Is Star Trek’s Warp Drive Possible?
Is Star Trek’s Warp Drive Possible?
The concept of the warp drive is currently at odds with everything we know to be true about physics.
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To my surprise and delight, the article itself confirms Betteridge's Law of Headlines by starting off with:
A provisional answer is “no.”
Personally, I've never really seen the need for such a thing. There's no great rush to jump dozens of light years away when we have hundreds of planets and moons and other large bodies we've barely even taken a glimpse at right here in our own back yards. We can go right up to a Kardashev II civilization without having to travel more than a few light hours away.
Don't need to go light years, it's the speed that's important.
If you can hop to Mars in 8 seconds instead of 8 months we can explore our backyard a lot better.
There's no great rush to jump dozens of light years away when we have hundreds of planets and moons and other large bodies we've barely even taken a glimpse at right here in our own back yards
None of those are habitable
It's not particularly likely that any of the planets or moons around other stars are habitable either. At least not "step out of the ship and take a nice deep breath of the fresh air, picking an apple off of a nearby tree and making some kind of comment about how it's like Eden" habitable like is so common on TV. It's likely that if there's a native biosphere then that planet is going to be incredibly hostile to alien life like us.
Build habitats. If you've got the tech to build a starship then you've got the tech to build a habitat, it's way easier. Habitats will give you exactly the environment you want, not whatever you happen to find.
As long as the atmosphere is roughly similar, the native biosphere would have very little defense against us. Sure, some of the defenses that local plants and animals developed against each other might cause issues, or they might not.
We would be an invasive species on the grandest scale. A completely foreign biology would maybe have useful nutrients, or maybe not. That would be the key, but the periodic table will be the same everywhere, and chemistry being what it is, we'd probably see similar molecules, at least the simple stuff. Basic hydrocarbons and such.
The complex biochemistry would be vastly different. That could trip up human explorers.
the native biosphere would have very little defense against us.
Why is it that way around, instead of "we would have very little defense against the native biosphere?" Especially considering the native biosphere has the home court advantage, it's already well adapted to the environment it's in and has a planet's worth of diversity to draw on when dealing with new competitors.
A new biosphere often has zero resistance against an invasive species.
All those tricks that the local biosphere have are targeted against other parts of the biosphere. It's called the co-evolutionary arms race. Prey species get better at defending themselves, and predators get better at targeting weak points in their prey. Predators can become super specialized. And in this specific case, herbivores can be considered predators to plant species.
An invasive species slips in when there is no local predator to eat them. Often because no predator can adapt to the new invasive species.
To back this all up, just look at the history of humanity transporting plants and animals all over the place and fucking shit up, all because we figured out the absolute best defense against our own predators, being too fucking smart for our own good.
The only way an alien biosphere could defend itself against us is if the planet it was on had an excess of heavy metals or other poisonous elements like arsenic that became a part of the biosphere itself.
To back this all up, just look at the history of humanity transporting plants and animals all over the place and fucking shit up, all because we figured out the absolute best defense against our own predators, being too fucking smart for our own good.
You're assuming this is the norm rather than something being transported and not able to survive in the new environment. Kudzu, as an example, is an invasive plant from Japan that has taken over the Southern US due to lack of insects and animals that eat it. But if Kudzu was brought to the Amazon instead, it likely wouldn't survive due to the high acidity of the soil. The plants there are specialized and it's unlikely for a plant without this specialization being able to widely spread.
We would be the "new biosphere", though.
"Invasive" species here on Earth are invasive because they turn out to be more highly adapted to the new environment they find themselves in than the existing "native" species. That's only possible because Earth has a lot of similar habitats, allowing species in different areas to try out a variety of different adaptations that can potentially end up being very useful in the new environments they get plopped down into. They happen to have hit on some strategy that's better than what the natives have come up with yet.
In the case of a completely alien planet with its own well-established biosphere that's likely not going to be the case. The habitats and niches available there are going to be different from whatever we've got on Earth, so the life we bring from Earth isn't going to have any ready-made superior strategies to deal with them. The local native life, on the other hand, has had billions of years to come up with ways to make a living there.
Again, you're ignoring the fact that the entire biosphere experiences co-evolution, This is why an invasive species is a problem. It was not part of the evolutionary arms race in that environment. It means that the highly specialized attacks that the plants and animals have against each other, might not work at all against the invader.
The billions of years of coming up with ways to make a living there, is actually billions of years of coming up with attacks specialized to exploit weaknesses in each other.
Take viruses as an example. They are often highly specialized to attack specific protein clusters on the outside of cells. Now, sometimes, through some random mutation, they can attack a slightly different protein structure and jump to a different host species, where they run rampant.
That said, alien viruses would likely not be an issue to either side. They're too specialized. Bacteria, on the other hand, that might pose a problem. But can be compensated for.
But other than that. Humans are very good at being an invasive species. We cheat. If there is anything edible on the planet, we'll find it. And the planet wouldn't know what hit it.
Again, the only way the planet's biosphere could keep us out, is if it was fundamentally incompatible. Like if it had an atmosphere without oxygen, or if every plant and animal had lead or arsenic in their biochemistry.
It hardly needs to be a difference so extreme. If the atmosphere had half the oxygen that Earth's does, Earth life would struggle badly and most species would simply fail to make a go of it - it'd be like living at 5.5km altitude. The highest human settlement on Earth is at 5km and the people there suffer from chronic health problems, it's a gold mining settlement that wouldn't have anyone living there if they couldn't earn a ton at it. But for the native life that's just Tuesday.
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Yeah, that's a pretty strong statement. I'm sure if we had the technology it would see a ton of use. Could we survive without it? Sure, but that goes for most useful technologies.
Warp drive, replicator, holodeck, transporters.... So many technologies in ST that would change everything if they existed.
Particularly replicator and transporter. It would completely pancake down the entirety of the manufacturing and transport industries.
I'd not trust transporters, but replicators would be great. If I had replicators, I'd open a replicator restaurant, then hire a few chefs to just cook random stuff all day to scan and then give out to the guests.
Maybe I'd travel around the world, scanning the best and freshest ingredients. But I'd travel by shuttle, not transporter.
Orbiting Habitats are
With something like an Alcubierre drive you can still travel between planets fairly fast. (Though this concept needs basically dark matter or some type of negative energy)
Even missions to Jupiter and Saturn take 5+ years in travel time one way with normal Hohman transfers and gravity assists that still allow for orbaital capture.
Even if you could simply find some type of fuel that would allow something like the Epstein drive (from the Expanse) where you can accelerate at 1g for 1/2 the trip and decel at 1g for the second half that would cut the travel time down to something on the order of like 9 days to Saturn or so.
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.
warp drives are probably not possible anyway
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.
It takes years of traveling to go to any of them
It takes years of traveling at or near the speed of light to go to any of them. It takes tens of thousands of years at the speeds we currently reach.
Edit: Oops, read this wrong. I thought they were implying exploring close stars. They were discussing only our solar system, which is still large so takes a long time, but there aren't any naturally habitable places, and nothing that'd be easy to terraform.
because, much like the show the warp drive is from, it's not about colonization or exploiting resources, but meeting new people and going new places
There won't be any new people there until our colonies get there in the first place, so it's a self-solving problem. Tourists can travel as fast as the colonists can.
That’s a fantastic assumption
Got any evidence to the contrary?
I’m not the one that made a supposition 😉
You said:
it's not about colonization or exploiting resources, but meeting new people
What new people?
Any that are out there :)
You have to assume we are uniquely special to think no one’s out there, do you have any evidence that that’s the case?I'm not assuming we're "uniquely special." I'm not saying anything about us at all. You're saying there are "new people" out there, that's a positive assertion. I'm asking you to back that up.
No, the null hypothesis is that if life can evolve here then it must be able to evolve elsewhere, unless for some reason it could only evolve here, in which case we are unique and special. You have a pre-copernican model of the universe
I'm asking for any sort of evidence to indicate that the thing you're claiming exists actually exists. If there's no evidence then that's a supposition.
What if I'd said that we shouldn't invent warp drives because then the Reapers will come kill us all? Would you be wanting some kind of evidence from me that Reapers existed?