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Star Trek warp drive might be possible after all

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Diagram of the Alcubierre Warp DrivePack your bags. Space.com reports that scientists may have found a loophole in that pesky “speed of light” limit making warp drives, as popularized in the television series Star Trek, possible after all. Warp drives enable travel through space-time. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre but subsequent calculations found that a device as proposed by Alcubierre would require too much energy to operate (energy required that is about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter). Scientists say they have found a way to make it work using less energy and thus, have brought the idea back to life.

Space.com explained:

“An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. 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. Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn’t being warped at all.”

Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, further explained:

"Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light. But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light."

In short, travel is limited to the speed of light but space-time is not. They calculate that the newly designed drive would be able to power a vehicle up to 10-times the speed of light and all it took was a slight change in its shape.

“Scientists 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. 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. Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more.”

Scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, are working on the first step in an experiment called “White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer” where they are attempting to create a laser interferometer that instigates micro versions of space-time warps in the laboratory.

Sources: Space.com, NBC News
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