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. 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. Perhaps it will not be long before we can boldly go where no man has gone before.J– NASA has toyed with the idea of the possibility of faster-than-light speed spaceships for a number of years. That hasn’t happened yet for warp drive theory, but we are all waiting with bated breath. It may be on the tiniest scale, but it’s real, solid and measurable evidence that the theory works. That “Chicago Pile” moment is the one where existence is proven. A year later, a reactor that produced approximately 4MW was built and we’ve only built bigger reactors since. That’s barely enough to light up a standard bulb. That is a reference to the moment in 1942 when the first ever nuclear reactor was activated in Chicago, generating just half a watt. White is still cautious about premature hype surrounding the experiment – he’s waiting for the “Chicago Pile” moment. They’re trying to simulate the re-designed Alcubierre drive at a very small scale, using lasers to disturb spacetime by one part in 10 million. That’s right – the idea has progressed from theoretical physics into experimental physics and NASA scientists are, at this very moment, testing the theory. Now that the whole idea of achieving interstellar travel doesn’t seem so impractical, the man is hard at work beginning actual experiments. His approach saw a reduction of mass-energy requirements to as little at 1600 pounds! He figured out that if you increase the thickness of the negative vacuum energy ring, making it more of a toroid shape rather than a flat belt, and if you oscillate the warp bubble, the energy requirements drop dramatically. However, White has had put a bit of thought into redesigning the Alcubierre drive to renew hope of upgrading Earth from a pre-warp civilisation. The theory was thus discarded as impractical – we’re running out of fuel as it is, how are we expected to power spaceships that require a mass-energy equal to the planet Jupiter?! The problem with the Alcubierre Drive is that, while it would allow us to travel to Alpha Centauri (which is 4.3 light years away) in a matter of weeks, the contraction and expansion of spacetime to the degree required proves to need amounts of energy that is simply impossible to achieve. To the ship, everything else has moved around it, while to us Earthlings, it’s sped off at warp 9. Of course, within the ship’s frame of reference, it will perceive no acceleration at all, and would not be exceeding the speed of light, thus not violating relativity. Since spacetime can be contracted/expanded as fast as you like, from a frame of reference outside the disturbed region, it would appear that the spaceship was moving faster than light. This creates what Star Trek would call a “warp bubble” around the spaceship, moving spacetime around the ship. How? The mechanics of it involves a localized expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship, and a corresponding contraction in front of it. In this paper, he showed that it was possible to travel faster than light without violating relativity and without the introduction of wormholes. You see in 1994, a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre published a paper titled, “ The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity“. And he doesn’t say ‘warp drive’ lightly – it works very much like the engines we see in Star Trek. And because I thoroughly enjoy it I’m going to say it – more Star Trek technology is coming to life! (In addition to the tractor beams, universal translators, VISORs and, of course, replicators).Ī physicist named Harold White recently made the landmark announcement that he and his team at NASA were beginning work on a faster-than-light warp drive. That’s right FTL may be closer than we think.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |