![]() This would make space travel to most planets impractical in the scale of a human lifetime, if one was confined to relativistic speeds. In Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, our Universe comes with a speed limit - with nothing able to travel faster than the speed of light. It would be the most incredible boon to science imaginable, by bringing the ultimate science-fiction technology to life.A NASA engineer has claimed that getting a 'running start' would be the key to ensuring that a real-life, Star Trek-style warp engine is in drive, and not reverse. And we could learn truths we can never know otherwise: of our deepest assumptions about the Universe being isotropic, homogeneous, and the CMB having the same properties from all locations in space. If the Alcubierre drive were real, we could not only reach any star or galaxy in the Universe we desired, we could literally achieve what's otherwise impossible today. ![]() Instead, it's merely an important practical restriction on what's possible - namely, that nothing with mass can move through space relative to another object faster than the speed of light - that's been circumvented through the controlled warping of space. In reality, no laws of physics are ever actually violated by warp drive. ![]() Image credit: Wikimedia Commons users AllenMcC., under a c.c.a.-s.a.-3.0 license. of the spacecraft and lengthened behind it. In fact, if you managed to punch your opponent at greater-than-light-speed, they would feel the impact of the punch, then see your fist at their face, and then see your fist move away from their face at arbitrarily fast speeds.Īnd in that same fashion, you can also create illusions or effects that appear to move faster than the speed of light, even though it's only the fabric of space itself that's changing.Ī two-dimensional projection of the Alcubierre spacetime, where space itself is shortened in front. And if you - as the attacker - move towards your target faster than the speed of light, they can never see you coming with any sort of sensor. Outrun any weapon attack with total surprise. All combat is limited by the speed at which things move: the speed of light. But if you can move faster than that, then attacks that are limited by the speed of light can never hurt you. easily be outmaneuvered and defeated by a ship that possessed warp drive technology. Now that's truly going where no one has gone before!Ī ship limited by conventional weapons, like lasers, that are limited by the speed of light could. But if you can warp space and break that limit, traveling through space with the capability to outrace a photon, you can speed through the Universe and see stars, galaxies and portions of the Universe that will never have their light reach Earth. Not only can you "catch" anything moving away from you through space, even if space itself expands faster than the speed of light, but it enables you to catch galaxies past the edge of the observable Universe! We can presently only see as far as light has traveled through the expanding Universe over the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang. Acknowledgement: Mathilde Jauzac (Durham University, UK and Astrophysics & Cosmology Research Unit, South Africa) and Jean-Paul Kneib (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland). credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, HST Frontier Fields. Could warp drive enable us to reach those galaxies after all? Peter Tibbles asks exactly that:Ī distant cluster of galaxies that would be unreachable without warp drive technologies. But in 1994, Miguel Alcubierre discovered a solution in General Relativity that catapulted warp drive into the realm of the physically possible. For another, it was thought that gravity was working to pull the distant galaxies back towards one another, and that if you traveled close enough to the speed of light, you'd eventually reach anything we didn't know about dark energy. In 1998, the accelerating Universe taught us that only 3% of the galaxies in the observable Universe would ever be reachable at the speed of light. For one, warp drive was simply a plot device to reach the distant stars without having characters and the Universe age it was thought to violate Einstein's relativity as a physical impossibility. When warp drive was first brought into the public consciousness with the debut of Star Trek fifty years ago, our understanding of the Universe was fundamentally different than it is today. The starship Enterprise in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, The Hunted.
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