Summary
While we have our troubles here on Earth, people have always dreamed of exploring the stars. In fiction, technologies like warp drive make this possible. In reality, it’s unlikely we’ll ever have such a convenient plot device to help us, yet the dream won’t die.
There are many concepts in fiction meant to overcome the challenge of interstellar distances. It’s hard to write a compelling story involving aliens or human colonies on other planets when it takes thousands or millions of years to travel between these worlds. So you get spaceships with jump drives, hyperspace drives, or various other creative takes on the same concept.
The fictional principles of these devices vary, but warp drives in particular have a specific way of getting you around the galaxy. Instead of trying to go faster than the speed of light, warp drives, well,warpspace itself.
It contracts space in front of the ship and expands it behind it. This creates a warp bubble where nothing goes faster than light inside the bubble, but the bubble itself will arrive at its destination faster than the speed of light.
Warp Drives Are Plausible
Warp drives might sound as goofy as any of the other sci-fi propulsion methods, but believe it or not, on paper, the math checks out. Proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre (and explained in detail onWikipedia), the Alcubierre drive lays out how you can achieve warp without violating any known laws of physics.
The equations make some assumptions about things that could be true (though they haven’t been observed or confirmed), but so far, barring discoveries in physics that would rule warp drive out, it’s plausible.
The biggest issue is that to actually build a drive like this, you’d need a fantastical amount of energy, and some sort of exotic matter. What is this exotic matter? Science doesn’t exactly know, but it would need some wild properties and might end up being dark matter or (probably not) antimatter. If that exotic matter doesn’t or can’t exist, then the dream of this particular warp drive design is dead.
We Don’t Like the Idea of Unreachable Stars
The truth is that we’re unlikely to ever discover any way to effectively travel faster than light. The laws of physics just don’t allow for it, even if on paper there are potential loopholes. Without the (seemingly) magic fuel that would make a warp drive go, it’s not happening.
We’ll likely get close to some significant percentage of the speed of light, to make travel to our nearest neighboring stars feasible, but the idea of visiting any worlds outside our own solar system on a human timescale has a tiny chance of becoming true.
That’s not the sort of reality we like to accept: unless there’s something truly fundamental we don’t know about the universe, we’ll have to obey this ultimate speed limit.
Exploring the galaxy, potentially finding other life, and expanding our reach beyond Earth and our star system would have an extraordinary impact on our beliefs, society, and the future of the species. So it’s not unsurprising that we’ll always keep some irrational hope that there’s a magic bullet that will let us escape from the part of the universe we originated.
Progress Makes Us Think Anything Is Possible
I think one of the main reasons people keep the hope of faster than light travel alive is because the last century has created the mild illusion that we can do anything through science and technology.
Many inconceivable things will likely be possible by the end of this century, thanks to developments in thelatest AI technology, materials science, robotics, andhuman-machine interfaces, but there will ultimately be some things we just can’t overcome.
We’ll Have to Take the Long Way
While warp drives may not be possible, it doesn’t mean we can’t achieve quicker space travel. There are many much more plausible ways to get the job done. Putting humans into suspended animation (as perNew Scientist), sending small robotic probes, or sending humans as embryos are all considerations. Or even as genetic data on computer drives, to print DNA for gestation at the other end of the journey.
This all sounds far-fetched, but any and more of these plans have a greater chance of working for galactic exploration than circumventing the speed of light. Where there’s a will, there’s probably a way, but not necessarily the way we would have wanted. For now, warp drives will have to stay on TV.
