed.
As often happens, the /. blurb is a poor reflection of TFA, which says that warp speed "may not be as unrealistic as once thought".
TFA seems a bit optimistic in posing a possible method for faster than light speed. The slashdot response tends to be antagonistic. The heartwarming thing is that all are excited about the idea. Deep inside we want to defy the rules, like Capt. James T. Kirk, and find a way. Who knows- that silly inner child in us may find a solution some day. Then what?
...omphaloskepsis often...
A brief history of the future with warp drives:
Cult/terrorist leader: "We are now on a holy mission to destroy the infidels. Aim the ship at the planet earth. Engage!"
The planet Earth goes boom and intelligent life evolves somewhere else in the galaxy to repeat this cycle.
At the last nanosecond, the deep space defense network trips the home defence network to rotate the dimensional phase of the Earth slightly, allowing the terrorists to shoot on by never to know whether they're still on the way to the target or just missed. "Ha haaa! Doofuses."
Geez, I can't believe you missed that. "Good guys always win. Bad guys always lose." It's fundamental.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
So are you suggesting that an ancient inorganic intelligence build a warp drive billions of years ago on earth and that is how we ended up with the moon? Interesting? Too bad we don't have a tricorder to see if the moon has residual warp trace???
Actually from what I've read antimatter has negative time. I'm going to guess the gravity is positive. There is a well known Physicist who just recently published a very interesting book. One of the things he proposes is that there is no dark matter or energy. He proposes that at the instant of the big bang, the polarity of the birth caused matter to go in one direction and antimatter to go in the other. That we are on a toroidal arc and at just past 7 billion years we hit the apex of our trajectory and that we are now accelerating towards the antimatter universe and its accelerating towards us. That in a couple billion years it will hit us and there will be a massive explosion as all matter is annihilated. And this will be the start of the next big bang. Cool idea, eh?
For more information you can look up the "Big Bagle" theory
While you're at it sparky, how about a little ice from the replicators, eh? Priorities puhleez!!!
Sounds like someone has peered into the storage room of his local McDonalds...
#DeleteChrome
they would probably veiw stellar travel as a affront to their divinity of choice sort of neo-amish life style and before it is wide spread enough to be hijacked like an airliner we would already have multiple off earth settlements/colonies. more likely is religious groups going hiring a starship and go off creating a new earth away from the unrighteous infidels and heathens who commit the great sin of looking sounding acting or thinking differently. maybe he can do what happened in the hitchhikers guide and trick all of them into going on ship A while the rest of us go on ship B after.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
I think it can have negative mass, but to make the observations work it would also have to have negative time.
And you have a problem with that? Honest question. :-)
Have you noticed all those guys over there fiddling around with Planck size Superstring stuff, and you're hesitant to consider negative time?
It's all just a bunch of big, complicated equations that we plug values into hoping the Universe doesn't blow up when we do it, or $DEITY doesn't smack us down for testing it, yeah? I say we try it. Whatta we got to lose?
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Will be cheaper to use Jupiter than paying the Apple lawsuit for using a Star Trek based device with rounded corners
I'll assume, for the sake of argument, that conservation of energy still applies to the discussion. That is, you can't move a chunk of the crust into orbit without expending more energy than the gravitation potential energy thusly imparted into said chunk.
Let's assume the energy to make the handwavium drive go is equal to the potential energy of a 500 kg mass, as it says in TFS. Presumably we've got matter-energy conversion or antimatter fuel to make this work, that's no more implausible than the handwavium required to make the FTL drive work in the first place.
How much energy is liberated by converting 500 kg into energy, say in the form of 250 kg antimatter to 250 kg matter? About two hundred and fifteen times as much as was released by the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. Make no mistake - that's a huge amount of energy, but nowhere near planet cracking levels. For another point of comparison, the impact that (probably) killed the non-avian dinosaurs was a couple million times as powerful.
Further, if we've got some way of supplying that kind of power, in a package small enough to fit on a spacecraft, wouldn't the power plant itself be a more dangerous weapon than a handwavium suicide run? Dangerous in the sense of city busting, not planet cracking.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
... what are you waiting for? Build one already!
What would happen if a chunk of the planet was temporarily missing and gravity forced the planet to round out--and then the piece comes back? No extra energy would be needed, just the gravitational potential energy stored in the planet.
The chunk would need to be relocated to somewhere where it had the same potential energy (e.g, slightly closer to the sun), or the difference in potential energy would need to be taken from somewhere.
Of course, the same problem would prevent ships from warping out of a solar system without expending huge amounts of energy in a very short time to increase the ship's potential energy. Circumventing this problem without expending the energy, would violate the conservation of energy, and provide a way to produce unlimited energy. Just warp water to the top of a mountain, and let it run down again, driving a turbine, over and over again.
Knew it, Star Trek was real ;-) and Geordi did visit the 21st century to leave that piece of advice for cases when inverting the polarity of shield emitters wasn't enough.
Of course, even if it only worked 1/10th as well as it could, consider what that would do to conventional drives. Getting rid of the effect of mass even to a very reasonable amount would allow us to either make much larger ships to, say, get to Mars, or it would allow us to get there in weeks or days. The original design says that it would allow for speeds up to 10x, but it also would allow a ship to go the speed of light (or close enough so that it doesn't matter) with a small fraction of the energy. That's impressive any way you slice it.
Actually, It's not inverse mass. There are several pieces of strong evidence for inverse charge. The amount of energy it takes to push around a positron using magnetic fields is the same amount it would take to push around regular electrons. The fact that anti-matter can be trapped using fields of opposite polarity used to trap regular matter proves that antimatter has inverse charge to matter.
Also, there are some interesting (calculated theoretical) behaviors to inverse mass objects. An inverse mass object will fall towards a massive object of equal absolute mass, but the regular mass object will fall away from the inverse mass object. There are also weird things that happen with infinite gravitational potential energy, and none of the effects have been observed as yet.
Just remember that mass and charge are not interchangeable, and they have distinct effects when inverted. Electromagnetism is roughly 10^36 times stronger than gravitation, so a single particle with inverted mass but normal charge is unlikely to interact any differently at currently achievable energy scales than a particle of normal mass and normal charge. Especially when most of the experiments today use electromagnetism as the only input force to manipulate where particles go, and what they do.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/8239/vulcanships.jpg
Where can we buy shares? This opens the universe for trading. The return in investment could be one over a small infinity. Much better than one over a large infinity!
Oh I say - unicorn burgers - now that's a good idea!
Not really. Electromagnetic charge can be positive or negative, but (except of course on Voyager) there are no anti-photons. Or better, photons are their own anti-particles.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I think you and I have different definitions of civilization. I'm not saying humans can't get there, but I wouldn't call that an interstellar civilization. I would call that multiple stellar civilizations. When you separate people by a wall of time that is a significant portion of a human lifespan, you've effectively separated out civilization. Round trip communications from one end of your 16 light year radius is 64 years (diameter 32 light years, there and back). Feel free to insert your own terminology.
I have to wonder what else you're assuming in your rejection of FTL
I didn't reject FTL. I said FTL implies time travel. It sounds like YOU are assuming time travel is impossible. Which would be fine except for the hypocrisy.
I also provided possible internally-consistent universes that could have FTL without causality violations. I honestly don't know how I could have given you more.
Coincidence? I think not.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Presumably the Hawking radiation would bleed energy out of the warp, shrinking it. Cosmic friction, what?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
'I'm sorry I broke your hip, Mrs. Henderson.'
Yep, and if anti-matter gravitationally repels itself AND regular matter, then it would form an intergalactic gas pushing the universe apart like "dark energy" and also producing a bunch of gamma radiation emanating from the edge of the galaxy. But again, we need to know how it actually interacts gravitationally rather than make stuff up.
"Good guys always win. Bad guys always lose." It's fundamental.
Unfortunately, you don't find out which side you were on until after it's all over.
He who would be a man, must be a nonconformist. -- Emerson
"Thanks Wesley! We couldn't have done it without you!"
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I think you miscalculated the worth of a warp drive. Sure, it'd be cool. But think of this:
1) Where would you go with it? You don't know, do you?
2) If you knew 1), what would you do when you got there? How would you breathe? Eat? Set up a new civilization? We can't even set up self-sustaining habitats on *earth*.
3) How would you support your life while you're traveling, assuming it's not so fast as to be trivial?
4) If you got a "working warp drive", d'you think you could figure out how it worked without 90% of humanity? Or is "warp drive technology, and all required technologies to reproduce warp drive" what you really meant?
Personally, I wouldn't trade 90% of humanity for a warp drive unless it came with solutions to all the above and more. And I'd think of it like this, is it worth a 90% chance of me personally dying immediately to assure that no single planetary disaster can ever cause humanity's extinction? Would my wife and other dependents go for that deal?
--PM
Handwavium? I like it. I like it more than "unobtanium."
Esoteric reference.
I would happily throw 90% of the human race under a bus for a working warp drive.
Discard the rest of the male population and keep just the top quintile of the women.
Hmm, on second thought you can keep your warp drive, I'm staying here!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Too bad IBM isn't sponsoring this research.
I think I still have an IDE drive with Warp on it somewhere around here.
Not happy now!
With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.
For reference, the nearest star system, Alpha Centari, is 4.2LY away. With a ship or probe equipped with one of these drives, in theory it could go there and back in less than a year. The next closest system would take a year to get to.
Point well made.
You mean that the "science consultants" from DARPA, JPL, CALTECH, MIT, and even NASA, and various other places that advised the Creator of Star Trek (Gene Roddenberrry) as well as the writers were RIGHT???? Wow, that is truly an AMAZING COINCIDENCE!!!! Next thing you know we will have communicators, Mr. Spocks data tablets, and selective lethality weapons!
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
Donuts....Is there anything they can't do?
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
If you set the subspace carrier wave to 7.1 terahertz and realign the di-lithium matrix with the deflector dish we could in theory achieve warp 9.5.
This is more like what happens when you take a small paper boat, and rub one end of it liberally with bar soap.
when you float it on the meniscus of the water, the soap (negative mass energy) alters the surface tension (spacial curvature) which propels the ship forward.
In this case, we also place a heavy normal gravitational wake in front of the ship, (something that would contract the surface of the water, rather than spread it), causing the ship to be also "falling" forward at the same time.
The net result is that a whole "chunk" of spacetime gets "loosened", and glides along without friction. the entire reference frame of the vehicle gets moved around.
Understanding the higgs field will simply allow us to better understand how we could create effective anti-mass to push the ship with. (instead of a gravity "well", it creates a gravity "bump")
We already have cryogenic freezing. It's just that it only works for embryos.
A 1 liter bottle of frozen embryos could store millions of people, and they could travel for thousands of years with no food, water or oxygen.
You would still need an artificial womb to birth them, and a teaching robot to raise them. We should be able to do that in a few centuries.
I have a new favorite material - it used to be unobtanium, but for discussions like this, handwavium is much more accurate!
Something is either possible, or impossible; hence, it does not make sense for something to be "less impossible." That's like saying that something "exists less" than another thing; things either exist, or they don't. For example, my barber exists, whereas barbers who shave all and only those barbers who don't shave themselves don't exist.