"IS WARP DRIVE POSSIBLE?" - A discussion

The age old question we all ask in the Trekiverse: IS WARP DRIVE POSSIBLE?
Is it possible to bend space around a ship and leap across a galaxy without being spaghettified?
What are your thoughts?
How much energy would be required to produce such a phenomena?

 

Theoretically it seems possible with proper technology and energy. That's where the problems are XD

 

I think that Warp Drive based propulsion systems are very possible. If you get away from the paradox of traveling faster than light creating some tunnel through time that will take you into the past, you will understand that Warp Drive is really nothing more than travelling very fast and occupying more space at any one time.

Before our Universe was filled with solar and celestial gravity based on mass in the form of stars, black holes and planets, there really wasn't any large amounts of matter in the Universe that created gravity on the scale that we see it today. Maybe there was a lot of Pre-Big Bang dust or particles of Pre-Big Bang matter, but nothing on the scale of a black hole or planet.

Without matter creating mass and gravity through very large planetary bodies, which if you think about it, stars planets and even large chunks of rock and ice are all similar to black holes. Similar to black holes in so much that each celestial object creates a pull on another object. Some objects are able to escape the gravity of a celestial object while other are not.

The real trick in Warp Drive capable ships is the ability to reduce the amount of particle mass that the ship encounters the faster that the ship travels to light speed.

Think of it this way. You have a 300 meter field. You are at one end, the finish line is at the other. You have a consistent field of pebbles, representing gravity, raining down every yard. As you start to walk, you can feel the pebbles hitting your body. The slower that you walk means that your body encounters more pebbles based on how wide and thick you are. But as you walk faster and faster towards the end of the field, you are pelted with more and more pebbles causing you to slow down.

Therefore,traveling faster and faster to the light of speed will see more gravity encountered on a micro scale based on micro elements that are electromagnetically attracted to your ship. Elements that are attracted would add more mass to the ship over, time slowing it down as more energy was needed to pump into the engines to overcome the increased mass. Basically like the barnacles that collect on a ship that causes increased weight that slows the ship down have to be cleaned off periodically.

If the field around a ship can break the electric and magnetic bounds between the elements that interact with the field, then less mass is added to the ship allowing it to travel faster and faster. At some point the ship could reach a peak velocity and turn its engines off to conserve fuel while gliding through space. As long as the field that disrupts the electric and magnetic bonds in an atom remain stable, the ship should be able to glide indefinitely through the small region of space that has been created that is now similar to space-time before the Big Bang.

But the energy needed to create Warp Drive would need to be near infinite you say. That might be true.

But as the ship travels faster and faster through space-time the energy created by the ship moving through space-time could be siphoned from around it to add back into the propulsion system to keep the ship's energy stores at nearly an infinite amount of energy or an amount of energy filling the ships energy stores at the speed of light.

 

You've written this sort of thing before, and it is still wrong.

 

did you write reasons before?

 

Anything is possible until you've proven it isn't.

Right now, we know that theoretically it is possible, we are aware time-space can be warped. We do not have the technology, and even more important, we don't have the energy source. Basically, that's the short answer.

 

Ask Miguel Alcubierre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

 

I wonder if warp drive, in our reality, is only possible for STL application? I mean that's still a boon. Zipping across the sol system in days or hours is enough for our civilization for hundreds of years, and enough for interstellar probes or missions in their own right.

Off the had, however, all I know is at best it requires a bit, being a few KG or w/e, of negative energy, according to someone's filtered analysis of who-knows-what of the math. The problem is, of course, that negative energy is just a mathematical construct at this time, and even if it wasn't, well, we can produce antimatter and yet have only had one or two dedicated labs to it in the last fifty years and have produced what, 110 micrograms of the stuff intentionally? Yea I don't think even being able to make it would suddenly make it so....

 

Who knows? But I likely won’t be around to see it.

 

I'd say it will likely be possible when we achieve the technology and understanding required to make something like it happen. But will it happen as we see it on TV? Not likely. The end-result is likely to be very different than the sci-fi perception. The interesting thing about future perceptions of technology is that if things eventually become available, is that by the time they do, they're already more advanced than those ideas.

 

I'm going to say it'll never be possible if only so I can turn out to be wrong.

 

Yep, it may be theoretically possible, but whether it is technologically possible is another question.

 

I imagine that it would be somewhat easier - and substantially cheaper - to not bother fighting the universal c velocity limit directly but instead, say, physiologically modify human astronauts to perceive time at only a fraction of the normal rate in order to generate a pseudo-FTL effect (i.e., "S-Space" in Charles Sheffield's Between the Strokes of Night, Baen, 1985/Expanded 2002), or even better, encode and store human explorers/colonists as computer data aboard AI-controlled relativistic starships who are then reincarnated at the target world (i.e., Metastatic Vectorship Naglfar in William Barton's Dark Sky Legion, Bantam, 1992). In the final analysis, I really cannot see a meaningful difference between real-FTL and pretend-FTL when it comes to interstellar space exploration along with establishing galactic-scale civilizations/polities.

 

For now it is theoretically possible. Maybe a century or two of advances in Physics and engineering with decide this issue?

 

It's in the possible but not probable realm for now. I think the last time I read about real warp theory it would take the moon's mass in energy to create a field to cover a 1 kg probe (like a micro satellite). The problem, as if that much energy weren't an issue, is that it has to be negative energy and there is no telling if negative energy exists.

 

Negative energy states and negative vacuum field density are allowed in quantum field theory and vacuum field suppression in the Casimir effect and squeezed light optics suggest negative energy states are achievable.

However, creating a usable warp bubble or inertial propulsive field by manipulation of the space-time metric seems to be practically unattainable using known technology. The reported performance characteristics of supposed unidentified anomalous vehicles are tantalising but the knowledge that's currently in the public domain doesn't allow us to emulate it. If some black lab really did hold the secret, wouldn't there be a temptation to benefit economically by bringing the technology into wider use?

I could speculate why such wider knowledge might be suppressed - possible weaponisation and vested interests - but I'd need a thicker tinfoil hat.

Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles

 

Apparently it is... but this isn't new.
The premise behind Alcubierre Drive existed for a longer time now:

Scientists Are Starting to Take Warp Drives Seriously, Especially One Specific Concept
https://www.sciencealert.com/how-feasible-is-a-warp-drive-here-s-the-science

Basically, what it comes down to at this time seems to be power generation.
Before, the power requirements for Warp drive were estimated to be equivalent the size of a universe... recently, those estimates were revised and shrunk down to the equivalent size of Jupiter.

Give it a bit more time and we'll probably drop it down low enough to equate a football.

Science and technology evolve exponentially... not linearly.

If we were to use AI/adaptive algorithms towards this problem, we would likely be very close to being Warp capable... but automation to this level is barely even being used in other fields (the existing system 'prefers' manual labor - even though its grossly inefficient and thousands of times slower than automation).

EDIT: Also, I would prefer we first solve our own problems here on Earth before going out into space, otherwise, we will just take our current behavior and problems out there where will we end up repeating the same mistakes over and over (and you will end up with all those dystopian projections of the future in more or less reality).

 

Well, at least folks can get away from each other and start over. Having an AI raise children with no history of their past would be the ultimate in starting over.

 

There's an extremely well thought out video game that handles that premise very well, recently.

Spoiler

Horizon Zero Dawn

. I don't want to give away the name of the game as it is a pretty huge spoiler. through much of the game you are aware as a player that you are in a post-apocalypse scenario, though centuries on, and there certainly are relics of the world we know. That's not really new territory for movies, tv, or video games.

Spoiler

Eventually you are faced with the realization that there was no continuity with the world we live in and the one you're playing in. It was entirely put in place by an AI doing its best to do what it had been programmed to do. Not just humans but every living thing on earth was destroyed. It's an entirely new biosphere modeled on the old.

 

In science news, Steven Howe talks about antilithium over at nextbigfuture.com this week

—but it is for Medusa type sail craft.
Some talk about ceramic sails.