10x the Speed of Light- Warp Speed Ahead!

OK, this is pure Geek rather than sword- but it is maybe the coolest thing ever. This post is going to be long on ‘bottom-line’ and short on detail but it’s easy enough to find this information online- the internet is abuzz with it. Last month NASA said a warp drive that could travel at speeds of up to 10x the speed of light was potentially realistic and that the road to the stars might open within our lifetimes.

Wow.

This all stems from the work of a Mexican theoretical physicist named Alcubierre who described a warp drive in mathematical terms in a paper in 1996. The problems with his warp-drive were two-fold. First off it relied on something called ‘Imaginary Negative Energy’ which many scientist don’t believe really exists. Second of all it would require a ridiculous amount of energy. How ridiculous? Well, if one could instantly convert the entire mass of Jupiter to energy that ought to just about do it. Not very practical.

But people just can’t seem to leave well enough alone so another theoretical physicist has ‘tweaked’ the original design. It turn out it doesn’t need so much energy after all. In fact NASA called the current estimates of the energy requirements ‘Doable.’ No one is saying what that means except that we can possibly do it. One hurdle is perhaps down…

The Imaginary Negative Energy one is still a problem but it may not be for much longer. There is already a theoretical physicist who claims that Negative Energy may not be quite so imaginary… and he may have demonstrated it in his lab. His work is under peer-review at the moment but it sure sounds like he is onto something. As we speak there is another physicist that has a prototype on his bench that he hopes will produce measurable distortions in space-time- a key technology for our Warp drive. It turns out that all of these breakthroughs relate to the fundamentally electromagnetic nature of space-time. Don’t ask me how- the math loses me immediately.

So how does it work? In a nutshell you compress space-time in front of the vehicle and expand it behind the vehicle. the vehicle itself sits in a ‘warp-bubble’ of flat-space (flattish actually) between these distortions and is effectively not moving from it’s own perspective. Since the vehicle is ‘not moving’ there is no inertial mass buildup from velocity; you become exempt from Dr.Einstein’s relativity effects and this allows you to appear to break the speed-limit of the universe. You don’t of course as the ship is technically not moving- space-time is moving around it.

‘Doable.’ NASA says FTL travel to the stars in our lifetimes is ‘Doable.’ Pause a moment and let that sink in.

This year DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has also funded the ’100 Year Starship’ initiative (100yss.com,) a group that will examine the logistics, financing and technical hurdles of using emerging and existing technologies to launch an interstellar mission within the next century. These hurdles are not insignificant; even at 10X the speed of light (which is only one of the scenarios that they are working with) it would take several months each way to travel to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri- which coincidentally astronomers have just announced has at least one planet. Anyway a trip to this star system is probably looking at a minimum of a one-year mission-time to do a thorough job of looking around. Long-duration missions of this type are quite complicated and technically difficult but those are probably things that we can overcome. We’re pretty clever when you get right down to it.

At very least such a drive opens the solar system- Mars would be minutes away at these velocities. The asteroids and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn would be practically in our backyard. The solar system will become our playground. The long-lost Sci-Fi future of my childhood may be coming at last.

this is a very exciting time to be a Geek!