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Uncategorized Tuesday, September 18th 2012 at 1:45 pm

Warp Drive Tech May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Still Probably Impossible

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The warp drive that powered the Enterprise and enabled the ship to travel faster than the speed of light may not be a flight of fancy, says a NASA physicist. A design for a similar drive was proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre almost 20 years ago, but its energy consumption would have been outlandish, rendering it impractical. However, Harold White at the the Johnson Space Center has made some tweaks to the original design that he thinks could move faster than light travel from fiction to science. No, it doesn’t involve dilithium crystals. Yeah, we’re disappointed about that too.

The proposed warp drive sees a ship the size of a football suspended in a ring which is also the warp drive that distorts space time around it, providing faster than light propulsion technology. It would do this by (very, very theoretically) expanding space time in front of the ship and contracting it behind the ship, while the vessel itself remains in a bubble of unwarped space time. Which is pretty neat in concept, even if the whole football-ring design does put the lasting image of the world’s most famous erectile dysfunction commercial back in our head.

White spoke about his work on the warp design earlier this week at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, where he outlined changes to the design that could cut its energy consumption. One of the major changes proposed is turning the flat ring in the original design into a more rounded design reminiscent of a giant, time warping space donut and could drastically slash the amount of energy needed to operate the ship. More energy savings could, in principle, be achieved by introducing oscillation to the intensity of the space warp, moving regularly from a strong warp at the front of the ships to a strong warp at the aft and then back again.

In the original Alcubierre design, the warp drive would have needed energy equal to the mass energy of the planet Jupiter to operate the drive, which is really a lot to ask. Then again, we are talking about doing things that spit in the face of the laws of physics here, so maybe we shouldn’t expect them to be too easy.

(via Slashgear)

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  • Idlethoughts

    Any explanation on the mechanism? The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that could warp space time is extreme gravity, which I guess the mass of jupiter in the volume of a football would cause. Even so it would be unable to surpass the speed of light as doing so would break causality as well as a lot of other decades old laws physics.
    Also the title should probably be “possible” but “infeasible” not the other way around.

  • Davelah

    If man can walk on the Moon! that open the door to SPACE so why not go. only GOD sets limits

  • Ian

    We set OUR own limits.

  • Luke

    The “laws” of physics are based on our current observations, they are neither perfect nor finished.

  • http://www.facebook.com/paul.giachetti Paul Giachetti

    I think you meant to say the SHAPE of a football… A football-sized ship would be pretty useless to us gigantic human beings… =)

  • Idlethoughts

    Very true, but you still shouldn’t base a theoretical technology off of a concept inconstant with currently excepted physics if you don’t have a working model of physics which allows for your mechanism and has all the math work out, or at very least create a replicatable example of your tech working.

    For the record I would love to see our perception of physics turned up on its head and open up decades worth of new science to explore, I’m just cautiously skeptical about it. Would be a shame to get all exited about another “faster than light” neutrino and end up disappointed when it turns out to be a measuring error.

  • Idlethoughts

    *accepted

  • Asreal

    Isn’t ANYONE gonna say it?

    “Ye cannae change the laws of physics!!”