If it wasn’t a warp bubble, what did they build? This would mean that a hypothetical vessel could break the “cosmic speed limit” by arriving at their destination faster than the speed of light, without ever having to accelerate its squishy human passengers to relativistic speeds. It would drag a spacecraft forward by contracting space itself in front of the vessel’s nose. That’s where the Casimir effect comes in. The idea of an Alcubierre warp drive rests on the principle that under the right conditions, spacetime itself can contract.
Nasa warp drive crack#
However, now that we’ve seen it happen in real life, it’s high on the list of real-world phenomena scientists are investigating to figure out how we might finally crack the problem of interstellar space exploration. It used to be a purely hypothetical offshoot of relativity. The Casimir effect, for the uninitiated, is a very small attractive force that exists between two uncharged but conductive parallel plates that are held very, very close together.
To make a warp drive, first you need to master the Casimir effect. Breaking the ‘cosmic speed limit’ with the Casimir effect
It might be a baby step, but it’s a real one. “Sunny” White has proposed a structure that could actually be built in the real world and used to study the Casimir effect. But all hope is not lost: a group of scientists led by Dr. Despite recent reports that scientists have “accidentally created a warp bubble,” it looks like warp speed is still a few baby steps away. In effect the astronauts would have traveled into their future.Sorry to our fellow hopeful space nerds, but we have to burst everyone’s warp bubble. Of course, upon return those back here on Earth would have aged at least 8.72 years. For the astronauts the trip would feel like a two week jaunt. He described what it would be like for astronauts traveling on a warp spaceship to our nearest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri, 4.36 light-years away. Harold “Sonny” White, who heads up the Johnson Space Center skunk works looking at warp drives, proposed that it is possible within this century to achieve warp drive technology. This could occur because the Universe had no mass at the time.Īt a conference in 2013, Dr. Shortly after the Big Bang, the moment of the Universe’s conception, it expanded at rates faster than light speed. In the past have objects in our Universe traveled faster than the speed of light? According to cosmologists the answer is yes. But for those observing from outside the bubble it would appear that the spaceship was exceeding light speed. For the passengers it would appear that they were traveling at sub-light speeds. Inside it the laws of special relativity would still apply. A spaceship with such engines would literally ride within a magnetically created bubble. Now scientists and engineers are speculating that space can be bent not just by light but by building an engine technology with powerful magnetic fields that warp the immediate surrounding area. That’s why the speed of light is deemed to be the physical limit for matter traveling through space.īut Einstein also discovered that light traveling through space could be bent by gravity. At the speed of light an object would have infinite mass. In his theory of special relativity he postulated that as an object accelerates it increases in mass. These rings would generate the warp field, bending space around the ship so that it could travel within a bubble isolated from surrounding space and at speeds faster than light.Īlbert Einstein stated that nothing in the Universe can exceed the speed of light. Unlike the USS Enterprise, a future warp drive vessel would probably feature very large torus-like rings surrounding the central habitat and workings of the ship.
Nasa warp drive movie#
One of the space administration’s skunk works has been working on it since Gene Rodenberry made it the means by which interstellar space travel was realized in the movie and television science fiction adventures of Star Trek.īack in 2010 a NASA team at the Johnson Space Center revealed concept drawings showing what a warp drive space ship would look like. J– NASA has toyed with the idea of the possibility of faster-than-light speed spaceships for a number of years.
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