"If we're ever going to become a true spacefaring civilization, we're going to have to think outside the box a little bit, we're going to have to be a little bit audacious," Obousy said. He called the project a "humble experiment" compared to what would be needed for a real warp drive, but said it represents a promising first step.Īnd other scientists stressed that even outlandish-sounding ideas, such as the warp drive, need to be considered if humanity is serious about traveling to other stars. "We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said. Any stable warping effect would magnify the capabilities of other propulsion. Then we work on optimizing sensor and increasing the effect size. They set up what they call the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer at the Johnson Space Center, essentially creating a laser interferometer that instigates micro versions of space-time warps. The point of the Agnew summaries is that there is a roadmap to closing the gap for experiments with the generation of detectable effects. White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory.
"The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab." "The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.įurthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more, White found. The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.īut recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.
"But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light." "Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light," explained Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit group of scientists and engineers devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight. Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn't being warped at all. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind. An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it.
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