![]() "A good point of reference is to assume that the maximum subluminal speed is 0.99 times the speed of light (particle accelerator speeds), which you generalize to '1' for napkin calculations." "Subluminal speeds are how we've explored the galaxy thus far, it just depends on the degree to which we're talking!" he told Futurism in an email. Joseph Agnew, graduate research assistant at the University of Alabama with a penchant for warp drives, would tend to agree. White called subluminal warp a "very appealing idea," adding that if "one could achieve large fractions of the speed of light, then it might be possible to visit some of our stellar neighbors in decades rather than centuries. Rather than claiming outright that their drive can surpass the speed of light, Bobrick and Martire suggest the physical warp drive could be used to travel at subluminal speeds - but still orders of magnitude faster than conventional propulsion systems that exist today. "In the end, my view is that some of the same problems remain," White told Futurism after reviewing the paper, "so it is still to be determined if one might ever be able to implement the idea of a space warp." Harold White, the Advanced Propulsion Team Lead for the NASA Engineering Directorate and a longtime researcher of Alcubierre Drive-like concepts, told Futurism that he isn't quite convinced by Applied Physics' paper - though, he said, the ideas in it could still have merit. "Thus we have made warp drives physical and thus have built the foundational math for warp field mechanics." In fact, "we can now construct a warp drive that does not require negative mass and can be built with ordinary matter," Bobrick told Futurism. The catch is that, unlike the Alcubierre Drive, it would be able to go fast, but no faster than the speed of light. ![]() The Alcubierre Drive would require negative energy to work, and negative energy probably doesn't exist - or, at least, it isn't accounted for by today's models of physics.īut in their new paper, Bobrick and Martire suggest that some tweaks to the Alcubierre Drive could make it possible - without the need for negative energy. His Alcubierre Drive, a purely speculative warp drive, could theoretically allow a spacecraft to travel faster than light by contracting space in front of it and expanding it behind. The idea, which Bobrick fleshed out in the paper with Gianni Martire, a tech entrepreneur who founded Applied Physics, builds on an existing concept first brought forward by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in the early 1990s. Bobrick likened the current moment to the calculations done by NASA scientists in the early 1960s, which set the groundwork for Neil Armstrong's "one giant leap for mankind" as he stepped onto the Moon in July 1969. "Just because we have the mathematical understanding of how to achieve something, that does not mean we have the engineering ability," he added. Now it’s just extremely difficult, but doable." "Before our paper, the validity of warp drives technologically, given the science we know, was completely out of the question. "Simply put, a lot would still need to happen," Bobrick said in an email. But now - perhaps, and with numerous caveats - that may be starting to change.Ī pair of researchers associated with a little-known startup called Applied Physics recently published a paper, accepted into the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, suggesting that actual warp drives could be "constructed based on the physical principles known to humanity today."Īlexey Bobrick, a PhD student from Lund University in Sweden who co-authored the paper, admits that an immense amount of work is still needed before the idea could ever be practical. One potential workaround would be a "warp drive," popularized by the science fiction franchise "Star Trek," which would bend the fabric of spacetime to achieve travel at the speed of light - or even, possibly, faster.įor the most part, warp drives have remained confined to the realm of sci-fi. If we ever want a chance of traveling to other parts of our galaxy, we're going to have to go a lot faster than that. ![]() That might not sound like much - but even for one of the fastest spacecraft ever built by mankind, NASA's interplanetary traveler New Horizons, it'd take more than 78,000 Earth years to travel there at top speed. THE CLOSEST NEIGHBORING STAR TO OUR SUN, a small red dwarf called Proxima Centauri, is about 4.24 light-years from Earth. ![]()
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