58
Is Star Trek’s Warp Drive Possible?
(daily.jstor.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
58 points (100.0% liked)
Science
13003 readers
25 users here now
Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Using a warp drive for that purpose would be like using a suborbital rocket to pop down to the local mall for some groceries.
9 days is too long to spend on a trip to Saturn? That's quite the first-world problem, there. Especially given that by the time we've got drives like that we'll likely have life extension and/or hibernation technologies to make the trip's duration irrelevant.
In any case, as the article says, warp drives are probably not possible anyway.
Don’t agree. Play a little Elite Dangerous or any game that can simulate scale of our solar system. Moving around it, even at multiple times the speed of light can be useful.
Imagine making a trip to Ganymede within a day. It would allow for civilizations expansion while maintaining supply chains and not require each place to be wholly independent.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice to go fast. I'm saying it isn't necessary.
Or possible, which makes the debate somewhat moot. We'll get by with sublight speeds.
The biggest problem is sustaining 1g for 9 days straight. It might not sound like much, but it's a huge amount of delta-v.
Using an Alcubierre drive, would not only reduce the time for the trip, but also the normal space delta-v required, so the amount of fuel, efficiency, and so on.
That's not what it says, and for good reason.
Right now, the work on the math for a warp bubble, done over the last 30 years, has reduced the energy requirements by some dozen orders of magnitude. A form of negative energy is already being used in experiments like LIGO, and a few years ago, what could be considered as "negative mass" was discovered in phonons.
As long as either the theory, or the math, leading to Alcubierre's calculations doesn't get disproven, warp drives are "possible", we just don't know "how"... and so far, all related experiments are rather going in the direction of getting to the how, not in the direction of disproving it.
Even if it was somehow possible to scrape together enough negative mass to create a warp bubble and even if it was possible to exit that warp bubble at the destination, none of this addresses a much more fundamental problem. Any method of travelling between two points faster than the speed of light is literally equivalent to a method of travelling through time into your own local past and violating causality. There's no way around that, it's independent of the actual mechanism used to go FTL.
I think it's safe to say that warp drives are probably not possible. It's an extremely extraordinary claim. It's fine if the physicists want to keep tinkering away at it, but making any significant future plans or projections based on the assumption that they'll succeed is not a particularly good bet.