In a breakthrough that could be the future of military space, researchers have taken a big leap toward developing an operational warp drive, something that has been isolated to date within the realm of science fiction.
The idea of warp drives, which the “Star Trek” sci-fi franchise has made a household name, operates on the concept of space-time bending, forming a “warp bubble” to compress space in front of and expand it at the back of a spaceship so that theoretically it could travel at extra-ordinary velocities. In theory, the technology demanded exotic forms of negative energy. Recent research indicates otherwise.
This may soon be possible, as a team of physicists from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, together with the Advanced Propulsion Laboratory at Applied Physics in New York, developed a new model making warp drives possible without negative energy. In their paper published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, the researchers describe a new, advanced blending of traditional and novel gravitational techniques for the creation of a warp bubble that will facilitate the transportation of objects at high, yet still subluminal, speeds.
“This work changes the conversation about warp drives,” said Jared Fuchs, the principal author of the paper. The team realized that warp drives could become a reality by producing this first-of-its-kind model. The new model does away with exotic energy and instead uses a stable matter shell combined with a shift vector distribution, which closely approximates the Alcubierre metric proposed in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre.
Such research has immense military implications in the area: if one could travel at close to light speed, this would revolutionize strategic mobility in effecting rapid deployment over vast distances. It would be a huge tactical advantage, as forces could deal on short notice with changing threats and execute operations at unequaled time scales.
CEO of Applied Physics Gianni Martire was quick to point out that, while mankind is nowhere near prepared for interstellar voyages, the research effort brings in an exciting new age of possibilities. Work by the team could be a stepping stone on the long road to efficient interstellar flight, marking the beginning of what Martire calls the “Warp Age.”
The researchers caveated their promising results by saying a working warp drive remains very far off from the past horizon. Their current theoretical model needs considerably more validation and refinement. Building such a warp drive engine is well beyond the available technology frontiers in the present, and big strides must be made in solving energy generation and materials science.
But the only steps that mattered, though very necessary and important, have been the ones Fuchs and his team have been able to record. They proceeded to fine-tune their models and to work in hand with other scientific fields, and the dream of warp drives now becomes tantalizing, not just for military strategists, but for other scientists across the board. The potential to travel the cosmos at previously impossible speed gives a new frontier to explore and to defend, a future not too distant when these boundaries of space will promise an end to be formidable.
The detailed physics of this revolutionary way of space travel is available for free via the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. With human civilization now at the brink of entering a new realm of space exploration, such a dream regarding warp drives taking humanity to the stars seems rather close to fulfillment.