Will we ever see each other? Credit: Gianni Martaire (Applied Physics).
Hands on the heart, who wouldn’t want to travel between the stars? Or at least send our ships there? It is all about cosmic science fiction. But the distances in space are monstrous. Modern technologies cannot handle them. For decades, humans have been praising the proverbial drive of Start Trek, Star Wars, and similar stories that bounce heroes off the star system as if nothing had happened.
Alexey Bobrick.
Credit:
Lund University.
Thanks to Star Trek, warp propulsion, that is, technology for traveling at “super-light speed”, became known. This drive is described in some episodes and in some detail in the story, including “Warp Core,” “Warp Reactor,” which draws energy from the destruction of antimatter material, the regulator “Thin Lithium”, and extreme magnetic fields. From the warp core, the warp plasma flows into the gendols, forming a warp zone. This turns space-time around the spaceship in question, which can move a great distance, such as flying at super-light speed, even if the ship is actually moving at a fairly normal speed, only Short flight.
So much science fiction. In 1994, Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcuberre Moya, an expert on Einstein’s relativity, bent over Einstein’s equations during his doctoral studies to design a real warp propulsion with which a spacecraft flew into a twisted space-time bubble. Will, real speed at super-light. And yes, he was inspired by Star Trek, which he loved from an early age. The creators of the fantastic stories have and still have a tremendous impact, perhaps more than they realize.
Miguel Alcuberere Moya (2013). Credit: Jid Moise / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0
Alcubier’s drive has not contradicted Einstein’s equations and they can theoretically work. But it has an important hook. A large amount of negative energy will be required to operate it, which is not clear if it can exist at all. It does not mention where to take it. Negative energy is a lot of foreign physics. However, as it turns out, there are other options, slightly less exotic and more practical, although it is likely that they will take a long time before they become possible.
American physicists Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martier of New York’s Advanced Propulsion Laboratory took Alcuberre’s drive and devised a new system that could drive it. They suggest that it would be possible to use mass gravitation to bend space in the warp drive instead of negative energy. Just to give you an idea, it would like to compress a planet-sized mass into the shape of a spacecraft. This, true, is not at all within the reach of our technologies, but at least there is no foreign physics and matter that cannot exist. We probably won’t be flying in the galaxy in the future, but it’s not hopeless at all. And this is what is going on here.
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