WARP DRIVE - LETS BUILD A SPACESHIP!!

Einstein tells us that nothing can move through space time faster than the speed of light. This is disappointing news as even our closest start (the sun) is around 8 light minutes away and the next closest start is around 10 light years away!  

However, what if I told there you that through clever solutions to Einstein's general relatively filed equations it may be possible for a spacecraft to achieve speeds far exceeding our cosmic speed limit! 

Welcome to the warp drive 

In simple terms a warp drive spaceship can be thought of as a spaceship which can travel faster than the speed of light. This is because although nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light, there is no limit on the speed on two separate patches of space-time. This may seem strange but it should be understood that due to the expansion of space-time distant galaxies are moving further apart from one another at a rate faster than light speed. Also, below the event horizon of a black hole space-time cascades towards a central singularity faster than light, carrying light and matter and everything else with it. The space-time around and within a black hole is predicted by solving Einsteins field equations around a point of extreme positive energy. Basically, mass and energy tell us the extent to which space-time will warp.

The famous mathematician Miguel Alcubierre developed a space-time description, a "metic tensor"  that describes a volume of flat space-time enclosed in a bubble of extreme curvature.  A pinching or warping of space-time in the surrounding shell that causes space to expand behind and contract in front of the bubble. As a result the machine is pushed and pulled by space-time its self, moving at speeds only limited intensity of the warp. 

This concept machine could reach speeds far greater than that of light speed, however it required a configurable energy-density field lower than that of a vacuum  - that is to say negative mass must be created. A lot of negative mass.. Meguel proposed that the mass-energy equivalent of the entire universe would be needed to power his machine... talk about impractical..

A couple of years ago up until now, a number of scientists at NASA have been working on reducing the warp drives energy requirement. As it turns out, by rapidly oscillating the warp field one may be able to soften the fabric of space-time via higher dimensional effects. Literally, a hyper space warp drive. By shrinking down the warp bubble while expanding the internal volume to get us down to potentially not even needing negative mass anymore as quantum scale manipulations of the vacuum energy through the Casimir effect might be enough.  

WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR? LETS BUILD IT! 

Contrary to popular belief, scientific progress requires a relatively significant amount of time. There are still a great number of questions left to be answered on how to build and more importantly operate a true warp drive. Just to name a few; how would you slow such a machine down? What would you make the machine out of? How is the most effective way of oscillating the warp field?  

Fortunately there are a lot of intelligent people working on this project and with a lot of work and some luck we can turn science fiction into science fact!! 

If you are interested and want to learn more then check out my references! 

References:

Alcubierre 1994 http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0009013  

Krasnikov 1995 http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9511068  

Van Den Broeck 1999 http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9906050 

Krasnikov 2002 http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0207057  

Harold White, Warp Field Mechanics 101 http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/cas...  

Harold White, Warp Field Mechanics 102 http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/cas...