Warp Drives May Be More Possible Than Once Thought

On Friday, September 14, participants at the 100 Year Starship Symposium were treated to a more unusual presentation, where they were told that warp drives of the type popularized by science-fiction movies may not be such a far-fetched idea as previously thought.

Basically, what a warp drive does is it enables faster-than-light travel. This means that a spacecraft outfitted with such a propulsion system could bend spacetime, allowing extremely fast travels between various points in space.

Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre was among the first to describe an actual concept for such a device back in 1994. In the mean time, other scientists determined that operating such a drive would require tremendous amounts of energy.

But the concept had to be revisited, because NASA and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) want to built a real-life starship within 100 years. This means a spacecraft capable of reaching other stars, Space reports.

With the new calculations, the proposed Alcubierre drive would run on significantly less energy than in the original design. “There is hope,” NASA Johnson Space Center expert Harold White told attendants.

The purpose of the symposium was to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight. One of the main hurdles facing the 100 Year Starship project is figuring out which issues need to be solved first. In addition to the propulsion system, there are countless other aspects to consider.

Life support is an issue, as is artificial gravity. The form in which a crew would be sent to a distant star is also a matter of debate. Some want to send a slurry of DNA, to be assembled into humans on site, while others want to create stasis pod for the same purpose.

Back to the Alcubierre drive, the device would look like a large ring, encircling a spacecraft about the size of a football field. The ring would be made out of exotic matter, and its purpose would be to fold spacetime around the vehicle in a specific manner.

Basically, it would contract space in front of it, while expanding it behind. “Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light. But the really cool thing is spacetime, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light,” said the president of the non-profit Icarus Interstellar, Richard Obousy.

By using this nifty trick, a vehicle could move at 10 times the speed of light without actually breaking this universal limit. Doing so previously required an amount of energy equal to that of the mass-energy budget of the gas giant Jupiter.

Now, the energy requirements have been lowered by several orders of magnitude, simply by changing the shape of the exotic matter structure, from a ring to a donut.

“The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation. The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab,” White said at the meeting.

The expert and his team have already begun experimenting with miniaturized versions of the Alcubierre drive in the lab, and hope to have some tangible results soon. “We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million,” he added.

“If we're ever going to become a true spacefaring civilization, we're going to have to think outside the box a little bit, were going to have to be a little bit audacious,” Obousy concluded.

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Via: Warp Drives May Be More Possible Than Once Thought