The New Light Speed Engine, Defies The Laws of Physics
Have you ever wondered why Astronauts don’t make frequent trips to other planets or even stars? If you have, what do you think is the reason? Well, the answer is that no technology has been able to allow it. The space is very big and this makes it hard to take trips. For instance, to make it to the nearest star from the earth, you would need to travel for four years! It is unimaginable to travel in space for four years and so scientists have worked tirelessly to develop a technology that could solve this problem. It has been decades of theories and inventions and finally, it seems like all hope is not lost because light-speed technology is underway.
What would the light-speed technology be able to do? Would it be possible to travel to a star or planet without having to worry about travel time? Keep reading to find the answers to these questions.
The name of this light-speed technology is a Warp drive and it would be every bit essential for traveling at light speed.
If you love Sci-fi movies and you’ve watched Star Trek, you should be familiar with the term Warp drive.
Many people have speculated that the Warp drive actually originated from Star Trek but it didn’t. It was first used in a story called “The flight of the Starling” in Amazing stories in 1948, however, Star Trek really helped to popularize it.
In The flight of the Starling, two test pilots try out this new warp drive, which allows ships to travel close to the speed of light and finally open the door to interstellar travel while in the Star Trek universe, Warp Drive is the favored method of faster-than-light propulsion by every interstellar civilization you’re likely to meet.
You'll notice that both stories have the same theories. Well, these principles would no longer be fictional because they would be used in developing the Warp drive.
To comprehend how the Warp drive technology would work, let’s start with explaining the Warp drive theory.
The theory is basically about bending time and space with enough energy. The concept was created by Miguel Alcubierre and is popularly known as the “Alcubierre drive” in 1994.
Miguel Alcubierre
According to Alcubierre, Rather than exceeding the speed of light within a local reference frame (which is a perspective you can use to determine if an object is missing), a spacecraft would traverse distances by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, resulting in effective faster-than-light travel.
Based on this theory, this is how the Warp drive technology would work. Space-time on one side of the spaceship would expand while the other side would contract thanks to the incredible amount of energy being used.
The idea is to compress the space between you and the planet you want to go to. This can be done by creating a bubble of flat space-time around the spaceship and curving space-time around that bubble to reduce distances so technically, it would be like you are not going to the star or whichever planet you want to go to, the star would come to you instead.
This is where things get very interesting. Due to this bubble created, the spaceship would be able to operate outside of physics.
According to Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, we live in four-dimensional “spacetime.” This means space-time is not static and so everything that moves through space-time can accelerate only up to the speed limit set by light.
Essentially, space-time bends in response to the existence of matter and energy. Einstein’s theory explained how two things move through space and Warp drive uses this analogy to build off the Warp drive.
Alcubierre denoted based on this theory that if spacetime were contracted in front of a spaceship and expanded behind it to compensate, it would be possible to travel to one’s destination at a speed faster than light.
He likened it to being on a passenger conveyor belt at the airport. Imagine that the floor behind you is being created out of nothing, at the same time when you look to your front, the floor is being destroyed, you would have no option other than to move along.
I know this analogy can be a little confusing but what you need to understand from all these is that it would feel like no acceleration is being made.
All these are theories though, bringing them to reality wouldn’t be a piece of cake. There are certain problems associated with how this drive would work.
One is the problem of how to stop traveling faster than the speed of light and return to “flat” space-time when you reach your destination. Not to mention, Hawking radiation would obliterate any travelers in a bubble of Warp Drive.
The reason for this is that Hawking radiation reduces the mass and rotational energy of black holes and is therefore also theorized to cause black hole evaporation. Because of this, black holes that do not gain mass through other means are expected to shrink and ultimately vanish.
In terms of the bubble in a Warp drive, since the forward and rear drives, the inside of the warp bubble becomes flat making anything inside be destroyed.
Due to this, travelers using a bubble of Warp drive would be very difficult or almost impossible.
There is also the problem of no one knowing how to produce such negative large energy because for you to be able to compress or warp space-time, you need negative energy.
A warp drive would use an amount of mass to create an imbalance between particles and antiparticles. This imbalance would now result in negative energy density and create the space-time bubble.
The major and sad part about this though is how to produce negative energy. The amount of mass needed to create negative energy is impractical because if for instance, you want to create a 100-meter bubble, you would need the mass of an entire universe and if this happens, where would you and I live?
Right now, there is no known mechanism on earth capable of creating this amount of negative energy needed. Not to worry though, there seems to be hope as a physicist, Erik Lentz offered a different approach to solve this problem.
In his paper, he showed how positive energy is enough to create a warp drive bubble if you take advantage of hyperbolic space-time rather than linear. Following this, a warp drive wouldn’t need to use negative energy.
Lentz describes how a warp drive might work by using a concept called a "soliton," which travels as a wave function in space-time. In contrast to Alcubierre's theory, where the universe is expanded behind the ship and contracted in front of it, in Lentz's theory both expansion and contraction take place around and in all directions of the soliton entity. The soliton itself is curved space-time, which remains stable throughout the process.
You may be wondering that if it were possible to generate this sufficient amount of energy required for a Warp Drive, what would it mean for the traveler? Well according to Erik Lentz, no time paradoxes would occur. If a person traveled for nine years from Earth to Proxima Centauri for instance, the same amount of time would have passed on Earth as on the spacecraft because of the lack of acceleration experienced by the space travelers.
Lentz suggests that creating this type of space-time bubble would only need conventional energy production techniques.
If this is true, then NASA could travel at great speeds and even move at the speed of light while not needing more energy. This would mean the longtime dream of Man satisfying his insatiable need for exploring the entire Universe can be achieved.
Fingers are crossed because Lentz could have just given NASA the solution to this problem they’ve been trying to solve for a while.
NASA is definitely more focused now than ever. Whether they use the Lentz approach or not, one thing is for sure. NASA is not giving up on developing this Warp drive.
This isn’t just a mere say. An internal report from inside the agency suggests that they are taking the concept of folding space and time very seriously now.
They are being discreet about this but sources say they are working hard at solving challenges preventing this drive from being a success.
Asides from the problems already mentioned in this video, another challenge that could likely be faced is the fact that traveling with a warp drive at such high speeds could be very dangerous to the ship and everyone on it because the ship would be going too fast.
This insane speed could make the ship be hit by a lot of dangerous particles as it moves.
This implies that any ship flying at this pace would need specially made shields to protect it and everyone on board.
Also, if the ship is expected to be going at an insane amount of speed, who would drive it? Just like cars and airplanes have pilots, we should expect that someone would be responsible for handling this technology which by the way would be very difficult to navigate through.
All these are questions and problems NASA is trying to solve. It seems impossible to achieve right now but we know now that even the impossible becomes possible. Not too long ago, we thought it was impossible to land on the moon but Apollo 11 did this in 1969.
To get more updates on how this goes, be sure to check this blog.