star trek warp bubble

• Mirror Universe

The alternate USS Enterprise at warp

Warp drive or warp engine was a technology that allowed space travel at faster-than-light speeds . It worked by generating warp fields to form a subspace bubble that enveloped the starship , distorting the local spacetime continuum and moving the starship at velocities that could greatly exceed the speed of light . These velocities were referred to as warp factors . Warp drive was the most common form of interstellar propulsion used in the Milky Way Galaxy , making interstellar civilization, exploration, and commerce possible. By the 24th century, warp was the primary means of interstellar transport , but scientists from various cultures were pursuing various alternative propulsion methods that were hypothetically faster or more efficient.

• 1 Etymology
• 2.1 Parts of the system
• 2.2 System types
• 3.1 21st century
• 3.2 22nd century
• 3.3 23rd century
• 3.4 24th century
• 3.5 ...and beyond
• 4.1 Background information
• 4.2 External links

Etymology [ ]

The USS Discovery at warp in 2257

The USS Stargazer performs a warp jump

In 2063 , the term "warp drive" was already used by Zefram Cochrane of his engine on the Phoenix . However, Cochrane used the term "space warp generator" in the monitor displays on his spacecraft. ( Star Trek: First Contact ) Even as late as the 2150s , the warp five engine was still officially known as a " gravimetric field displacement manifold" ( ENT : " Cold Front ").

Most cultures throughout the Milky Way Galaxy used the term "warp drive" and by the late- 23rd century it was the most common term used by the Federation as well ( Star Trek: The Original Series , et al.). In the 2250s the term "hyperdrive" was used by Starfleet , ( TOS : " The Cage ") and the Ferengi occasionally used the term "lightspeed drive". ( TNG : " Peak Performance ") Finally, there was the term "star drive" which was only used by the Federation and Starfleet in the 2260s. ( TOS : " Bread and Circuses ", " The Paradise Syndrome ")

Space warp was one of the vocabulary words listed on the chart "A Tunnel in the Sky". This chart was seen in the schoolroom aboard Deep Space 9 in 2369 . ( DS9 : " In the Hands of the Prophets ")

The process of going to warp was described as a warp jump . ( ENT : " Horizon "; TNG : " Peak Performance ", et al.)

The use of the term "hyperdrive" in " The Cage " was never fully explained, but the writer's guide, The Star Trek Guide (third rev., p. 8) [1] suggests an origin for the term. According to the guide, "hyper-light speed" was an alternative, less preferred, term for "space warp speed". Decades later, the term "hyper-speed" is referenced in a descriptive/action paragraph of the script for " Where No One Has Gone Before ". Hyperdrive later became more prominently known as the ftl drive in the Star Wars franchise.

According to Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual (p. 54), the original official term used by Cochrane in the 2060s was "continuum distortion propulsion", which was only informally dubbed as "warp" propulsion at the time.

Technology [ ]

Enterprise with a disabled warp engine

Warp engines were the bulky units found, in many cases, in a starship's nacelle . ( TNG : " New Ground ")

24th century Federation warp engines were fueled by the reaction of matter ( deuterium ) and antimatter ( antideuterium ), mediated through an assembly of dilithium crystals, which were nonreactive with antimatter when subjected to high-frequency electromagnetic fields . This reaction produced a highly energetic plasma , called electro-plasma or warp plasma , which was channeled by plasma conduits through the electro-plasma system (EPS); that system also provided the primary energy supply for the ships other electronic systems. For propulsion the electro-plasma was funneled by plasma injectors into a series of warp field coils , usually located in remote warp nacelles . These coils were composed of verterium cortenide and generated the warp field .

Other civilizations used different power sources, such as the Romulans ' use of artificial quantum singularities to power their warp drives, ( TNG : " Timescape ") but the basic process was similar. In some vessels, such as the Intrepid -class , the nacelles were mounted on variable geometry pylons . ( VOY : " Caretaker ")

A display showing the main components of a warp drive

Parts of the system [ ]

• Antimatter containment
• Antimatter inducer
• Antimatter relay
• Deuterium cartridges
• Deuterium control conduit
• Electro-plasma
• Emergency shutdown trips
• Main stage flux chiller
• Magnetic interlock
• Bussard collectors
• Plasma injector
• Nullifier core
• Pre stage flux chiller
• Phase inducer
• Plasma conduit
• Plasma coolant
• Plasma regulator
• Power transfer conduit
• Power transfer grid
• Space matrix restoration coil
• Warp field generator
• Warp plasma conduit
• Antimatter injector
• Antiproton injection seal
• dilithium articulation frame
• dilithium chamber hatch
• dilithium crystal
• dilithium regulator
• Intermix chamber
• Matter injector / deuterium injector
• Theta-matrix compositor

System types [ ]

• Class 7 warp drive
• Class 9 warp drive
• Enhanced warp drive
• S-2 graf unit
• Subspace resonator
• Tetryon plasma warp drive
• Tricyclic plasma drive
• Warp five engine
• Warp three engine
• Yoyodyne pulse fusion

Development [ ]

Warp drive and other faster-than-light (FTL) propulsion technologies were the linchpin of an interstellar civilization, making trade and exploration across vast interstellar distances viable. Without these technologies, these distances could not be crossed in any reasonable period of time, making interstellar civilization usually limited to a single sector. ( TNG : " A Matter Of Time ") To put this in perspective, planets that were years away with impulse speeds could be reached in days with ships equipped with warp drive. ( TOS : " Where No Man Has Gone Before ")

The IKS Rotarran accelerates to warp, viewed from within the vessel

Cultures in the galaxy discovered warp drive at their own pace and rate of development, as most of the cultures had to do. The Vulcans were an interstellar civilization by 9th century BC and had reached the level of warp 7 by 2151 . ( ENT : " The Andorian Incident ", " Fallen Hero "; DS9 : " Little Green Men ") Klingons had interstellar travel capability around the time of Kahless in the 9th century . They had achieved the capability of warp 6 by 2151. ( TNG : " Rightful Heir "; DS9 : " Little Green Men "; VOY : " Day of Honor "; ENT : " Judgment ") Romulans were once considered a group of petty thugs and warp drive was regarded as the key technology that allowed the founding of the Romulan Star Empire . ( Star Trek: Insurrection ) The Vissians developed warp drive around the 12th century . ( ENT : " Cogenitor ") The Borg in the Delta Quadrant began to establish their interstellar collective by the 15th century . ( VOY : " Dragon's Teeth ") In the Alpha Quadrant, the rapid progress of Humanity in the 22nd century led to the wide-scale exploration of the galaxy being one of the basic goals of the United Federation of Planets , founded in 2161 .

Quark stated in "Little Green Men" that the Ferengi would have had warp drive "centuries" before the "Humans, Klingons, and even the Vulcans," had he delivered warp technology to Ferenginar in 1947. See Little Green Men – Trivia for more information. For the Vulcans, this is contradicted in ENT : " Carbon Creek ", where Vulcans are clearly depicted as warp-capable in 1957 , with the ability to reach Earth with relatively small survey ships .

According to "Rightful Heir", before Kahless died, he declared he would one day return, in the Boreth star system . Shortly after this, Klingons built the Boreth monastery there to await for his return. According to the episode "Day of Honor", Kahless lived in the 9th century. It is stated in Star Trek: Star Charts (p. 55) that Klingons had achieved warp capability in the year 930. Quark, however, stated in "Little Green Men" that the Ferengi would have had warp drive before the Klingons, had he delivered warp technology to Ferenginar in 1947.

Regarding Vulcan propulsion technology aboard the T'Plana-Hath , Ronald D. Moore commented, " Certainly Cochrane is credited with the invention of warp drive as we know it in Trek , so we could assume that the Vulcans were using something else – possibly a variant of the contained singularity used by the Romulans. That might have been a much more dangerous and inefficient technology which was quickly abandoned by most of the galaxy when Cochrane's system was introduced. " ( AOL chat , 1997 )

The development of the warp drive was recognized by the United Federation of Planets as the marker of an advanced society. It was only after a people developed warp drive that the Federation made contact, as codified in the Prime Directive . ( TNG : " First Contact ") A warp capable society was deemed technically and psychologically ready to embrace the universe at large.

According to Science Officer Spock in 2259 , not once in the entire history of first contact had warp been first developed as anything but a drive. However, the Kiley had developed warp in the form of a warp bomb . ( SNW : " Strange New Worlds ")

21st century [ ]

Phoenix goes to warp

On Earth , warp drive was initially developed by Zefram Cochrane , in the period following World War III . ( Star Trek: First Contact )

The spacecraft credited with discovering the space warp phenomenon was the Bonaventure . ( DS9 : " The Nagus ", production art )

Despite the hardships imposed by the war's aftermath and the lack of advanced materials, Cochrane was able to build a manned warp-capable vessel using a converted Titan II missile. The successful first flight of his ship – the Phoenix – took place on April 5 , 2063 , and drew the attention of a Vulcan exploratory vessel, leading to the event known as First Contact . ( Star Trek: First Contact )

The Bonaventure then became the first deep-space starship to have warp drive installed. ( TAS : " The Time Trap ")

22nd century [ ]

Two NX-class starships in tandem warp flight

Development of warp technology by Humans proceeded slowly over the next eighty years, after the flight of the Phoenix – due, in no small part, to the cautious advice of the Vulcans – and it was not until the 2140s that a warp engine developed by Henry Archer at the Warp Five Complex could exceed warp factor 2.

This engine was successfully tested in the second NX prototype by Commanders A.G. Robinson and Jonathan Archer to a speed of warp 2.5, breaking the so-called " warp 2 barrier " in 2143 . Eight months later, Duvall achieved warp 3 with the NX Delta . Warp 4 was first achieved by the USS Franklin . ( ENT : " First Flight "; Star Trek Beyond )

By the year 2149 , warp technology was sufficiently advanced to begin the construction of Enterprise , a vessel capable of warp 5 and launched in 2151 . ( ENT : " Broken Bow ") Although Enterprise was at first unable to fully realize this potential (maxing out at warp 4.7), the starship finally reached warp 5 on February 9 , 2152 . ( ENT : " Fallen Hero ")

By 2161 , Starfleet warp drive technology had achieved the capability to reach warp 7, and these engines were being built into the latest class of Starfleet vessels as the NX-class ships were being decommissioned. ( ENT : " These Are the Voyages... ")

23rd century [ ]

The USS Shenzhou at warp in 2256

Development and improvement of warp drive continued apace, and by the 2240s , Starfleet vessels of the Constitution -class had standard cruising speeds of warp 6 and emergency speeds as high as warp 8 (although under the right conditions, the engines could reach warp 9). These ships took advantage of a major breakthrough in warp technology that took place between 2236 and 2254 , the breaking of the so-called " time barrier ". ( TOS : " The Cage ")

Higher warp factors continued to be reached, mostly through alien intervention, or dangerous malfunction. The USS Enterprise was modified by the Kelvans to maintain a speed of warp 11 in 2268 . Later that year, the Enterprise accelerated to a speed of warp factor 14.1, after being sabotaged by a Kalandan planetary defense system . At that velocity, however, the ship came within moments of destroying itself. ( TOS : " By Any Other Name ", " That Which Survives ")

At around the same time, warp engines were being redesigned to allow standard speeds of warp 8 and above. During the refit of the Constitution -class, the cylindrical-shaped nacelles were replaced with a new flattened design. Engines required precise tuning; imbalanced engines caused a wormhole effect that almost destroyed Enterprise on its first mission after refit. ( Star Trek: The Motion Picture )

According to the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology (p. 180), the new warp drive of the Enterprise after the refit was an advanced fourth generation warp drive system known as "pulsed warp drive".

The USS Enterprise -A jumps to warp to escape an incoming photon torpedo

Warp theory continued to advance with the development of the first transwarp drive engines in the mid- 2280s , which would have theoretically allowed greater efficiency and any warp speed to be available for a ship. However, the transwarp experiment of USS Excelsior ended in failure, and the technology was abandoned at that time. The Excelsior itself was deemed spaceworthy, retrofitted with conventional warp drive and commissioned as NCC-2000 under the command of Captain Hikaru Sulu . ( Star Trek III: The Search for Spock ; VOY : " Threshold "; Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country )

24th century [ ]

The USS Enterprise -D at warp

At some point in the 24th century, a new warp factor scale came into use, which placed warp 10 as a theoretical maximum. ( VOY : " Threshold ")

According to Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual , the new scale was a more advanced function than the previous cubic power scale, with factors increasing exponentially in terms of power consumption and equivalent speed. This "new" scale also presents a maximum "cap" on the absolute velocity of a warp drive, even beyond the warp 10 limit; since energy cannot be created or destroyed, an exponential increase in power consumption would eventually outstrip the amount of available energy in the known universe.

By the time the Galaxy -class starship was being designed in the 2360s , warp technology had progressed to the point where speeds of warp 9.6 could be sustained for up to twelve hours, although warp 9.2 was considered the "red line." ( TNG : " Encounter at Farpoint ")

According to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual (pp. 151-158), the classification of Federation warp drives capable of maintaining speeds of warp factor 9.2 and above for at least twelve hours was "1,500+ cochrane warp core".

In 2367 , the warp drive on the Galaxy -class starship was managed by the warp propulsion power system . In that year, when Data hijacked the USS Enterprise -D , he issued a command override on this system giving him complete control of the system from the bridge . ( TNG : " Brothers ")

Voyager accelerates to warp

The USS Voyager was capable of a top cruising speed of warp 9.975. ( VOY : " Caretaker ", " Relativity ")

The USS Prometheus was capable of a sustained cruising speed of warp 9.9. ( VOY : " Message in a Bottle ")

In 2370 , the Hekaran scientist Serova discovered that the use of conventional warp engines caused damage to the fabric of spacetime. The Federation Council imposed a speed limit of warp factor 5 on all Federation vessels in all but extreme emergency cases, such as medical emergencies. A conspiracy theory posit by Steve Levy suggested that the discovery of this was part of a Vendorian morality test ( TNG : " Force of Nature ", " The Pegasus ", " Eye of the Beholder ", LD : " Caves ")

Warp speeds above warp 5 were routinely used after 2370, without mention of the harmful effects, suggesting a solution was found, even though it was not mentioned on-screen. ( Star Trek Encyclopedia , 2nd ed., p. 187) See also: Variable geometry pylon . As the "speed limit" probably also limited potential future storylines, it seems that the concept was quietly done away with, shortly into the next season. Brannon Braga has noted that, " When you limit warp drive, the rug is being pulled out from under Star Trek . " ( Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages , p. 294) Technical specifications for the USS Voyager published in Star Trek: Voyager 25th Anniversary Special state that the vessel's advanced warp system allows the vessel to exceed the warp speed limit without damaging the nearby space continuum.

It was not until 2372 , that the transwarp threshold was broken by the Federation. Tom Paris of the USS Voyager managed to achieve infinite velocity on the shuttlecraft Cochrane . However, this form of travel was found to have severe, unanticipated side effects . ( VOY : " Threshold ")

...and beyond [ ]

In what was originally the future which was observed and altered by Jean-Luc Picard , speeds of at least warp 13 were possible. ( TNG : " All Good Things... ")

In the October 1995 issue of OMNI , science advisor Andre Bormanis stated the idea of warp factors beyond 10 in the alternative future was a recalibration of the warp scale, as ships of that era had gotten faster. Bormanis suggested the possibility that warp factor 15 was set to be the ultimate speed limit and warp 13 in that scale would have been the equivalent of warp factor 9.95 in the previous scale.

The box of the Playmates desktop model of the alternative future Enterprise -D called it a transwarping ship. [2]

In the late 32nd century , the pathway drive was developed by the Federation as an alternative to warp drive as it eliminated their reliance on dilithium . Decades later during the 33rd century , the pathway drive appeared to have replaced the warp drive completely. ( DIS : " Red Directive ", " Life, Itself ")

Appendices [ ]

Background information [ ].

Gene Roddenberry originally intended the Enterprise to become transparent while in warp drive, as depicted in " The Cage " (later reformatted into the two-part "The Menagerie"). The idea was that the ship would be traveling faster than light, which means that light would not reach it, rendering the vessel invisible to the naked eye. However, according to Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, the speed of light is a constant from any frame of reference; an observer moving at close to c would still observe light moving toward him and away from him at c .

External links [ ]

• Warp drive at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• Hyperdrive at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• Warp drive at Wikipedia
• André Bormanis's explanation of warp drive (X)
• 1 Bell Riots
• 2 Daniels (Crewman)

July 13, 2021

11 min read

Star Trek ’s Warp Drive Leads to New Physics

Researchers are taking a closer look at this science-fiction staple—and bringing the idea a little closer to reality

By Robert Gast & Spektrum

Warp one, engage!

Getty Images

For Erik Lentz, it all started with Star Trek . Every few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard would raise his hand and order, “Warp one, engage!” Then stars became dashes, and light-years flashed by at impossible speed. And Lentz, still in elementary school, wondered whether warp drive might also work in real life.

“At some point, I realized that the technology didn’t exist,” Lentz says. He studied physics at the University of Washington, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on dark matter and generally became far too busy to be concerned with science fiction. But then, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Lentz found himself alone in Göttingen, Germany, where he was doing postdoctoral work. He suddenly had plenty of free time on his hands—and childhood fancies in his head.

Lentz read everything he could find on warp drives in the scientific literature, which was not very much. Then he began to think about it for himself. After a few weeks, something occurred to him that everyone else seemed to have overlooked. Lentz put his idea on paper and discussed it with more experienced colleagues. A year later it was published in a physics journal .

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It quickly became clear that Lentz was not the only person dreaming about warp drives. Media outlets all over the world picked up the story , and a dozen journalists asked for interviews. A discussion on the online forum Reddit attracted 2,700 comments and 33,000 likes. One Internet user wrote, “Anyone else feel like they were born 300 years too soon?”

A Bubble in Space and Time

There is no doubt that the universe is still far too vast for humans to traverse. It takes more than four years for a beam of light to reach Earth’s nearest star Proxima Centauri. Even with the best available propulsion systems, it would take tens of thousands of years for a human to get there. One can always dream about establishing colonies in other star systems, but it is not a journey anyone is likely to undertake.

But perhaps one day it might be possible to reduce the travel time. There are many ideas about how to do that, from laser-accelerated solar sails to nuclear propulsion. But even with the aid of these technologies, you would not get too far in a human lifetime. The galaxy really is open only to those who travel as fast as light—or faster.

NASA artist’s 1998 rendition of warp drive travel. The ring around the spacecraft generates a negative-energy field. From today’s perspective, the negative-energy field would no longer be necessary. Credit:  NASA; Digital art by Les Bossinas (Cortez III Service Corp)

For that very reason, imaginative physicists have long been pondering the ultimate propulsion system: a bubble in space and time in which a spaceship could dash from sun to sun, just like the USS Enterprise did. This is research at the fringe of science: not necessarily wrong but spiced with a large pinch of optimism.

The fact that scientists are dealing with the idea at all today is thanks to a 1994 paper by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre. At the time, Alcubierre was not just a passionate Star Trek devotee. In his doctoral thesis at the University of Wales College Cardiff (now Cardiff University), Alcubierre also worked on the theory of relativity. Strictly speaking, the theory states that nothing can travel faster than light. But by applying a little creativity, Alcubierre identified an apparent loophole.

For physicists, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity consists of two parts: The “special” theory of relativity, which dates from 1905, deals with the uniform motion of fast-as-light objects. Ten years later Einstein generalized these ideas for accelerating bodies. According to “general” relativity, the three spatial dimensions we are familiar with (up-down, left-right, front-back) are inseparable from time. Every mass deforms this spacetime.

According to Albert Einstein’s epic discovery, we live in four-dimensional “spacetime.” Spacetime is not static. Like a tablecloth, it is deformed by massive objects. Everything that moves across the tablecloth (or through spacetime) can accelerate only up to the speed limit set by light. The tablecloth itself, on the other hand, can be deformed at any speed, as the universe itself shows in some situations.

At the instant of the big bang, for example, the original spacetime structure presumably expanded for a split second and did so much faster than any ray of light could travel. Even today, the expansion continues to drive extremely distant galaxies away at speeds faster than light, which means their light can no longer reach us.

Based on his discovery, Alcubierre surmised that it would only be a small step to a warp drive. If spacetime were contracted in front of a spaceship and expanded behind it to compensate, it would be possible to travel to one’s destination at a speed faster than light. The ship would remain encapsulated in a bubble, and the crew would not sense the magnitude of the interstellar journey. In a 2017 lecture, Alcubierre compared it to being on a passenger conveyor belt at the airport: “You can imagine that the floor behind you is being created out of nothing and in front of you it is being destroyed, so you move along.”

But formulating this idea in the language of general relativity immediately gives rise to major practical problems. First, to deform spacetime so radically, you would need to cram a huge mass into a bubble bounded by a wall thinner than an atomic nucleus. Then you would need two forms of matter to maintain the bubble. The gravity of ordinary mass would cause the space at the front of the bubble to contract, moving the whole structure forward. But at the same time, the space at the back of the bubble would need to expand like rising bread dough. To make that expansion happen, according to Alcubierre, you would need some form of negative energy radiating a kind of antigravity.

The Curse of Negative Energy

For most physicists, that was the end of the thought experiment. Energy—which according to Einstein’s formula E = mc2 is equivalent to unconstrained mass—seems like it must, by definition, be positive. But according to quantum theory, it can indeed have a negative value. This seems to occur only in rare special cases, however—on a tiny scale. In the so-called Casimir effect , for example, the quantities involved are so minuscule that any technological application seems absurd.

Alcubierre, now a professor of physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, concedes this point. In terms of a potential technology, warp drives “are greatly lacking,” he and one of his colleagues wrote in a recent preprint paper . He has now turned his attention to known phenomena, such as black holes. The warp drive concept, however, retains its fascination, especially for Trekkies—and for a few gravitational physicists, who occasionally publish variations on the idea.

Some of these papers have shown how to reduce the bubble’s mass requirements so that the total mass needed to deform spacetime would be less than that of our sun. But no one was able to get around the problem of negative energy—until Lentz took it up during the lockdown in Göttingen. In his enforced isolation, Lentz found a way to construct a warp bubble using only positive energy. In so doing, he may have overcome the greatest objection to warp drives.

What made it possible was a special feature of the geometry of spacetime that Lentz discovered buried in the general theory of relativity—more precisely, in Einstein’s field equations. These equations can calculate how a particular distribution of matter and energy deforms spacetime. Researchers can also use them, as Alcubierre did, to determine the mass and energy needed to produce a specific curvature of space.

Dealing with a dynamic, four-dimensional structure like spacetime is extremely complicated, however. Writing out Einstein’s formulas in full produces a jumble of nested differential equations with thousands of terms. Depending on the assumptions you make about a particular physical situation, you only take some of those terms into account. For theorists, it is an almost limitless playground.

Principle of the Alcubierre drive: Spacetime contracts at the front of the bubble (right), corresponding to a warp in spacetime. Behind the bubble (left), new space is created out of nothing, which is equivalent to stretching spacetime. Credit: AllenMcC Wikimedia  (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Lentz specifically examined the assumptions leading to the negative energy requirements in Alcubierre’s work. Like his colleague, Lentz began by analyzing spacetime, modeling the multidimensional substance as a stack of very thin layers. He found that Alcubierre had only considered comparatively simple “linear” relationships between the equations for shifting one layer onto the next. At this point, choosing more complex “hyperbolic” relations, which typically express rapidly changing quantities, results in a different warp bubble than the one obtained by Alcubierre. It still requires enormous amounts of mass and energy but, according to Lentz’s calculations, only positive amounts. “I was very surprised that no one had tried this before me,” Lentz says.

Lentz’s bubble looks different from the one Alcubierre worked out in 1994. It consists of diamond-shaped regions of altered spacetime that resemble a flock of birds. Creating such a spacetime geometry in reality would involve a complicated layering of rings and disks, not made of solid material but of an extremely dense fluid of charged particles, similar to the substance found in the interior of neutron stars, Lentz says.

That means near-light-speed travel is still very, very far away from applied technology. But now that no exotic negative energy densities are needed—at least according to Lentz’s latest work—the theoretical games are within the realm of established physics. Alcubierre describes Lentz’s paper as a “very important development.” Francisco Lobo, a researcher at the University of Lisbon and a colleague of Alcubierre’s, who has published a textbook on warp drives, cannot find any obvious errors either. “If correct, this has the potential of opening up new interest and novel avenues of research in warp drive physics,” he says.

Lentz’s idea has even aroused interest among researchers outside the small community of warp drive enthusiasts, including Lavinia Heisenberg, a professor of cosmology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. Heisenberg and her student Shaun Fell found Lentz’s paper so exciting that they built on it by designing their own positive-energy warp bubbles that would require as little as a thousandth of the mass of our sun.

“The whole thing is much less mysterious than most people assume,” says Alexey Bobrick , an astrophysicist at Lund University in Sweden. Collaborating with New York City–based entrepreneur Gianni Martire, Bobrick came up with some promising solutions to Einstein’s field equations in 2020. According to Bobrick, all that is needed for a warp bubble is an appropriately shaped shell made of dense material that bends spacetime in its immediate vicinity while the universe through which the bubble moves and the space within the shell remain comparatively undisturbed.

Time Goes by So Slowly

“Comparatively” is the key. Alcubierre and later warp architects assumed an abrupt transition between the contorted spacetime in the wall of the bubble and the smooth interior and exterior. But Bobrick and Martire found this “truncation” of the gravitational field to be the reason why large amounts of negative energy are required to stabilize the contortion of space and time.

Abandoning the cartoonish image of a soap bubble, however, makes it possible to build warp drives based on ordinary matter, they claim. The gravitational field would not simply disappear when one moved away from the wall of the shell. Instead it would gradually decay. Spacetime would therefore also be curved inside the bubble. To travelers in a spaceship right in the middle of the bubble, this phenomenon would be most obvious in the passage of time: their watches would go slower than in the rest of space because, according to the theory of relativity, time is affected by gravity.

The slower passage of time on a spaceship might be something interstellar travelers appreciate. Still, Bobrick and Martire describe other obstacles. So far, they argue, there is no known way to actually accelerate a warp bubble. All previous ideas about the subject simply assume that the curvature of spacetime is already moving at high speed.

A beam of light travels 299,000 kilometers per second. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, this is a physical constant. The speed of light is the maximum speed any particle may reach, and a particle can only do so if it has no mass. Consequently, today’s physics offers no possibility of accelerating objects beyond the speed of light. On closer inspection, however, this limit only applies within the four-dimensional spacetime comprising the universe. Outside of that, even greater speeds appear to be possible.

“None of the physically conceivable warp drives can accelerate to speeds faster than light,” Bobrick says. That is because you would require matter capable of being ejected at speeds faster than light—but no known particles can travel that fast. Furthermore, the bubble could not be controlled by occupants of the spaceship itself because they would lose contact with the outside world, owing to the extremely strong curvature of space around them.

Lentz sees these objections as a problem, too, but he believes a solution can be found. Bobrick, meanwhile, points out that it is also possible to travel to distant stars at a third or half the speed of light, especially if time passes more slowly for the people in the warp bubble. Just do not think about the fact that all your relatives left behind on Earth will probably have died of old age before you get back. “But at least the idea is no longer completely crazy,” Bobrick says.

From Theory to Practice

There is still some debate about whether warp bubbles really can do without negative energy. Recently, three theoreticians suggested that this claim was only true for observers moving next to the bubble. Plus, not everything that seems possible according to the theory of relativity actually exists—or is technologically feasible. For example, Einstein’s field equations can also be used to justify “white” holes (the antithesis of their black hole counterparts), Einstein-Rosen bridges (frequently called wormholes) and other exotic alterations in spacetime that no one has ever observed. That could be because laws of nature, as yet unknown, preclude such phenomena.

Some researchers therefore caution against going overboard with the fantasies. Space propulsion expert Martin Tajmar of the Technical University of Dresden, for example, sees no practical relevance for the current work on warp drives. The huge masses involved simply exceed anything that can be tested on Earth, he says.

Most veteran warp drive researchers would undoubtedly agree. They see their work less as preparation for real-world experiments and more as a way of exploring the limits of relativity. In this endeavor, even speculative “thought experiments” are useful, Lobo says.

Lentz, on the other hand, is actively working toward a practical application of his idea. After his research in Göttingen, he took a job at an IT company. But in his spare time, he still thinks about how to accelerate a bend in spacetime to speeds faster than light and how to reduce the energy required to do so.

Lentz also advocates looking closely at the surroundings of neutron stars. It could be that these ultracompact stellar remnants eject bubbles like those that he describes in his paper. “As long as one doesn’t let personal biases get in the way and accepts what evidence tells you, it’s a field of research that is as worthy of being pursued as any other,” he says.

Jean-Luc Picard would probably see it similarly. “Things are only impossible until they are not,” the character noted in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation . But that’s also easier to say when you live 300 years in the future.

This article originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission

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Wesley Crusher's God-Level Gadget is Star Trek's Coolest New Tech

I don't care if modern star trek breaks established canon, i’m glad voyager’s tom and b’elanna are no longer star trek's only successful romance.

Star Trek popularized the term " warp speed " but the franchise has created several alternatives to travel by warp drive technology. By the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation , warp drive had been in existence for roughly three centuries, and had progressed considerably in the time since Zefram Cochrane's first warp flight. Warp drive allows Star Trek 's starships to travel at speeds faster than light by forming a warp bubble that locally distorts the space-time continuum to enable the ship to travel at a degree of warp velocities. It's the most widely used form of interstellar travel in the 24th century, but recently some replacements have been introduced, borne out of necessity.

An alternative to warp travel is being sought by Star Trek Discovery season 4's tragic villain , Ruon Tarka, following the devastating effects of the Burn. With the dilithium needed for warp drive technology being vastly depleted and at risk of instability, the Federation was looking into advancing Discovery's spore drive technology. However, this is just one of many alternatives to warp travel that have been introduced in recent Star Trek canon.

RELATED: First Contact Is The Origin Story Star Trek Needed

The Spore Drive

The spore drive was introduced in Star Trek: Discovery season 1, as Starfleet co-opted the research of Paul Stamets and Straal to gain an advantage in their war against the Klingons. Stamets and Straal's research was based on the idea that, on a quantum level, the universe was no different from a living organism. The implication of this discovery was the theory that a starship, aided by a suitable navigator, could traverse a subspace network of spores known as the Mycelial Network.

It was a groundbreaking discovery that allowed Discovery to abandon warp travel in favor of this more organic approach. It wasn't without its drawbacks, however. Although the spore drive allowed for near-instantaneous travel across the network, it could take a physical toll on the navigator. Starfleet began investigating a non-human interface, but this research was abandoned and evidence of the drive was suppressed when Discovery was lost during the Red Angel incident. The Federation of the 32nd century has now picked up where the 23rd century had left off.

Transwarp Drive

The concept of transwarp travel was introduced in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock , when Starfleet was attempting to install a transwarp drive aboard the USS Excelsior. However, it remained a theoretical concept until Picard's Enterprise encountered the Borg . The Borg used transwarp technology to travel across the galaxy at speeds beyond traditional warp travel. This would later be harnessed by Admiral Janeway when she traveled back in time to get the USS Voyager home much faster.

To date, no one has been able to install a transwarp drive, presumably because better alternatives have been found to exist. Another drawback to the transwarp drive is the severe mutations that Tom Paris experienced while trying to break the transwarp barrier during the efforts to bring Voyager home to the Alpha Quadrant. A safer option was also found during Voyager's time in the Delta Quadrant.

RELATED: Janeway's New Ship Vs. Chakotay's: Which Star Trek Ship Is Faster

Quantum Slipstream Drive

Admiral Janeway's new starship connects to Voyager and its time in the Delta Quadrant. The USS Dauntless has a quantum slipstream drive, which means that the starship is able to travel at speeds far beyond standard warp capability. This is necessary for Janeway's mission back to the Delta Quadrant to recover the Protostar and discover the whereabouts of her former Number One, Chakotay. The Voyager crew first discovered the quantum slipstream drive when it was used as a lure in a revenge plot against Janeway and the crew in the season 4 finale "Hope and Fear".

In Star Trek: Voyager season 5 episode "Timeless," the crew attempted to construct their own quantum slipstream drive, but due to a miscalculation, Voyager crashed into a planet, killing all hands. It was up to Chakotay and Kim to travel back in time and fix the miscalculation. Their mission brought them up against TNG 's Geordi La Forge , who attempted to stop their dangerous temporal plot. Correcting their mistake, Voyager abandoned experiments in slipstream technology. Sometime after Voyager returned home, B'elanna Torres led the construction of the USS Dauntless, which was fitted with a quantum slipstream drive.

The Protostar Drive

Star Trek: Prodigy introduced the USS Protostar, an experimental starship that had a completely new power source, an actual star. The protostar is the earliest phase in stellar evolution, which neatly reflects Prodigy 's younger crew. While the protostar drive still requires a dilithium matrix to operate, it can travel far faster than any other ship in the fleet. It's implied that the Protostar was sent to the Delta Quadrant to address some of the mistakes made by the Voyager crew during their time there. The ship was captained by Chakotay, who is now missing along with the rest of his crew.

Janeway was present at the launch of Chakotay's new Starfleet ship , and has taken it upon herself to track the missing vessel down. The USS Protostar is the most advanced ship in the fleet, and Starfleet are terrified that it will fall into the wrong hands, unaware that it already has. The crew of the Protostar have been able to outrun the Dauntless so far, protecting the Federation from the weapon housed inside the ship. However, Prodigy revealed that the quantum slipstream drives and protostar drives can reach similar speeds, so all it will take is for one false move for the highly advanced USS Protostar to be recaptured, spelling disaster for Star Trek 's Federation.

NEXT: How Janeway's New Star Trek Ship Compares To Voyager

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• Star Trek: Discovery

Memory Beta, non-canon Star Trek Wiki

A friendly reminder regarding spoilers ! At present the expanded Trek universe is in a period of major upheaval with the continuations of Discovery and Prodigy , the advent of new eras in gaming with the Star Trek Adventures RPG , Star Trek: Infinite and Star Trek Online , as well as other post-57th Anniversary publications such as the ongoing IDW Star Trek comic and spin-off Star Trek: Defiant . Therefore, please be courteous to other users who may not be aware of current developments by using the {{ spoiler }}, {{ spoilers }} OR {{ majorspoiler }} tags when adding new information from sources less than six months old (even if it is minor info). Also, please do not include details in the summary bar when editing pages and do not anticipate making additions relating to sources not yet in release. THANK YOU

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• Subspace physics

Warp bubble

Ambassador -class warp bubble.

A warp bubble (also known as a warp shell) is a subspace phenomenon, a disruption in normal space with subspace properties that is based on the principle used to create a warp field . While a warp field radiates and dissipates, a warp bubble can hold its shape, but eventually becomes unstable and collapses inward. ( ST reference : USS Enterprise Owners' Workshop Manual )

History [ ]

In 2366 , Wesley Crusher conducted an experiment generating a static warp bubble, which accidentally trapped his mother, Dr. Beverly Crusher , in an alternate dimension of her own inadvertent creation. ( TNG episode : " Remember Me ")

In 2377 , after the USS da Vinci had been transported to an alternate dimension by Rod Portlyn , chief engineer Nancy Conlon proposed using a static warp bubble in a similar way to return to their dimension. This idea was ultimately deemed impractical, as there was no way to control the dimension they would travel to. ( CoE eBook : The Art of the Comeback )

Appendices [ ]

External links [ ].

• Warp bubble article at Memory Alpha , the wiki for canon Star Trek .

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In honor of 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Season 2, a tour of the physics

Regina G. Barber

Berly McCoy

Rebecca Ramirez

Season 2 of the critically acclaimed Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiered June 15 ( streaming on Paramount+ ). So today, Short Wave boldly goes where many, many nerds have gone before and explores the science — specifically the physics — and the science- fiction of Star Trek . Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber chats with two Trekkie physicists about why they love the franchise. Astrophysicist Erin Macdonald is the science consultant for Star Trek , and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical physicist and author of the book The Disordered Cosmos .

This episode, the trio discusses the feasibility of warp drive, global cooperation and representation and how the transporters that beam crew members from the surface of a planet to the ship might be breaking fundamental laws of physics. They end at the galaxy's edge — and discuss why its portrayal in Star Trek might be problematic, scientifically.

Space is vast – it takes years for real spacecrafts to travel within our solar system! In Star Trek, characters zip around the galaxy in their starship vessels thanks to warp drive, which let spaceships travel faster than the speed of light. But physics puts a speed limit on anything with mass. These objects have to move slightly slower than the speed of light, which itself has a speed limit. So what's the loophole here?

According to Erin, good ol' suspension of disbelief isn't necessary because, "the math checks out." For that reason, it's one of Erin's favorite pieces of sci-fi in the series. Spacetime is the three dimensions we humans are used to living in, plus time. The universe is situated in the four dimensional fabric of spacetime, with heavier objects "pulling" that fabric down more than lighter — or, weightless, in the case of light — objects. So, spacetime itself could be a loophole to this speed limit. Erin says that to bypass the cosmological speed limit of light, you could simply, "build a bubble of space time around your ship, and then that pushes you faster than the speed of light. " This is the various warp speeds . One bubble for warp 1, another bubble around that first bubble for warp 2 and so on.

Of course, Erin and Chanda both point out that using spacetime in this way requires an extraordinary amount of energy — well beyond what humans are capable of at this moment in time.

'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' season 2 is a classic sci-fi adventure

Transporters.

It would be great to teleport to work, as Star Trek characters do thanks to their transporters. Upside? No traffic. Downside? The fear that once you've been broken down into particles and beamed across the city, you might not be rearranged in the right order.

In order for a transporter to work, users would have to know both where a given particle is and its velocity. Unfortunately, this is not possible due to a well known physics conundrum, the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle . Star Trek plugs this plot hole with something they call a Heisenberg Compensator that is connected to their transporter mechanics. How it works is never explained. All we need to know is that, in the Star Trek universe ... it does!

So, transporters require a little more suspension of disbelief than warp drive — or good-humored humility if you're Chanda. "I don't think transporters will ever be a thing that we can do. But I always say that it's important for me as a scientist to be humble, and so it may be that there is some science beyond the uncertainty principle that we are just not aware of at this point," she quips.

Galactic Barrier

Warp drive can get ships to light speed and faster in the Star Trek world but space is still HUGE. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across so, even at Warp 9, it would take the Star Trek crew years to travel the galaxy. It's pretty rare that any starship gets near the edge of our galaxy, but in the 1960s, Star Trek writers had the crew arrive at the " galactic barrier ." According to the show, this barrier doesn't let communication signals through, is dangerous and gives characters " strange energies ."

Chanda says that the impenetrability of signals is what winds her up most about this fake barrier. "But we see other galaxies all the time, and those are signals," she says. "We see radio observations. We see across the electromagnetic spectrum."

These three sci-fi concepts barely scratch the surface of what "science" — and science — Star Trek uses throughout the series . There's so much physics we didn't cover — and so there will be much more science to dissect in the future.

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify , Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts .

Questions about the "scientific" underpinnings of other pop culture? Email us at [email protected] . We'd love to hear from you!

This episode was produced by Berly McCoy, edited by Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by Katie Daugert. Josh Newell engineered the audio. Johannes Doerge is our main legal duderino.

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Is Star Trek’s Warp Drive Possible?

The concept of the warp drive is currently at odds with everything we know to be true about physics.

Central to science fiction, and Star Trek in particular, is the ability to travel the galaxy at speeds far faster than light via a fictional technology called a “ warp drive .” What is that, and will we ever have one ?

No Warp Drive for You

A provisional answer is “no.” According to the accepted laws of science, nothing can travel faster than light . Even though light is fast enough to circle the Earth over seven times in a single second, space is very large. It takes eight minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth, and it would take four years for light from our Sun to reach the nearest star ( Proxima Centauri ). Most stars—and hence, most planets—are much more distant, so travel time would be correspondingly longer. The distances are so vast that interstellar travel would take lifetimes.

That makes for a boring sci-fi plot, so the creators of Star Trek invented a convenient, but imaginary, technology. According to Star Trek canon, the warp drive works by creating a “warp bubble” around the spaceship, inside of which space is literally warped. In front of the spaceship, space is compressed, while behind the vessel, it is expanded. In this way, a spaceship never travels faster than light; it merely passes through a shorter distance. For example, if a warp drive could shrink the distance to Proxima Centauri by 1/1,461 times the normal length, it could travel there in a single day.

A Massive Problem

Is this realistic? Maybe. To begin with, our best modern understanding of space comes from Einstein’s theory of general relativity . In this theory, gravity is understood not as a force as we typically imagine it, but rather as a bending of space. So, if space can be bent or distorted in some way, then a warp drive could be within the realm of accepted science.

However, this is where things get tricky. Within the theory of relativity, the quantity that bends space is mass (or, equivalently, energy). In familiar and simple terms, the enormous mass of the Earth bends space in its vicinity. This distortion results in the phenomenon we know of as gravity.

While the bending of space by matter is a fact, it doesn’t help our warp drive very much. The bending of space near the surface of the Earth is relatively modest. After all, the distortion doesn’t appreciably shorten the distance between the Earth and the Sun, let alone the nearest star. Thus, for a warp drive to be a useful propulsion technology, a spaceship might have to carry with it a mass much larger than a planet — or even larger than a star. This extra mass would make the craft too difficult to move, meaning that the idea just isn’t tenable.

Negativity about Negative Energy

Does this completely invalidate the idea of a warp drive? Not quite. The equations governing special relativity are rich and complex and there are many solutions. In 1994, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre found a solution that distorted space in a way very similar to that originally envisioned by the creators of Star Trek . Under exactly the right conditions, it is possible to expand space behind an object and compress it in front.

There is a problem, though. To accomplish this distortion, researchers would have to use negative energy—that is, reduce the energy of empty space to below zero. According to Einstein, a warp drive requires an impossible premise. As an analogy, it’s possible that some mathematical calculation involving a person’s height might have a solution that is negative. But what would it mean for a person to have a negative height? It doesn’t make physical sense.

Therefore, while scientists try to find loopholes in the conditions required for Alcubierre’s solution, most think that a warp drive will not be created this way; negative energy is a mathematical artifact and not a physical phenomenon.

Is a Warp Drive Possible or Not?

Altogether, our current understanding of the laws of nature neither allows for faster-than-light travel nor an Alcubierre-like solution to warping space. However, those who dream of traveling the stars should not give up. Scientists do not have a full understanding of the laws of nature. Indeed, my colleagues and I spend our days looking for new phenomena—things that have never been seen before.

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In speculative science, it is always foolhardy to say that something is impossible. In 1850, if you asked the best scientists of the day if it would be possible to speak in Europe and have someone in America hear you, or if it would be possible to look inside a person’s body, they would have told you “no.” Yet a scant half century later, the invention of radio and discovery of X-rays would have proved them wrong.

That is what it will take for a warp drive to be a reality. Some bright soul is going to have a new idea, something quite different from our current understanding of physics. Then, maybe—just maybe—we will be able to boldly go where no one has gone before.

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Paging Zefram Cochrane: Humans have figured out how to make a warp bubble

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Space is vast. Really, really vast. So vast, in fact, that it would take Voyager 1, the furthest man-made object from earth, more than 73 millenia to reach the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, at its current speed of over 38,000 mph, if it were headed that way to begin with. In short, if we’re ever going to find a way to explore beyond our own solar system, we need to find a way to bend the laws of physics to make faster-than-light travel possible.

A team of scientists working with DARPA, including warp drive pioneer Dr. Harold G “Sonny” White, may have just taken us one step closer to that reality with the announcement that they’ve discovered a space-warping bubble, the fundamental thing needed for the faster-than-light travel of the Star Trek universe.

SEE: Windows 10 in S mode: A cheat sheet (free PDF) (TechRepublic Premium)

Before we jump ahead to romantic visions of space travel, Dr. White said, we need to think about what we could do with a microscale warp bubble, like the one his team discovered, before even dreaming of what it could be in the future. Dr. White is passionate about space travel, but says we need to start simple. “there may be lots of other things along the way before we ever get there that could have some really interesting implications,” he said.

What is a warp bubble?

This is a pretty complicated notion that involves a ton of math, but at its most basic level, a warp bubble is a bit of space that’s contracted in the front and expanded in the back. The contraction/expansion theoretically pushes the bubble, and its contents, forward at speeds surpassing the speed of light without ever violating the laws of physics: You’re not technically traveling faster than light, you’re surfing a bubble of condensed space.

Warp bubbles are also important because they eliminate a major problem of faster-than-light travel: Time dilation. Say you did manage to travel faster than light: Everything else outside of your craft would speed up, meaning that three-hour tour you took to a nice, tropical planet could have equated to years of time passing on earth. Put simply, if you plan to move faster than light while following the known laws of physics you had better say goodbye to everything you’ve ever loved before heading out.

Again, warp bubbles get around this problem because the space inside the bubble remains unaffected, so an hour of travel at warp speed would mean that only an hour passed for everyone else not currently in a pocket of sci-fi space.

Warp bubbles were long the domain of science fiction, until theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre came along and theorized his Alcubierre warp drive in 1994, which maintained general relativity while allowing for faster-than-light travel. The key upon which it rested, was an energy-density field that was configurable into a vacuum bubble that would make anything inside it have negative mass.

Unfortunately, the amount of energy required to operate an Alcubierre drive made it impossible, until 2012 when Dr. White proposed changes to the math  and shape of the craft designed to create the field, which lowered the necessary energy from “impossible” to a power source the size of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Since then, development of an actual warp bubble or Alcubierre drive has continued to be a distant dream.

Discovering a warp bubble

Fast forward to 2021, and Dr. White, whose 2012 paper was written while he worked at NASA as Advanced Propulsion Theme Lead, is doing research funded by DARPA on objects called Casimir cavities. These cavities are formed of two parallel plates with a pillar running between them. These things are small — mere microns in size — and they do something really interesting: Create a negative vacuum between the plates when exposed to a regular vacuum.

“You would anticipate zero pressure outside and zero pressure in the cavity, but what we find when we measure is negative pressure in between the plates,” Dr. White said.

“What we’re trying to do is explore the quantum vacuum at a fundamental level,” Dr. White said. “We think there’s a bit more to these vacuums than we currently know. Some of the unknown characteristics could be used to create some really useful technologies.” Hence DARPA’s interest.

These uses could include amazing things, like batteries based around what Dr. White calls “quantum vacuum solar cells” that would never run out of energy. Telecommunications products that use longitudinal waves undisturbed by buildings or natural barriers could be a potential use, as could photosensors that don’t suffer from chromatic aberration because they sense all elements of the EM spectrum evenly.

Potential applications aside, testing those cavities led to an interesting discovery: A negative vacuum energy field that looked just like a two-dimensional slice of an Alcubierre warp bubble.

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“Our custom Casimir cavities are basically two big planes with a long pole in the middle. The Alcubierre metric, by comparison, needs a total ring of negative vacuum energy density, which means it needs to look more like a lifesaver,” Dr. White said.

Having already done all the math and collected all the data that was generated by the experiment with the 2D version of the bubble that the team observed, the next logical step was to take that data and change the shape of the object in the center, getting rid of the pole and putting in the eerily Vulcan starship-esque shape shown at the top of the article.

After running simulations with the modified shape, the math just added up, Dr. White said. “We did a purposeful analysis using [the warp ship shape], and wow — hey, that matched the Alcubierre metric requirements.”

The warp bubble team has published a paper on their findings , which Dr. White says are in no way illustrative of a warp bubble analog: Their data shows that, given the right shape placed in the same physical cavities they’re experimenting with now, an honest-to-God warp bubble would be created.

“We can identify to the physics community that there is a real world type of structure that we can make that the analysis predicts. It will manifest a negative vacuum energy density, such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble, not an analog … this would be a real, no kidding nanoscale warp bubble,” Dr. White said.

The 299,792,458 m/s question: When’s first contact?

In the world of Star Trek, the warp bubble works basically the same way: The Enterprise isn’t actually travelling faster than light, it’s just surfing a cosmic space wave generated by its matter/antimatter warp core.

Zefram Cochrane was responsible for building the first functional warp-capable ship in the Trek universe in 2063, at which point the Vulcans, who just happened to be passing by, decided it was time to make first contact and welcome humans into the galactic community. We might be right on course, then, with Dr. White’s team laying the practical groundwork for theoretical concepts that takes us away from Earth and toward the stars.

So, when can humans expect to vacation on Risa, do business on Ferenginar, and study at the Vulcan Science Academy (conditional on meeting the strict entry requirements)? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, says Dr. White.

“A lot of people wanna get straight into application: when are we gonna go make something like this fly? I get the motivation for that, but science is a slow, arduous process.” Dr. White says his motto has been “crawl, walk, run,” when it comes to this sort of cutting-edge stuff. Dreaming is important, he says, but so is doing the basic research that goes into finding additional applications that are practical and valuable now, in the age where we’re still terrestrially-bound.

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“I don’t have a crystal ball more than anyone else does. I don’t know when this idea could be applied to space travel, or even if that could even become a reality,” Dr. White said. That’s understandable given we are currently talking about warp bubbles generated in cavities smaller than the width of a human hair.

“Science will continue to turn the crank and hammer the rock, chipping slowly away at some of the unknown to get to more of the known,” said Dr. White. Consider this discovery just one chip in the right direction.

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Spacecraft in a ‘warp bubble’ could travel faster than light, claims physicist

Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity famously dictates that no known object can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum, which is 299,792 km/s. This speed limit makes it unlikely that humans will ever be able to send spacecraft to explore beyond our local area of the Milky Way.

However, new research by Erik Lentz at the University of Göttingen suggests a way beyond this limit. The catch is that his scheme requires vast amounts of energy and it may not be able to propel a spacecraft.

Lentz proposes that conventional energy sources could be capable of arranging the structure of space–time in the form of a soliton – a robust singular wave. This soliton would act like a “warp bubble’”, contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind. Unlike objects within space–time, space–time itself can bend, expand or warp at any speed. Therefore, a spacecraft contained in a hyperfast bubble could arrive at its destination faster than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws, even Einstein’s cosmic speed limit.

Negative energy

The idea of creating warp bubbles is not new, it was first proposed in 1994 by the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre who dubbed them “warp drives” in homage to the sci-fi series Star Trek . However, until Lentz’s research it was thought that the only way to produce a warp drive was by generating vast amounts of negative energy – perhaps by using some sort of undiscovered exotic matter or by the manipulation of dark energy. To get around this problem, Lentz constructed an unexplored geometric structure of space–time to derive a new family of solutions to Einstein’s general relativity equations called positive-energy solitons.

Though Lentz’s solitons appear to conform to Einstein’s general theory of relativity and remove the need to create negative energy, space agencies will not be building warp drives any time soon, if ever. Part of the reason is that Lentz’s positive-energy warp drive requires a huge amount of energy. A 100 m radius spacecraft would require the energy equivalent to “hundreds of times of the mass of the planet Jupiter”, according to Lentz. He adds that to be practical, this requirement would have to be reduced by about 30 orders of magnitude to be on par with the output of a modern nuclear fission reactor.  Lentz is currently exploring existing energy-saving schemes to see if the energy required can be reduced to a practical level.

Any warp drive would also need to overcome several other serious issues. Alcubierre, who regards Lentz’s work as a “significant development”, cites the “horizon problem” as one of the most pernicious. “A warp bubble travelling faster than light cannot be created from inside the bubble, as the leading edge of the bubble would be beyond the reach of a spaceship sitting at its centre,” he explains. “The problem is that you need energy to deform space all the way to the very edge of the bubble, and the ship simply can’t put it there.”

Spacecraft doubts

Lentz describes his calculations in Classical and Quantum Gravity , where other recent research on the topic is outlined in an accepted manuscript from Advanced Propulsion Laboratory researchers Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire. The duo describes a general model for a warp drive incorporating all existing positive-energy and negative-energy warp drive schemes, except Lentz’s which they say “likely forms a new class of warp drive space–times”.

However, they argue that a Lentz-type warp drive is like any other type of warp drive in the sense that, at its core, it is a shell of regular material and therefore subject to Einstein’s cosmic speed limit, concluding that “there is no known way of accelerating a warp drive beyond the speed of light”.

Ad astra! To the stars!

Though he recognizes these huge hurdles to building a warp drive, Lentz feels they are not insurmountable. “This work has moved the problem of faster-than-light travel one step away from theoretical research in fundamental physics and closer to engineering,” he says.

After addressing energy requirements, Lentz plans to “devise a means of creating and accelerating (and dissipating and decelerating) the positive-energy solitons from their constituent matter sources”, then confirm the existence of small and slow solitons in a laboratory, and finally address the horizon problem. “This will be important to passing the speed of light with a fully autonomous soliton,” he says.

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Ability: Emit Unstable Warp Bubble

• VisualEditor
• 2 Basic Information
• 3 Detailed Information
• 4 Ability Ranks
• 5 Skills that improve this Ability

Overview [ | ]

The Emit Unstable Warp Bubble disables launching fighters, hazards, fields and platforms for 20 seconds, as well as preventing the activation of abilities such as Saucer Separation . It is one of the rewards for completing “Broken Circle” .

Basic Information [ | ]

• Profession: Engineering
• Locale: Space
• Game Description: Emit an unstable warp bubble from your warp core, dampening the space-subspace interactions on enemy ships in the vicinity. This bubble of warped space prevent the safe deployment of all small objects, such as hangar pets, or safely triggering starship separation. Re-stabilizing the space-subspace flow requires diverting power from primary system, reducing max speed and energy damage. The bubble disrupts the calculations normally used to create spacial hazards such as Tykens Rift and Gravity Well, preventing their use.

Detailed Information [ | ]

• Used by: Captain
• Target: Self
• System : Beams and torpedoes
• Ability Type: Debuff
• Activation: 1 seconds
• Eject Warp Plasma
• Acquired from Mission: Broken Circle
• Countered by: Engineering Team

(Tooltip required rank information is incorrect, it does not match the skill training area requirements. (Manuals Say Mk II is Lieutenant and Mk III is also Lieutenant). Mk II manual is for a Lieutenant Commander ranked Bridge officer, and the Mk III id for a Commander ranked Bridge officer.)

Ability Ranks [ | ]

Skills that improve this ability [ | ].

• Control Expertise - Improves Hold and Disable,Knock,Repel and Slow
• Control Amplification - -25 Exotic Damage Resistance and Control Resistance

Gallery [ | ]

Emit unstable warp bubble.View from player ship

Emit unstable warp bubble expanded view

Emit unstable warp bubble at target

Emit unstable warp bubble showing target and player fields

Emit unstable warp bubble effect during ability

• 2 Playable starship
• 3 Lobi Crystal Consortium

'Warp drives' may actually be possible someday, new study suggests

"By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we've shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction."

A new study provides some theoretical underpinning to warp drives, suggesting that the superfast propulsion tech may not forever elude humanity.

Sci-fi fans — especially " Star Trek " devotees — are familiar with warp drives . These hypothetical engines manipulate the fabric of space-time itself, compressing the stuff in front of a spaceship and expanding it behind. This creates a "warp bubble" that allows a craft to travel at incredible velocities — in some imaginings, many times faster than the speed of light .

In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a groundbreaking paper that laid out how a real-life warp drive could work. This exciting development came with a major caveat, however: The proposed "Alcubierre drive" required negative energy, an exotic substance that may or may not exist (or, perhaps, the harnessing of dark energy , the mysterious force that seems to be causing the universe's accelerated expansion). 

Related: Warp drive and 'Star Trek': The physics of future space travel

Alcubierre published his idea in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all.

"This study changes the conversation about warp drives," lead author Jared Fuchs, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and the research think tank Applied Physics, said in a statement. "By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we've shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction."

The team's model uses "a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics," according to the statement. 

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Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper's abstract, for example, says that the solution "involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric."

The proposed engine could not achieve faster-than-light travel, though it could come close; the statement mentions "high but subluminal speeds." 

— How 'Star Trek' technology works (infographic)

— Warp speed: The hype of hyperspace

— What is dark energy?

This is a single modeling study, so don't get too excited. Even if other research teams confirm that the math reported in the new study checks out, we're still very far from being able to build an actual warp drive.

Fuchs and his team admit as much, stressing that their work could end up being a stepping stone on the long road to efficient interstellar flight. 

"While we're not yet preparing for interstellar voyages, this research heralds a new era of possibilities," Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, said in the same statement. "We're continuing to make steady progress as humanity embarks on the Warp Age."

The team's study was published online on April 29. You can find it here , though all but the abstract is behind a paywall; a free preprint version is available via arXiv.org.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with  Space.com  and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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• MikeEz I would be interested in Dr. Alcubierre and Dr. Whites' responses. Reply
• billslugg It uses standard physics and does not allow FTL travel, according to the article. What's the point? Reply
• Questioner I think what they are saying is it creates an independent frame of reference. That it is dislodged from standard spatial continuity. That would be the first step to superluminal Alcubierri methodology. It also might evade luminal proximate collisions with space detrimous. But that's just my take. Reply
• Pogo We’ve been launching stuff beyond Earth’s atmosphere for 67 years now and haven’t gotten beyond 0.064c thus far. This warp thing is still only one team’s theory. It’ll likely be generations before we get even a subatomic particle into this warp speed thing, if ever. If it ever does become practical, it could be used to send small probes to local stars in a reasonable timeline. Anything manned will not likely be practical. The article doesn’t mention if warp drive actually negates relativistic effects. Reply
• billslugg All of the theories that would have us go FTL are based on solutions to Einstein's field equations. That they solve the equations does not necessarily mean they can exist in reality. Here is an example: The area of a square is given by x^2. Two negative numbers can solve the equation just as well as two positive numbers. But there is no such thing as negative length. Headline: "Scientists find solution to area problem that involves negative length, thus it must exist". Another reason we can't go FTL. If one goes FTL, one must necessarily pass through c. At that point, the item would require all of the mass in the universe be converted into its kinetic energy. In other words: "You can't get there from here". Reply

billslugg said: It uses standard physics and does not allow FTL travel, according to the article. What's the point?

• billslugg Valid points. When they actually come up with some of the exotic matter they need, then I'll get on board. Reply

Pogo said: The article doesn’t mention if warp drive actually negates relativistic effects.

Mizagorn said: That was my first thought. You're part of the crew. You get paid by the hour and you're on the clock. Do you go by the onboard clock or the one back at the office? 🤔

Admin said: A new study provides some theoretical underpinning to sci-fi warp drives, suggesting that the superfast propulsion tech may not forever elude humanity. Warp drives' may actually be possible someday, new study suggests : Read more

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Did scientists discover a warp bubble? Crunched up space-time, explained

Boldly going faster than the speed of light.

Jumping from star system to star system with the push of a spacecraft’s warp drive throttle is a kind of Star Trek-inspired future tech that has very little in common with space travel of today. Achieving this sci-fi future would require not only new technology but breaking one of nature’s most fundamental rules: the speed of light. It’s very, very unlikely — but there may be new hope on the horizon.

In a recent paper published in The European Physical Journal C, a team of engineers and physicists led by former NASA engineer Harold “Sonny” White say they have discovered the right conditions to — theoretically — create a small warp bubble in a lab. A warp bubble is like a car traveling along a warp drive highway.

The USS Enterprise starship is prepared to launch at warp speed into faraway galaxies at the drop of a hat, but scientists can’t figure out how to bring this technology to life.

While White and colleagues have experimentally evaluated part of the science behind this discovery, the warp bubble itself currently exists only in theory as computations — White and colleagues haven’t proven that experimentally. But if they do, White says it could completely revolutionize the study of warp-speed space travel.

“This has not been done before in the literature and hence is significant,” White tells Inverse . “It is a matter of precedence for the idea of a space warp analogous to the Chicago pile for nuclear reactors .”

What is warp drive?

Before we dive further into what this warp bubble could mean for space travel, let’s back up to understand a warp drive first. The key here lies in two of Einstein’s pivotal papers, published in 1905 and 1915 respectively, on special and general relativity.

Among other things, these papers lay down three fundamental theories of physics:

• The universe has a speed limit and it is the speed that light travels — 299,792,458 meters per second, or just 3x10^8 meters per second among friends
• At velocities approaching the speed of light, the passage of time will change relative to an observer. In other words, space travelers moving faster age slower relative to their less speedy counterparts — like in Interstellar when they visit the water-world planet.
• Space and time are knitted together in a fabric creatively called space-time that ebbs, flows, and bends around mass. This curvature is gravity.

White explains that “space warp” is one of two loopholes within the theory of general relativity and noted in a 1994 paper by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre.

“[It] allow[s] one to cover arbitrarily long distances in arbitrarily short times without ever locally breaking the speed of light — e.g., get to Proxima Centauri in, say, a month as measured by clocks on the spacecraft and clocks in mission control.”

A warp bubble is a kind of loophole that could theoretically help spacecraft travel faster than light.

Similar to a wormhole — which theoretically lets you skip across space-time by “walking” through a region where the fabric is folded together like a fan —warping space-time would look like the fabric bunching up in front of the bubble and then stretching out behind it in a train.

In a 2017 lecture, Alcubierre compares the phenomenon to the experience of being on a moving walkway at the airport.

“You can imagine that the floor behind you is being created out of nothing, and in front of you it is being destroyed, so you move along.”

In theory and science fiction, a warp bubble could move along this walkway and ride the bunching space-time fabric in such a way that its relative time remained slow (meaning Kirk wouldn’t be an old man when he arrived) while simultaneously moving great distances faster than the speed of light.

But there’s a catch: The bubble must be enrobed in negative energy, the kind that might come from anti-gravity. Sadly, that’s not something you can easily whip up in a lab.

How to discover a warp bubble

The negative energy constraint might seem like a fatal blow to the notion of warp drive, but a few glimmers of hope remain. For one, we may be able to do away with this requirement altogether, according to 2021 research by physicist Erik Lentz , who pored over the problem during the lockdown .

Though much more complex than a bar magnet, the Casimir effect works on similar base principles of attraction.

In the case of White and colleagues, the solution could come from a fluctuating of magnetic fields in something called the Casimir effect . Put succinctly, the Casimir effect refers to the attractive force of fluctuating magnetic fields that “pull” two objects — like plates or mirrors — together when inside a vacuum.

The idea is that electromagnetic waves flow continuously even through a vacuum, but only some small waves can fit between the two objects. As a result, the total vacuum energy between the objects becomes less than the outside energy, and they are attracted to one another. During such interactions, negative energy can be created on very small scales.

It was something called “Casimir cavities” that White and colleagues were investigating for DARPA when they noticed in their calculations something that looked suspiciously like a warp bubble.

“The detailed numerical analysis of our custom Casimir cavities helped us identify a real and manufacturable nano/micro-structure that is predicted to generate a negative vacuum energy density such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble — however humble it may be,” White says.

White and colleagues write that “a toy model consisting of a 1-micron diameter sphere centrally located in a 4-micron diameter cylinder” could be used to explore the Casimir effect energy density experimentally.

Is the DARPA warp bubble fake?

So, is this a real warp bubble? It seems like it has the potential to be — if experimentally validated. However, not all scientists are convinced.

But regardless of how this latest finding ultimately shakes out, White says we are still a long way off scientists and aerospace engineers coming anywhere close to building genuine warp drive — and that’s not a problem he’s looking to solve right now.

“Currently, we are laser-focused on exploring the characteristics of our custom Casimir cavities for,” White says. “It is too early to ask questions about some type of actual flight experiment. In my mind, step one is to just explore the underlying science at the nano/micro-scale.”

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Static Warp Bubble...what if you can't?

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Warp speed, Scotty? It may be possible to travel faster than light

In the "Star Trek" TV shows and films, the U.S.S. Enterprise's warp engine allows the ship to move faster than light, an ability that is, as Spock would say, "highly illogical."

However, there's a loophole in Einstein's general theory of relativity that could allow a ship to traverse vast distances in less time than it would take light. The trick? It's not the starship that's moving — it's the space around it.

In fact, scientists at NASA are right now working on the first practical field test toward proving the possibility of warp drives and faster-than-light travel. Maybe the warp drive on "Star Trek" is possible after all. [See also:  Warp Drive: Can It Be Done? (Video) ]

According to Einstein's theory, an object with mass cannot go as fast or faster than the speed of light. The original " Star Trek " series ignored this "universal speed limit" in favor of a ship that could zip around the galaxy in a matter of days instead of decades. They tried to explain the ship's faster-than-light capabilities by powering the warp engine with a "matter-antimatter" engine. Antimatter was a popular field of study in the 1960s, when creator Gene Roddenberry was first writing the series. When matter and antimatter collide, their mass is converted to kinetic energy in keeping with Einstein's mass-energy equivalence formula, E=mc 2 .

In other words, matter-antimatter collision is a potentially powerful source of energy and fuel, but even that wouldn't be enough to propel a starship to faster-than-light speeds.

Nevertheless, it's thanks to "Star Trek" that the word "warp" is now practically synonymous with faster-than-light travel .

Is warp drive possible?

Decades after the original "Star Trek" show had gone off the air, pioneering physicist and avowed Trek fan Miguel Alcubierre argued that maybe a warp drive is possible after all. It just wouldn't work quite the way "Star Trek" thought it did.

Things with mass can't move faster than the speed of light. But what if, instead of the ship moving through space, the space was moving around the ship?

Space doesn't have mass. And we know that it's flexible: space has been expanding at a measurable rate ever since the Big Bang. We know this from observing the light of distant stars — over time, the wavelength of the stars' light as it reaches Earth is lengthened in a process called "redshifting." According to the Doppler effect, this means that the source of the wavelength is moving farther away from the observer — i.e. Earth.

So we know from observing redshifted light that the fabric of space is movable. [See also: What to Wear on a 100-Year Starship Voyage ]

Alcubierre used this knowledge to exploit a loophole in the "universal speed limit." In his theory, the ship never goes faster than the speed of light — instead, space in front of the ship is contracted while space behind it is expanded, allowing the ship to travel distances in less time than light would take. The ship itself remains in what Alcubierre termed a "warp bubble" and, within that bubble, never goes faster than the speed of light.

Since Alcubierre published his paper "The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity" in 1994, many physicists and science fiction writers have played with his theory —including "Star Trek" itself. [See also: Top 10 Star Trek Technologies ]

Alcubierre's warp drive theory was retroactively incorporated into the "Star Trek" mythos by the 1990s TV series "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

In a way, then, "Star Trek" created its own little grandfather paradox: Though ultimately its theory of faster-than-light travel was heavily flawed, the series established a vocabulary of light-speed travel that Alcubierre eventually formalized in his own warp drive theories.

The Alcubierre warp drive is still theoretical for now. "The truth is that the best ideas sound crazy at first. And then there comes a time when we can't imagine a world without them." That's a statement from the 100 Year Starship organization, a think tank devoted to making Earth what "Star Trek" would call a "warp-capable civilization" within a century.

The first step toward a functional warp drive is to prove that a "warp bubble" is even possible, and that it can be artificially created.

That's exactly what physicist Harold "Sonny" White and a team of researchers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas are doing right now.

NASA's warp drive project

According to Alcubierre's theory, one could create a warp bubble by applying negative energy, or energy created in a vacuum. This process relies on the Casimir effect, which states that a vacuum is not actually a void; instead, a vacuum is actually full of fluctuating electromagnetic waves. Distorting these waves creates negative energy, which possibly distorts space-time, creating a warp bubble.

To see if space-time distortion has occurred in a lab experiment, the researchers shine two highly targeted lasers: one through the site of the vacuum and one through regular space. The researchers will then compare the two beams, and if the wavelength of the one going through the vacuum is lengthened, i.e. redshifted, in any way, they'll know that it passed through a warp bubble. [See also: How Video Games Help Fuel Space Exploration ]

White and his team have been at work for a few months now, but they have yet to get a satisfactory reading. The problem is that the field of negative energy is so small, the laser so precise, that even the smallest seismic motion of the Earth can throw off the results.

When we talked to White, he was in the process of moving the test equipment to a building on the Johnson Space Center campus that was originally built for the Apollo space program. "The lab is seismically isolated, so the whole floor can be floated," White told TechNewsDaily. "But the system hadn't been (activated) for a while so part of the process was, we had the system inspected and tested."

White is now working on recalibrating the laser for the new location. He wouldn't speculate on when his team could expect conclusive data, nor how long until fully actuated warp travel might be possible, but he remains convinced that it's only a matter of time.

"The bottom line is, nature can do it," said White. "So the salient question is, 'can we?'"

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Dr. Crusher's fear of losing loved ones becomes real when her worries create an alternate reality. Dr. Crusher's fear of losing loved ones becomes real when her worries create an alternate reality. Dr. Crusher's fear of losing loved ones becomes real when her worries create an alternate reality.

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• Trivia Gates McFadden did all her stunts for the vortex effects sequences. Shortly after performing the stunt where she is thrown from Data's ops console chair, McFadden learned she was pregnant.
• Goofs When Dr. Crusher is on the bridge and she hears the first explosions, a computer graphic shows the warp bubble collapsing onto the ship and a significant portion of the front of the saucer section having already disappeared. Back in Engineering, La Forge and Data notice that the warp bubble is collapsing at the rate of 15 meters per second and will be completely gone in four and a half minutes. That would make the diameter of the warp bubble 4.050 km (roughly 2.5 miles) at that point. The Enterprise D is only 643 meters (2,100 feet) long. Even without knowing the ship's specs, it is evident that the ship is not four kilometers long.

Doctor Beverly Crusher : If there's nothing wrong with me... maybe there's something wrong with the universe.

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What if you Flew Your Warp Drive Spaceship into a Black Hole?

Warp drives have a long history of not existing, despite their ubiquitous presence in science fiction. Writer John Campbell first introduced the idea in a science fiction novel called Islands of Space. These days, thanks to Star Trek in particular, the term is very familiar. It’s almost a generic reference for superliminal travel through hyperspace. Whether or not warp drive will ever exist is a physics problem that researchers are still trying to solve, but for now, it’s theoretical.

Recently, two researchers looked at what would happen if a ship with warp drive tried to get into a black hole. The result is an interesting thought experiment. It might not lead to starship-sized warp drives but might allow scientists to create smaller versions someday.

Remo Garattini and Kirill Zatrimaylov theorized that such a drive could survive inside a so-called Schwarzschild black hole. That’s provided the ship crosses the event horizon at a speed lower than that of light. Theoretically, the black hole’s gravitational field would decrease the amount of negative energy required to keep the drive going. If it did, the ship could pass through and somehow use it to get somewhere else without getting crushed. Furthermore, the mathematics behind this idea points the way toward the possible creation of mini-warp drives in lab settings.

What’s a Warp Drive?

Could scientists build a micro- or mini-warp drive in the lab? Good questions. To understand the team’s work, let’s look at the major players in this research: warp drives and black holes.

The idea is inspired by the fact that nothing can go faster than light speed. Given the distances in space, traveling to the nearest star would take years (if we could go at light speed). Going across a galaxy or to more distant galaxies would take years and many lifetimes. So, if you want to be a space-faring species, you must travel faster than light (FTL).

How would you do that? This is where warp drives come in. Theoretically, they allow you to put your spaceship inside a bubble that could slip through space at FTL speeds. That’s how the starships in Star Trek (and other SF stories) get across huge distances so quickly. The Star Trek ships use an energy source in a “warp core” to power warp field generators. They create the warp bubble in subspace. The ship uses that to go wherever the crew needs to be.

Do Physicists Like Warp Drive?

Such a warp drive is a tantalizing idea with many caveats. For example, generating a warp field requires an insane amount of energy. Some physicists suggest that it would take more energy than we’re capable of generating. Creating that energy would require huge amounts of exotic matter—something like “unobtanium”. So, that’s a problem right there.

Others say that creating such a drive goes against our current understanding of spacetime physics. However, that hasn’t stopped anybody from speculating on ways to make it happen. For example, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre had an idea for such a drive in 1994. He suggested that it could create a bubble that would shift space around an object. He has continued his research about a ship that could get somewhere faster than light. However, he and others still point out various problems with both creating and sustaining a warp drive. That includes the idea that such a drive effectively isolates itself from the rest of the Universe. Among other things, it means the ship can’t control the drive that’s making it go. So, there are a still few bugs to work out.

About Black Holes

We are most familiar with black holes in terms of stellar mass and supermassive ones. These also sport accretion disks that convey material into the black hole. For example, the central supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A* in our own Milky Way Galaxy periodically gobbles down material. Then, it emits a belch of radiation. Other, more active galaxies send out jets of material emitted as the central supermassive black hole feeds continuously.

A black hole is a concentration of mass with gravity so strong that nothing, even light, can escape. In their study about black holes and warp drives, the authors used Schwarzschild black holes. These so-called simple “static” black holes curve spacetime, have no electric charge and are non-rotating. Essentially, they are good approximations for mathematical explorations of the characteristics of slowly rotating objects in space.

When A Ship with Warp Drive Crosses into a Black Hole

The Schwarzchild black hole is the “perfect” black hole to use in this theoretical exploration of a warp drive crossing the event horizon. To figure out the scenario, Garattini and Zatrimalov decided to mathematically combine the equations describing the black hole and the ones describing the warp drive. Among other things, they found that it’s possible to “embed” the warp drive in the outer region of the black hole. The warp bubble itself is much smaller than the black hole and needs to be moving toward it. The black hole’s gravity affects the energy conditions needed to create and sustain the warp drive. That means you can theoretically decrease the amount of negative energy required to sustain the warp bubble. In addition, the researchers suggest that if the warp bubble is moving at less than the speed of light, it effectively erases the black hole horizon.

The research team also described the idea that such an occurrence could evoke the conversion of virtual particles into real ones in an electric field. If so, it could lead to the creation of mini warp drives in the lab.

Changing the Black Hole a Bit

Interestingly, the team also suggests that, if the warp bubble is moving slowly and is much smaller than the black hole horizon, it could increase the entropy of the black hole. However, as they state in their closing arguments, “there are potential problematic issues in other physical situations: namely, when the warp drive is completely absorbed by the black hole, it may decrease its mass, and, therefore, its entropy.

Likewise, when there is a larger warp bubble passing through a black hole, it would produce a ”screening” effect and de facto eliminate the horizon, making it impossible to define the black hole entropy in the Hawking sense. If warp drives are possible in nature, these issues indicate that we still do not understand them from the thermodynamic point of view.”

Warp Drive Technology Remains to be Seen

So, while this research may prove valuable theoretically, and could lead to lab production of mini black holes, many questions remain. Perhaps in the future, when we understand the quantum mechanics behind both of these objects, we might find warp technology a slam-dunk. If so, then, as ships travel through black holes, we could face a weird time. For example, signals from inside a black hole could get carried out by a warp bubble merging from the singularity. That would allow us to send images or recordings of what it’s like inside the event horizon—something nobody knows about today. There’s also a chance that those fearsome black holes could make a warp drive less difficult to achieve since they won’t need so much exotic “negative energy” source material.

For More Information

Black Holes, Warp Drives, and Energy Conditions The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast Travel Within General Relativity Schwarzschild Black Hole Simulatio ns

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