This is probably one of the most exciting posts I’m going to make (for me anyway) both because I love Star Trek and also because guess what, Warp Drives are totally possible. Which isn’t to say we have the technology yet, but someday we might.
The idea of Star Trek’s warp drive is simple, really. Rather than moving faster than light, which is impossible, the star ship uses conventional engines to move at impulse (sub-light) speeds. Once the warp drive is activated, however, something interesting happens. The fabric of space in front of the ship is contracted, while the space behind it is simultaneously expanded.
Think of it like this: it might take you quite a few steps to move across your bedroom. But what if you shrunk your house to the size of a dollhouse? You could walk across your whole house in less than a second without actually moving any faster. A warp drive works just like that. Without the need to move very fast at all, you can move across a star system in minutes. Another fantastic advantage to a warp drive is the lack of time dilation. Since the spaceship is moving at slow speeds much less than the speed of light, it experiences the passage of time at the exact same rate as a resting object. Travelling to earth from the nearest start, then, wouldn’t mean coming back to earth 50 years after you left even if your trip felt like it took 5 seconds.
So warp drive doesn’t break any of the laws of physics, which is always good, but it gets better: people are actually working on designing one. Now, it’s still in the baby stages of developing the correct equations, but there has been some minor progress. One of the first scientific advancements in the creation of warp technology was by Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican physicist who wrote a paper describing how, with large amounts of negative energy, it would be possible to actually design a warp drive. This drive would create a single wave in spacetime which would contract and expand space just like in Star Trek, and the ship could ride this wave inside of a “warp bubble”. There are a few issues with Alcubierre’s warp equations though. First, the negative energy required to build a successful warp drive is enormous, and an amount of dense, exotic matter with unimaginable mass would be needed to make it work. In addition, the paper does not describe any method of actually controlling the warp drive.
While Alcubierre did not solve these issues in his paper, some of the lovely scientists at NASA have proposed a potential solution. Lead by Harold White, the team published a paper in sldkfj which addressed the major concerns of the Alcubierre Drive. The scientists generated a method of controlling the craft’s direction, as well as proposing a theory which would eliminate the requirement for exotic matter and allow the creation of a warp drive using a positive mass equivalent to that of a large spacecraft (such as Voyager).
Now, these technologies are still very far off. Nobody has yet succeeded in creating even a small warp bubble, and many questions remain about the safety of such a craft. For example, the creation and destruction of a warp bubble could cause the release of massive amounts of energy, which could seriously damage anything around the ship. In addition, nobody has yet solved the problem of escaping the warp bubble or turning off the warp drive, which is obviously pretty important. Still, it’s pretty exciting to think that in a few hundred years, we might just be able to make interstellar travel a reality.
On the Horizon 