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The ring around the spacecraft generates a negative-energy field. NASA artist’s 1998 rendition of warp drive travel. The galaxy really is open only to those who travel as fast as light-or faster. But even with the aid of these technologies, you would not get too far in a human lifetime.
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There are many ideas about how to do that, from laser-accelerated solar sails to nuclear propulsion. One can always dream about establishing colonies in other star systems, but it is not a journey anyone is likely to undertake.īut perhaps one day it might be possible to reduce the travel time. Even with the best available propulsion systems, it would take tens of thousands of years for a human to get there. It takes more than four years for a beam of light to reach Earth’s nearest star Proxima Centauri. There is no doubt that the universe is still far too vast for humans to traverse. One Internet user wrote, “Anyone else feel like they were born 300 years too soon?” A Bubble in Space and Time A discussion on the online forum Reddit attracted 2,700 comments and 33,000 likes. Media outlets all over the world picked up the story, and a dozen journalists asked for interviews. It quickly became clear that Lentz was not the only person dreaming about warp drives. A year later it was published in a physics journal. Lentz put his idea on paper and discussed it with more experienced colleagues. After a few weeks, something occurred to him that everyone else seemed to have overlooked. Then he began to think about it for himself. Lentz read everything he could find on warp drives in the scientific literature, which was not very much.
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He suddenly had plenty of free time on his hands-and childhood fancies in his head. But then, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Lentz found himself alone in Göttingen, Germany, where he was doing postdoctoral work. dissertation on dark matter and generally became far too busy to be concerned with science fiction. He studied physics at the University of Washington, wrote his Ph.D. “At some point, I realized that the technology didn’t exist,” Lentz says. And Lentz, still in elementary school, wondered whether warp drive might also work in real life. Every few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard would raise his hand and order, “Warp one, engage!” Then stars became dashes, and light-years flashed by at impossible speed.
That's a distinct barrier if there ever was one.For Erik Lentz, it all started with Star Trek. So, theoretically, to move at the cosmic speed limit of light you need an infinite amount of energy. Moving takes energy, and the faster you move the more energy you use. As NASA poses the question, "How can an object travel faster than that which links its atoms?" It's a very different matter.Īnother issue special relativity brings up is the light speed barrier. So when it comes to breaking the light barrier, it's like breaking through light with light (sort of… ask Brian Greene). But the atoms and molecules that make up all matter are connected by electromagnetic fields, and that's the same stuff that light is made of. The sound barrier–properly, the aerodynamic effects of pressure waves interacting with a body as it approaches the speed of sound–was broken with a cleverly engineered aircraft and an at-the-time state of the art rocket engine.īell's X-1 was, importantly, a physical aircraft made of matter, not made of sound. The problem is that breaking the light barrier isn't at all like breaking the sound barrier. Speculative research is a thing that happens.
It's more about the fact that NASA is partly in the business of letting really smart people try things that are kind of crazy and unlikely, if they can back up the idea with a reasonably plausible hypothesis. But, as Amy Teitel explains in a story for Vice's Motherboard, the fact that this is happening does not necessarily mean a real working warp drive is possible. Harold White of NASA's Johnson Space Center is currently leading an effort to design a warp drive space ship.
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