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.
As long as we aren't trying to fuck with the transporter technology that kills you and makes another you somewhere else, I'm fine.
But if the another you is undistinguishable at the quantum level... then it's still you (as seen by external observers, and honestly, I could use a break).
I suggest to you https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667991
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.
Permanently Deleted
Orbiting Habitats are
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.
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.
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
Tl;dr: we dunno. 🤷♂️
If there is a way to make it happen, it'll be interesting to find out how the universe resolves the resulting causal paradoxes. What happens if the cause of an event is able to observe the event before causing it? What happens if the cause of the event responds by not causing the event?
I think the best we can hope for if we get very very lucky with future laws of physics is a cheap way to travel near but slightly below lightspeed. Maybe some sort of way to lower the rest mass of matter.
It's much more likely there will be no immediate application of whatever the full laws are, because new physics only appears in very extreme circumstances we can't easily replicate.
I like to think the best we can hope for is that the speed of light limit is somehow naturally localized and the border to that localization is nearby enough for us to discover before we make ourselves extinct.
It's not too likely, since there would probably be solid evidence of it already in the light at can see.
Oh well.
It’s not too likely, since there would probably be solid evidence of it already in the light at can see.
This. And even if it wasn't, it would have to be far enough away to defeat the point. I think a faster speed of light in the milky way would be very obvious.
Maybe some sort of way to lower the rest mass of matter.
Now that you mention it, what if we can create a region of space in which c is greater than normal? Is that possible? Would living things be able to continue living inside it?
Like some sort of... sub-space?
Even if so, it doesn't matter how you do it, moving faster than c does bad things to causality. You'd be one Lorentz boost away from a grandfather's paradox. I think that would hold for a region of space with lower c too, weirdly enough, because it itself could also be boosted in a way discordant with everything else.
You could just abandon relativity entirely, I guess, but that's kind of a key ingredient in how the universe works. Making a theory like that, I'd imagine, is like baking chocolate chip cookies without the chips.
No, but on the brightside you got a much better chance of it having a 10 Forward.
Yes, you can try to change time-space before and after the space aircraft. Basically manipulating space around you. So instead you moving through space.. You move the space around you. Allowing you to accelerate at to speeds within seconds without causing harm to yourself.