Is This A Good Idea? Warp Drives For Spacecraft?
August 26, 2009
What if we were able to equip spacecraft with faster-than-light warp drive engines, like the Enterprise has in Star Trek? Imagine that instead of being limited to the 25,000 miles per hour that the Apollo spacecraft achieved on the way to the moon and back, astronauts could travel at the speed of the Enterprise and other Constitution-class starships in the 23th Century Federation fleet — roughly 5.4 billion miles per hour?
At that speed, the immense distances of space would suddenly shrink to human scale, making it possible for us to discover, explore and even colonize distant worlds. It would be possible to reach the dwarf planet Pluto, on the edge of our solar system 2.66 billion miles from Earth, in a little more than a half hour, instead of the more than 12 years it would take at Apollo speed. More importantly, it would be possible to travel 62 trillion miles to the solar system of Epsilon Eridani, the home of Spock’s fictional planet Vulcan and the nearest star that may possibly have an Earth-like extrasolar planet in the so-called habitable zone, in about 15 months. Gliese 581c, a possibly habitable world about five times the size of Earth, would be a roughly three-year trip away. Pretty cool, huh?
If you’re a space travel enthusiast like I am, it’s hard to conceive of a downside to warp drive — provided, of course, that it wouldn’t incinerate spaceship passengers and cause the Earth to be sucked into a black hole, as naysayer physicist Stefano Finazzi has theorized. One big problem might be fuel efficiency, since bending space itself, as a warp drive would do, would require an almost unfathomably enormous energy expenditure. As Lawrence Krauss calculates in his book The Physics of Star Trek, reaching the nearest star to our sun, the Alpha Centauri system, would require the equivalent of 100,000 years’ worth of current total U.S. consumption. If a hydrogen fusion reactor powered the warp drive, a starship would consume thousands of times its weight in hydrogen on a long trip. In Star Trek, of course, script writers ingeniously get around this problem by utilizing the fictional crystalline element dilithium to regulate a matter-antimatter reaction that generates the needed power. But as we’ll discuss, scientists actually are trying to develop such an energy source for space travel.
Now, some of you may be wondering: “So why are you now blogging about warp drive for spacecraft? The Star Trek movie came out back in May, and the DVD isn’t being released until November. Can’t you at least write about a gadget from a current blockbuster?” OK, well, I suppose it would have been more newsworthy to write about the speculative technology in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. But G.I. Joe’s gadgetryas befitting to a movie based on a line of action figureslooks like a cheesy, scaled-up version of the accessories you would find on the shelf at FAO Schwarz. (See Popular Mechanics’ “Five Extremely Dumb Military Designs From G.I. Joe.”). And just as importantly, I haven’t been into G.I. Joe since my parents got me the dorky beret-and-turtleneck-clad French Resistance Fighter version of the action figure for Christmas when I was a kid, instead of the cool Mercury Astronaut version that I coveted.
Besides that, warp drive has an enduring appeal. Like the hand-held flip communicator from the seminal 1960s TV series that presaged today’s cell phones, warp drive is another of those once-outlandish sci-fi innovations that scientists now realize may someday actually be possible.
The oldest reference that I can find to “warp drive” is in a 1953 collection of short stories by science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, who later wrote for the Star Trek TV series (he’s the one who dreamed up the Vulcan salute). But while sci-fi writers commonly employed warp drives in novels and stories, they usually danced vaguely around the subject of how they would actually work, since the common interpretation of Albert Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity dictated that faster-than-light travel was impossible. Some envisioned instead that travel to distant space might be possible by flying spacecraft through a network of wormholesessentially, tunnels in space-time, first envisioned by German mathematician Herman Weyl in the 1920s. But that solution had a flaw also, after 1960s physicists demonstrated that such wormholes, if they existed, would be inherently unstable.
It wasn’t until 1994 that theoretical physicist and Star Trek fan Miguel Alcubierre published “The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity,” a paper that offered a way for a faster-than-light warp drive to work without changing the rules of Einsteinian physics or discovering a passageway through space-time. Alcubierre noticed that general relativity didn’t actually say that faster-than-light travel was impossible, but only specified that objects couldn’t move faster locally than light. He envisioned a spacecraft sitting motionless inside a bubble, while it caused time-space to expand behind it and to contract in the direction that it wanted to go. Alcubierre figured that the time-space distortion process would be powered by some sort of “exotic matter,” which sounds a lot like the matter-antimatter engine dreamed up by Star Trek writers.
Alcubierre’s blueprint for faster-than-light travel may sound even more bizarre than wormholes. But other physicists find it intriguing. In 2008, Baylor University physics associate professor Gerald Cleaver and graduate student Richard Obousy published a paper describing a way to create and propel an Alcubierrean bubble, by manipulating one of the additional dimensions envisioned in string theory. http://www.superstringtheory.com/. And theoretical physics researchers at NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, who are searching for a way to make interstellar travel feasible, think the concept has promise as well.
As Space.com recently reported, they’re encouraged by theoretical models that suggest that space-time expanded at a rate faster than light speed [the speed of light?] shortly after the universe’s inception, and by laboratory experiments in which ultra-cold rings cause gyroscopes above them to spin, suggesting that they are detecting the effect of the rings moving space-time.
But we’re still a long way from developing a working warp drive. Finding an energy source remains a huge obstacle. The Baylor researchers, for example, estimate that the amount of energy needed to manipulate that extra dimension to move a 10-meter-long ship would be the equivalent of the entire mass of the planet Jupiter, converted into pure energy.
So what do you think? Is the warp drive an idea worth pursuing? Or would we be better off crawling into a wormhole? Express your opinion below.











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