Scientists Think Warp Drive is Now Plausible
A team of scientists working for the 100 Year Starship project have determined that warp drive and faster than light travel is indeed a possibility, although it would take huge amounts of energy to make it happen.
From FoxNews here:
A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television’s Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.
A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.
Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially brining the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.
An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.
Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn’t being warped at all.
With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.
The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.
Its also interesting that they intend to use the circular nacelle design like the Vulcans and Romulans used. On the other hand, these NASA castoffs in the 100 Year Starship program are fishing around for funding, and claiming that they could make faster than light travel might be their ticket to increased funding. Now if they can only acquire the energy equivalent to 20 percent of the planetary bodies of the solar system…
