I apologize. I really do. I’m sorry, fellow Trekkies, I have to shit on your dreams again. Mine too.
It isn’t going to happen. Despite the lovely concept art NASA’s put forth, and the experiment that apparently is underway at a small scale, there’s no warp drive coming, probably ever. It isn’t possible, unless a fundamentally new kind of matter is discovered, and that little thing about causality is dealt with.
Relativity states you can’t violate causality, and a FTL drive would do just that. Special relativity states it’d be a type of time-travel. When you look up into the night sky, you’re essentially looking backwards in time. That light from the stars is light that took dozens and hundreds of years to reach us. This site explains it better than any site I’ve found on the internet and I highly recommend it. Even the comments are tolerable.
As one hard-science fiction site says,
“Causality, Relativity, FTL travel: chose any two” and if you’re going to choose all three, make sure you have limits that are logical and consistent. Nerds will still try to break it. It's what we do. It’s what NASA is doing.
The Alcuibierre Drive That This Is Based On
In 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre wrote about a metric for a spacedrive:
"It is shown how, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the `warp drive' of science fiction. However, just as happens with wormholes, exotic matter will be needed in order to generate a distortion of spacetime like the one discussed here.”
This is basically the drive NASA is researching. In English, the spaceship would launch from Earth via conventional means and travel to some arbitrary location. Inside the ship a switch or lever would be pulled and some type of spacedrive would somehow project a bubble built of magic imaginary exotic matter that would expand spacetime behind the ship. In front of the ship, spacetime would contract. The ship itself would not be moving faster than light (from the vantage point of a person within the ship) but outside of the bubble, the distortion would appear to move faster than light, thus the “apparent” FTL that special relativity does allow for. “Exotic matter,” does not exist. Handwavium, unobtainium, whatever you want call it is not physically real. When you get to your location (not sure how you’d know since you can’t see outside of the bubble) the lever would be pulled again, the field would be turned off, and boom, you’re light-years away from Earth or something.
Critiques of the Alcubierre Drive (which the creator has stated was basically just a fun thought experiment, but I love that he watched Star Trek and used his knowledge to try to figure out how it could possibly work) have stated the drive would require vast amounts of unobtainium, in the order of several solar masses or more, perhaps more than the available energy of the universe . In addition, you might not be able to communicate to turn the bubble on or off. The edges of the bubble would have immense tidal forces due to the curvature of spacetime but you should be okay in your spaceship within the center of the bubble. Or not. It might get so hot and so radioactive inside the bubble that you’ll cook like crispy, glowing bacon and die horribly and painfully. Later study indicates that the amount of unobtainium needed would be much smaller—perhaps only a few kilograms. In addition, you probably won’t cook yourself or destroy your local star system.
Dr. Harold White of NASA’s Theoretical Propulsion Unit is currently working on a small-scale experiment (or I should say, has been working, for several years, on a small scale experiment.). You can read the concept paper here (right click and save, it’s a PDF) and you can also read another presentation here.
The experiment is an interferometer designed to determine if spacetime can be warped. Using a capacitor ring of positive energy density and an He-Ne laser, the setup is supposed to measure if spacetime can warp. I’m really not doing the experiment justice with my description.Go here, and rightclick and save the poster NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratory created.
The only evidence I’ve found is that the experiment’s results so far are inconclusive. This was last year. I’ve not heard anything since.
NASAWatch clarifies some things here.
This essentially is geekbait, folks. There’s nothing more to it, really. It’s a cheap experiment---NASA spends basically my annual salary a year on its entire Eagleworks so there’s no real money being lost. It’s cute the concept art names the ship “Enterprise.” More geekbait, and after all, Star Trek (and all its bloated, broken canon, unworkable , impossible physics and biology and science and gender politics and economics, and the fun sense of adventure) is approaching its 50th anniversary this December or September 2016, depending on how one counts it. I squeed along with everyone else when I first saw the ship, but realistically it’s probably not going to happen. Inconclusive results from a warp field interferometer don’t give me much confidence. Sorry to shit on all our dreams, but we’re really likely stuck on this rock until we go extinct, and whether that’s in this century, or next, or six thousand centuries from now is something that actually is up to all of us. Reality may have a liberal bias but that doesn't mean reality is inherently fair. It's not.
(that said, ima steal this concept for my next scifi novel that I’m going to write this November for NaNoWriMo, cause even if it's not real, who cares? It's scifi. )