'Warp drives' may actually be possible someday, new study suggests

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'Warp drives' may actually be possible someday, new study suggests

"By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we've shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction."

www.space.com

'Warp drives' may actually be possible someday, new study suggests​

News

By Mike Wall

published yesterday

"By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we've shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction."

Artist's conception of what moving at the speed of light might look like. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

A new study provides some theoretical underpinning to warp drives, suggesting that the superfast propulsion tech may not forever elude humanity.

Sci-fi fans — especially " Star Trek" devotees — are familiar with warp drives. These hypothetical engines manipulate the fabric of space-time itself, compressing the stuff in front of a spaceship and expanding it behind. This creates a "warp bubble" that allows a craft to travel at incredible velocities — in some imaginings, many times faster than the speed of light.

In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a groundbreaking paper that laid out how a real-life warp drive could work. This exciting development came with a major caveat, however: The proposed "Alcubierre drive" required negative energy, an exotic substance that may or may not exist (or, perhaps, the harnessing of dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be causing the universe's accelerated expansion).

Related: Warp drive and 'Star Trek': The physics of future space travel

Alcubierre published his idea in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all.

"This study changes the conversation about warp drives," lead author Jared Fuchs, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and the research think tank Applied Physics, said in a statement. "By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we've shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction."

The team's model uses "a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics," according to the statement.

Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper's abstract, for example, says that the solution "involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric."

The proposed engine could not achieve faster-than-light travel, though it could come close; the statement mentions "high but subluminal speeds."

This is a single modeling study, so don't get too excited. Even if other research teams confirm that the math reported in the new study checks out, we're still very far from being able to build an actual warp drive.

Fuchs and his team admit as much, stressing that their work could end up being a stepping stone on the long road to efficient interstellar flight.

"While we're not yet preparing for interstellar voyages, this research heralds a new era of possibilities," Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, said in the same statement. "We're continuing to make steady progress as humanity embarks on the Warp Age."

The team's study was published online on April 29. You can find it here, though all but the abstract is behind a paywall; a free preprint version is available via arXiv.org.

 

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claude-3-haiku generated explanation(first 9 pages of the paper):


The main idea is to create a "warp drive" that can transport people and objects faster than normal, but without breaking the laws of physics.

Previous warp drive ideas, like the Alcubierre drive, had a major problem - they required exotic matter that doesn't really exist in the real world. This exotic matter would violate the laws of physics.

In this new solution, the researchers avoid that problem by starting with something more realistic - a shell of normal matter, like a sphere made of regular stuff. This shell has a positive mass, which fits with our understanding of how gravity and spacetime work.

Then, the researchers add a special "shift vector" on top of the matter shell. This shift vector creates a "warp bubble" around the shell, which can transport things through space faster than normal.

The key is that the researchers designed the shift vector very carefully, so that it doesn't cause the same physics-breaking problems as the exotic matter in previous warp drive ideas. They did this by making sure the shift vector distribution matches certain properties of known warp drive solutions, but without violating the energy conditions that normal matter has to follow.

By starting with a regular matter shell and then carefully adding the right shift vector, the researchers were able to create a warp drive solution that is physically realistic and doesn't break the laws of physics. This is an important step towards making real-world warp drives possible someday.

The paper goes into a lot of detailed math and physics to show exactly how they did this, but the high-level idea is to use normal matter as the foundation and then tweak it in a very specific way to get the warp drive effect without the problems of previous proposals. Does this help explain it in simpler terms?

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The paper presents a new solution for a warp drive that can travel at a constant velocity while satisfying all the energy conditions. This means the warp drive can transport passengers without violating the laws of physics.

The key steps are:

1. Start with a regular matter shell (like a spherical shell of mass) in a Minkowski (flat) background spacetime. This provides a positive mass that satisfies the energy conditions.

2. Add a specific distribution of a "shift vector" on top of the matter shell. The shift vector creates a "warp bubble" that can transport passengers along geodesics (the straightest possible paths in curved spacetime).

3. The shift vector is designed to match the behavior of well-known warp drive solutions like the Alcubierre metric, but without violating the energy conditions.

4. The authors generate the full spacetime metric numerically and confirm it satisfies the energy conditions, unlike previous warp drive proposals.

The main innovation is using a regular matter shell as the foundation, and then carefully adding the shift vector to create the warp bubble effect, rather than relying solely on exotic matter that violates the energy conditions. This allows for a physically realistic warp drive solution.

 

[DEAD7]

 

[85 East]

We might actually become a 1.0 level species on the Kardeshev scale within our lifetimes.