NASA Thinks Warp Drive "Plausible"
novy.
Posted to SciTech on Tue Sep 18, 2012 at 09:18:46 AM EST (promoted from Diaries by port1080). RSS.
"and worth further investigation".
"The principle of warm drive is really fairly simple. Nothing that exists in space is supposed to be able to go faster than the speed of light, right? Right. So, the only way to go faster than the speed of light is to not do it in space. One way of going about this is to use something like a wormhole to punch a shortcut straight through one part of space to another, but a more common method (in Star Trek, at least) is to avoid the whole speed limit problem by warping space itself.Will Vulcans turn up to say hi when we finally figure out how to do it?"All you have to do to travel faster than light is to create a warp field with a ring of exotic matter, encasing your ship in a separate bubble of space, and then get the space to move faster than the speed of light. Technically, since it's the fabric of space that's moving, nothing in space itself is breaking the light speed limit. It's a loophole, yes, but it works. Or at least, we're not sure that it doesn't not work. In terms of powering a spacecraft this way, you'd just shrink the bubble of space in front of you and expand the bubble of space behind you, pushing your bubble along lickety-split."
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