![]() "People used to say, ‘You’re dealing in something that would be great, but it takes the mass of the entire universe to do it,’" Agnew said. Some scientists believe it would require more energy than available within the universe, although others maintain the energy levels would be physically attainable. The energy required to create an Alcubierre bubble would be immense. "What you would do is, you’d compress space-time ahead of the craft and expand space-time behind it." "Suppose you have a craft that’s in the bubble," he continues, quoted in a university press release on the talk. "Mathematically, if you fulfill all the energy requirements, they can’t prove that it doesn’t work," he recently said at a standing-room only talk on the subject. The engineering student, Joseph Agnew, wants to explore the idea. The rules of physics would still apply within the bubble, but the ship would be localized outside of space. Inside that bubble would be a inertial reference frame where explorers would feel no proper acceleration. "By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it," Alcubierre wrote in his paper's abstract, "motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible."Įssentially, an Alcubierre drive would expend a tremendous amount of energy to contract and twist space-time in front of it and create a bubble. In 1994, the theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre developed a theoretical workaround, which has come to be known as the Alcubierre drive. That certainly rules out massive ships like the Enterprise. Only things with no mass, like photons, can travel at those tremendous speeds. "As objects travel faster and faster, they get heavier and heavier-the heavier they get, the harder it is to achieve acceleration, so you never get to the speed of light," Roger Rassool, a physicist at the University of Melbourne, Australia, once told the BBC. Thus, warp drive is tremendously important to humanity's evolution.īut Einstein's Theory of Relativity kind of throws a wrench into the whole thing, since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Without these super-fast ships that run on warp drive, we can't become a space-faring species. Warp drive is fundamental to the world of Star Trek, as it's the crucial component to superluminal starships. The franchise has inspired technologies that people use and study every day, and now a mechanical engineering student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville wants to bring forth another one: warp drive. Star Trek's science fiction has been intermingled with real-life science for decades. An undergrad at the University of Alabama wants to restart the conversation, and he's focused on how much energy such a bubble would need. ![]() Many think it makes theoretical sense, but is practically unworkable. ![]()
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