The downside of warp drives: Annihilating whole star systems when you arrive. The dream of faster-than-light travel has been on the mind of humanity for generations. Until recently, though, it was restricted to the realm of pure science fiction. Theoretical mechanisms for warp drives have been posited by science, some of which actually jive quite nicely with what we know of physics. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re actually going to work, though. NASA researchers recently revisited the Alcubierre warp drive and concluded that its power requirements were not as impossible as once thought.
However, a new analysis from the University of Sydney claims that using a warp drive of this design comes with a drawback. To see how the Alcubierre drive could devastate an entire star system, you have to know a little about how it would work. Supply the craft with enough energy, and the very fabric of the universe can be warped. As your faster-than-light ship sails through the cosmos, it’s not alone. The Alcubierre drive is, of course, still highly speculative. Interstellar Starship Meeting Warps Into Houston This Week | 100 Year Starship. Scientists, visionaries, entertainers and the public will gather in Houston this week for the 100-Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss space travel to another star.
Interstellar travel is significantly more difficult than spaceflight within our solar system, because the distances involved are vast. For example, at its farthest, Mars is about 20 light-minutes away from Earth, and even Pluto is only about 4 light-hours distant. But the nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, is more than 4 light-years from Earth, meaning a vehicle traveling at light-speed would take 4 years to arrive. Since the fastest spaceships ever built can't even approach light speed, a probe or manned vessel would take many, many years to reach even the nearest stars. That's why the 100-Year Starship initiative, a project started with seed money from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA ), has targeted the goal of developing a vehicle that could reach another star in 100 years. NASA's 100-Year Starship Project | Interstellar Space Travel & Warp Drive | Science Fiction, Space Exploration.
Shooting for the stars will first require a lot of down-to-Earth elbow grease, as NASA's new 100-Year Starship project illustrates. The effort, to journey between stars in the 2100s, began with a workshop and now is in the study phase. NASA's Ames Research Center and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are collaborating on the $1 million 100-Year Starship Study, an effort to take the first step in the next era of space exploration. The study will scrutinize the business model needed to develop and mature technologies needed to enable long-haul human space treks a century from now.
Kick-started by a strategic planning workshop in January, the project has brought together more than two dozen farsighted futurists, NASA specialists, science fiction writers, foundation aficionados and educators. But for the moment, put aside all those Vulcan mind melds and get a grip. Self-sustaining enterprise The long-haul starship plan An interstellar challenge Unforeseen breakthroughs. The Warp Drive Could Become Science Fact. 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 bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science. "There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.
Warping Spacetime. Star Trek's Warp Drive: Not Impossible. The warp drive, one of Star Trek's hallmark inventions, could someday become science instead of science fiction. Some physicists say the faster-than-light travel technology may one day enable humans to jet between stars for weekend getaways. Clearly it won't be an easy task. The science is complex, but not strictly impossible, according to some researchers studying how to make it happen. The trick seems to be to find some other means of propulsion besides rockets, which would never be able to accelerate a ship to velocities faster than that of light, the fundamental speed limit set by Einstein's General Relativity. Luckily for us, this speed limit only applies within space-time (the continuum of three dimensions of space plus one of time that we live in). While any given object can't travel faster than light speed within space-time, theory holds, perhaps space-time itself could travel.
Already happened? "If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not for our space drives? " In the lab. Ship Could Fly Faster Than Light. Travel by bubble might seem more appropriate for witches in Oz, but two physicists suggest that a future spaceship could fold a space-time bubble around itself to travel faster than the speed of light. We're talking about the very distant future, of course. The idea involves manipulating dark energy — the mysterious force behind the universe's ongoing expansion — to propel a spaceship forward without breaking the laws of physics. ? Think of it like a surfer riding a wave,? In theory, the universe grew faster than the speed of light for a very short time after the Big Bang, driven by the dark energy that represents about 74 percent of the total mass-energy budget in the universe.
Strange as it sounds, current evidence supports the notion that the fabric of space-time can expand faster than the speed of light, because the reality in which light travels is itself expanding. String theorists had believed that a total of 10 dimensions exist, including height, width, length and time. ? Why We Need to Travel to Other Stars | 100 Year Starship Symposium. HOUSTON — Launching a mission to another star could teach us not just about space, but about Earth as well, experts argued here today at the 100 Year Starship Symposium.
"I believe space exploration is a human imperative," said Mae Jemison, the first female African American astronaut. "It didn’t begin in 1957 with Sputnik, it's been a part of us" all along. Jemison is heading the 100 Year Starship initiative, which aims to mount a mission to another star within 100 years. Toward that end, scientists and thinkers from a variety of disciplines gathered for a public symposium here from Sept. 13 to 16 to discuss the motivations, challenges and possible solutions for pursuing interstellar spaceflight. "I'm excited for the opportunity we have to pioneer tomorrow's technology and to reimagine our future," former President Bill Clinton, who is the symposium's honorary chair, said via a video address today (Sept. 14). "I only wish I could be here 100 years from now to make the trip.
" Warp Drive More Possible Than Thought, Scientists Say. HOUSTON — 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 bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.
"There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said here Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight. Warping space-time Laboratory tests. Star Trek's Warp Drive: Are We There Yet? | Video. Warp Drives & Wormholes. Alcubierre drive. Two-dimensional visualization of the Alcubierre drive, showing the opposing regions of expanding and contracting spacetime that displace the central region. The Alcubierre drive or Alcubierre metric (referring to metric tensor) is a speculative idea based on a solution of Einstein's field equations in general relativity as proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, by which a spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel if a configurable energy-density field lower than that of vacuum (i.e. negative mass) could be created. Rather than exceeding the speed of light within its local frame of reference, a spacecraft would traverse distances by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, resulting in effective faster-than-light travel.
History[edit] Alcubierre metric[edit] The Alcubierre metric defines the warp-drive spacetime. Mathematics of the Alcubierre drive[edit] where is a positive definite metric on each of the hypersurfaces. and with arbitrary parameters . Ideas Based On What We’d Like To Achieve. Warp Drive, When? The following section has a brief description of some ideas that have been suggested over the years for interstellar travel, ideas based on the sciences that do exist today. Worm Hole transportation Just when you thought it was confusing enough, those physicist had to come up with wormholes.
Here’s the premise behind a "wormhole. " [graphic] Although Special Relativity forbids objects to move faster than light within spacetime, it is known that spacetime itself can be warped and distorted. Here’s one way to build one: First, collect a whole bunch of super-dense matter, such as matter from a neutron star. No problem? Here’s what a naturally occurring wormhole might look like if it passed in front of another star. Alcubierre’s "Warp Drive" Here’s the premise behind the Alcubierre "warp drive": Although Special Relativity forbids objects to move faster than light within spacetime, it is unknown how fast spacetime itself can move.
Any other sticky issues? Yes... Visualization of the Warp Drive. This video visualizes a spaceship equipped with a warp drive according to Alcubierre, cf. Sect. 9.4 of the thesis. The warp drive constructs a warp bubble which separates two flat parts of spacetime. The warp bubble is able to move faster than the speed of light as measured in an outside flat region of spacetime. A spaceship which is at rest inside the warp bubble would then travel faster than the speed of light. The visual appearance of the spaceship and the background objects is calculated by using general relativistic ray tracing.
The visualizations of this video were also shown at the exhibition Seven Hills. Scientists ponder interstellar travel at Nasa-backed space summit | Science. In one room, scientists debated whether the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer will help find a way to bend the space-time continuum and make interstellar travel feasible within a lifetime. In another, they estimated how many pairs of underpants an astronaut would need to pack for the trip. Later, a paper was presented on Space Propulsion Under the Changing Density Field Model, and Lt Uhura sang the theme from Star Trek.
Otherworldly in more ways than one, this was the 100 Year Starship symposium, a conference backed by Nasa and the Pentagon at the weekend that landed an eclectic mix of the eminent, the famous and the curious in Texas. It launched a mission that is nothing less than spaceflight's holy grail: make it possible for humans to travel to another star system within a century. Not that anyone was able to proclaim, after four days of discussions and dozens of presentations on every conceivable related angle, that "Houston, we have a solution".
"The science exists. | 100YSS® 2012 Public Symposium. NASA: Warp drive is 'plausible and worth further investigation' S1.E13 ...My Soul to Keep S1.E12 There's No More Room In Hell S1.E11 The Feast S1.E10 The Pain Connection S1.E9 Post-Apocalypse Now S1.E8 Two Graves S1.E7 Whistle Past the Graveyard S1.E6 We Need To Talk About Abigail S1.E5 Whatever Happened to Maggie Rennie S1.E4 The Exorcism of Marcus Moon S1.E3 The Curse of the Copper Head Road S1.E2 The Ghost in the Machine. Icarus Interstellar. Daydreaming Beyond the Solar System with Warp Field Mechanics. This article was authored by Harold “Sonny” White and Catherine Ragin Williams Sure and is a submission of the Exotic Research Group of Icarus Interstellar. Sure, the Red Planet or an asteroid are enticing destinations, but what if one day we wanted to go really, really far out? With the technology we have today, it’s not in the realm of possibility. But it could be … and the Eagleworks Laboratories at Johnson Space Center are doing the mathematics and physics required to find the answers that defy traditional Newtonian laws.
Enter: The space warp. Back in the 1970s, the British Interplanetary Society looked into what it would take to send a robotic probe to reach Barnard’s Star, about 6 light years (or 380,000 AU) away, within 50 years. The loopholes, amazingly, can be found in mathematical equations. When you think space warp, imagine raisins baking in bread. What about the colossal energy requirements discussed in the literature? Surface plots of York Time.
NASA Starts Work on Real Life Star Trek Warp Drive. Why We Need to Reach the Stars (and We Will) Travelling Faster Than the Speed of Light Is Harder Than It Looks. Now that we’ve been to the moon, built the International Space Station, and landed a multi-billion dollar robot on Mars, space geeks are getting restless. Where are we going next? Well, going to Venus is probably boring, and we’d have to fly through the asteroid belt if we wanted to get to Saturn. Our next best option? Invent a warp drive and zip over to another star system, of course. Science fiction authors have been obsessed with the concept of a warp drive — a space-time bending contraption that would enable us to travel faster than the speed of light — for ages. But a NASA scientist now says he can build it. Dr.
The basic idea behind White’s warp drive is simple. If this all sounds like it’s too futuristic to be true, that’s because it is. The proposed Alcubierre warp bubble, with “opposing regions of expanding and contracting spacetime” surrounding a central point, like a ship. Just like a traditional space ship, a warp drive-equipped ship needs fuel and lots of it. Warp drive may actually be possible, NASA scientists says. The Warp Drive.