If you want a cross-galaxy science fiction epic, you need to travel faster than light. The alternative is to take decades or centuries to reach an alien star system, which is nowhere near as fun. So you start with a wild scientific idea, add a bit of technobabble, and puke! Quam Celerrime ad Astra. Everything from wormholes to hyperspace has been used in science fiction, but perhaps the most famous FTL trope is the warp drive.
Warp Drive has been used in science fiction since the 1930s but was popularized by the 1960s television show Star Trek. Although it’s based on general relativity, where space and time can be warped by gravity, the TV series didn’t go into details. Warp coils, marbles, marbles, dilithium crystals. It doesn’t matter that the theory of relativity clearly states that objects cannot move faster than light. Without Warp Drive, Captain Kirk would never be able to woo beautiful aliens.
Even so, the idea was so intriguing that some scientists tried to come up with a theory of how it might work. For example, physicist and science fiction writer Robert Forward suggested several ideas. But things really started when Miguel Alcubierre published an article in Classical and Quantum Gravity that really could be called Warp Drive.
An illustration of the Alcubierre warp effect. Photo credit: Wikipedia user AllenMcC
The paper showed how the general theory of relativity that allows space can be warped in a way that enables FTL travel. In theory, a ship could never fly through space faster than light, but you could create a distorted space bubble around the ship, making it possible to reach distant stars in almost no time. The idea came to be known as Alcubierre Drive.
There was only one problem. While the Alcubierre drive was possible within general relativity, it only worked when you could get your hands on the value of some exotic, negative-mass material on a planet. All known matter has a positive mass, so this is kind of a deal breaker. Even Alcubierre has said the idea probably wouldn’t work in real life.
New research solves some of these problems, but introduces others. The work of Alcubierre and Lobo mainly focuses on the weak field warp effect. They find that small warp effects work similarly to a non-reactive drive, as was suggested for the EM drive. They also found that while propulsion still requires negative mass energy, it could hypothetically be done with a ship with positive finite mass.
Hypethetic soliton warp bubbles for various ship designs. Photo credit: Erik Lentz
Another recently published paper by Erik Lentz takes a different approach. He notes that there are certain warp configurations that are similar to solitons. Solitons are a ripple effect that amplifies itself. Solitons can maintain their shape while moving at constant speed and have been observed in water and other liquids. Lentz showed that while soliton warp bubbles would require an incredible amount of dense matter, the energy of the matter need not be negative.
Both ideas also have another problem. By creating a relativistic bubble around the ship, they effectively isolate the ship from the outside world. This is known as the horizon problem, and it means that a ship’s warp bubble cannot be controlled from inside the ship. The voyage would have to be controlled from the outside. Jean Luc Picard could be a ship’s captain, but he couldn’t just do it like that.
Obviously, the warp drive is still hypothetical. There are deep theoretical challenges, not to mention the technical ones. But maybe we will have made it all by the 23rd century and we can finally move quickly to the stars.
Reference: Alcubierre, Miguel. “The Warp Drive: Hyperfast Travel Within General Relativity.” Classical and Quantum Gravity 11.5 (1994): L73.
Reference: Alcubierre, Miguel and Francisco SN Lobo. “Warp Drive Basics.” Wormholes, Warp Drives, and Energy Conditions. Springer, Cham, 2017. 257 & ndash; 279.
Reference: Lentz, Erik. “Breaking the Warp Barrier: Hyperfast Solitons in the Einstein-Maxwell Plasma Theory.” Classical and Quantum Gravity (2021).
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