Science time-out: Warp drive?
It goes nearly without saying that mankind will not truly be able to reach for the distant stars until a method is found to travel faster than the speed of light. Our closest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away. That means that anything less than lightspeed is going to take over 4 years to get there. Given our current, instant-communications mindset, the notion that even a message exchange will take enough time to see a 1st-grade student enter high school to receive will be hard to accept. We need a method of propulsion that’s capable of faster-than-light (FTL) speeds.
FTL drives are a staple of science fiction shows. Star Trek introduced the notion of warp drive to the television-viewing public back in the 1960’s and Star Wars used hyperdrive engines to get from 1 star system to another. Always the province of dreamers, FTL drives might not be as impossible as some have believed:
The warp drive, one of “Star Trek”’s hallmark inventions, could someday become science instead of science fiction.
Some physicists say the faster-than-light travel technology may one day enable humans to jet between stars for weekend getaways.
Clearly it won’t be an easy task. The science is complex, but not strictly impossible, according to some researchers studying how to make it happen.
The mythology of Star Trek “explains” warp drive as the generation of a field around a ship that basically moves the vessel into a state wherein it’s not really traveling through the normal space-time fabric. Researchers are now saying that the concept might be more apt than thought. The trick might be to create that field and find a way to move the entire chunk of space-time rather than just the ship.
Read the whole article if the science or the fiction interests you. It’s interesting.
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