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) The Warp Drive What: A spacecraft that travels at faster-than-light speeds by distorting, or "warping," the fabric of spacetime. Instead of trying to move through space, the warp drive moves space itself. The ship sits inside a bubble of spacetime bound by a negative energy field that races across the cosmos. Why: Chemical and nuclear propulsion, solar sails and ion thrusters all are too slow to reach the nearest star systems within a human life span. At faster-than-light speed (more than 186,000 miles per second), a warp-drive ship would travel 4.5 light-years to Alpha Centauri, the closest sun to our own, in about four years. Who: This warp-bubble model is based on thought experiments conducted by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, theoretical physicist Chris Van Den Broeck of Cardiff University in Wales and, most recently, by mathematician Jos Natrio of the Higher Institute of Technology in Lisbon, Portugal. How To Pilot a Warp Ship: FAQs
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." 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... [Our gratitude to Michael Pfenning for pointing out an error in our older explanation of the Alcubierre warp drive.] Negative mass propulsion Millis’s hypothetical "Space Drives"
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. 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. 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 US defence department's key research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, gave $500,000 to seed-fund 100YSS. "The science exists. Encounter … aliens?
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).
| 100YSS® 2012 Public Symposium Warp drive may actually be possible, NASA scientists says SALT LAKE CITY — The coolest part of much science fiction, especially space operas like Star Wars and Star Trek, is the fact that they have hyperdrives and (the much nerdier) warp drives. They can blast through space faster than the universal speed limit. Well, real-life warp drives may be a lot more feasible than we initially thought. Scientists are already preparing for experiments. Physicists working for NASA's "Eagleworks" laboratory, the informal name for a place dedicated to developing advanced propulsion systems, says that it would take much less energy to bend space-time than previously estimated. That means we should be able to travel around, and even beyond, our solar system at ten times the speed of light using a "warp bubble" The idea was proposed in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who showed that it was theoretically possible and fleshed out some of the details. Here's the concept: You can think of space a lot like a balloon with a grid drawn on it.
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. 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. 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. Then there’s the issue of brakes. We also haven’t addressed the issue of obstacles. Image via Flickr
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