Scientists: Star Trek's Warp Drive is not impossible

reply to post by Indigo_Child


What happens between a and b is nothing, the craft simply 'rides the wave of warped space time', so the craft isn't violating c, space-time itself is moving. Did that make sense?

We are actually closer to warp drive than you think

Originally, the warp drive created a bubble that reduced the weight of the ship.. thus allowing impulse engines to push the ship faster the more the weight was reduced

Just the effect the TR-3B is supposed to use for it's drive.

[edit on 7-5-2009 by hisshadow]

reply to post by jkrog08


I understand it that much. I just don't understand how the craft warps space and time to get from A to B. It sounds like it bends the space between A and B, but does that not mean that it bends everything in between.

When I visualise it I imagine it like this. To go from Earth to outside the solar system, we bend the solar system towards the Earth! I can literally see all the planets coming towards the Earth. It looks catastrophic!

Another problem with warp-drive is if you are moving so fast through space how do you control the direction you are going in? What if you hit an asteroid on the way. If you are moving at it at 1 million times the speed of light, the collision would be the equivalent to the energy released by several hydrogen bombs.

So it seems to me that warp-drive technology seems impractical. I think FTL is possible but the way it actually done is by slipping into a quantum slipstream. This way you cannot hit anything physical on the way because nothing physical exists to hit.

[edit on 7-5-2009 by Indigo_Child]

reply to post by Indigo_Child



What the craft does (in theory) is constrict space dirctly in front of the craft and expand it directly behind the craft in a localized region of space-time, this creates a wave of space-time, which the craft rides, note this only happens in a localized field around the craft.




Here is another example of a warp field...




All images courtesy of www.abovetopsecret.com...

As far as the complex navigation goes, there will need to be a great advancement in navigation and computers as well. The thread I got the pictures from explains all that.Hope that clears it up somewhat!

reply to post by jkrog08


Thank you, that clears it up for me. Yes I suppose that could work.
How does one make space-time move though? Is it by generating a gravitational field to warp space?

Reading that artical made my brain hurt so bad -_-"

So if this article is an indication of where we're being told we are in terms of development and application of the FTL concept, I wonder where we really are!

Imagine it taking longer to get into Earth orbit from the ground than going from Earth orbit to Mars orbit. Imagine the car ride from your house to the launch pad taking longer than the ride from Earth to the moons of Jupiter.

I don't just think this technology is important, I think it's essential to the survival of the human race. Maybe we can stop killing each other if we're once again able to fulfill our most powerful human instinct; to explore. Instead of studying and guessing about the composition of extrasolar planets based on the wavelengths of million year old images captured by telescopes, we jump into our ship and zoom on over to check it out.

I wonder though, are they thinking about objects or debris that might lie between the point of origin and the destination? I can't imagine that steering is all that practical during FTL travel. I wonder if the space-time "bubble" would protect the travelers from, oh, say a star, or planet that happened to be in their path.

Originally posted by Indigo_Child

Another problem with warp-drive is if you are moving so fast through space how do you control the direction you are going in? What if you hit an asteroid on the way. If you are moving at it at 1 million times the speed of light, the collision would be the equivalent to the energy released by several hydrogen bombs.

The deflector dish, of course.

[edit on 7-5-2009 by AR154]

reply to post by Indigo_Child


Well that is the problem, as Internos showed in the first page of this thread the stage in development right now is only speculation, the main problem is in developing and conceptualizing exactly what you said- a engine that actually can do this. Right now there are not many ideas out there, and even they are still well in the conjecture stage.

Finding the principle behind making FTL actually possible is just the beginning really. If that is ever discovered, there is still the problems of navigation, a phenomenal energy source that could supply a ship to travel light years, space debris danger, etc. And if we're talking about manned FTL travel, then there's the issue of life support, inertia, zero-g effects on the human body over long periods of time, etc. How long this would all take is anyone's guess, but I estimate it would take at the very least another one or two hundred years.

The whole notion of FTL never struck me until I was about 6 years old, when the original Star Trek television series appeared on NBC for the first time. Yes, there was a pilot episode in 1964, but NBC didn't pick up the show as a series until 1966. I became an instant fan, although it took me a few episodes (as a kid) to figure out that "warp speed" meant traveling at light speed and beyond.

A few years after the series went sour and NBC rightly pulled the plug on it, I started attending that brand new phenomenon in the early 1970s that they called the Star Trek Convention, and that's where I first heard pseudo-technical explanations for the various ST gimmickry, including Warp Drive. Of course, all of these explanations were pure mental masturbation, having nothing to do with physical science.

For years as a teenager, I visualized Warp Drive as a kind of Watermelon Seed Drive... A fresh watermelon seed is a particularly slippery object, coated with that slippery watermelon goo, and merely pinching it between the thumb and forefinger will send the seed zipping away, right? So, imagine a warp field as that "slippery goo," a membrane of sorts, surrounding a starship (the seed) — as the field intensifies, normal space simply slams shut on the starship, squirting it like a watermelon seed in a desired direction... Difference being that, as long as the warp field is active, normal space is continually slamming shut on the starship, for the duration of the warp event.

As I said, it was pseudo-scientific nonsense, but it was a good visualization for a teenager. Unfortunately, it couldn't explain Star Trek's FTL drive. As I discovered later, the watermelon seed drive actually can work in normal space, but at its high-end velocity, we're still talking about sub-lightspeed.

I finally concluded, many years later, that our mistake is in using physical terms to describe the warp event. We talk about "warping space" and "warping time" as if we actually have a handful of each and we're capable of manipulating them. We can't. The energy expenditure is so costly to warp space and time over vast distances that we simply can't touch it — your "star drive" would have to be a real star, harnessed to provide your power.

However, since most scientists agree on the existence of many more physical dimensions than those few with which we are familiar, it would seem to me that warp drive would have to be an interdimensional drive of some sort.

It wouldn't require FTL propulsion at all, nor would it demand vast amounts of raw energy to bump a starship out of existence, into another dimension, and then back into existence on the other side of the galaxy... or the other side of the universe, for that matter. We're not crossing physical space, it's more like we pulled over and parked on the shoulder of the highway of existence and allowed the traffic (Time and Space) to go whizzing by us under its own expansive power. Then we just pop back into existence to find ourselves...well...totally lost.

I wouldn't want to be the first one to try it, I'll put it that way.

— Doc Velocity





[edit on 5/12/2009 by Doc Velocity]

You gotta see the new Star Trek.. man, it rocks !! Kirk is back haha and better than ever


Speaking of using gravity to compress space time, seems like there would have to be some other way without gravity.. since not even black holes tear spacetime

Saw the new Star Trek last night, and walked in with no expectations — I prepped by using Vulcan trance meditation to completely rid my mind of The Old Series bias. Yes, I am a hardcore Trekster from Day One, as I explained in the previous post. So I steeled myself and marched right in there to watch JJ Abrams reinvent the wheel, Armageddon style. Or maybe Cloverfield style.

Yes, there were elements of those films in the new Star Trek...Breakneck pace, very stylized cinematography, machine-gun editing, the works. A helluva lot of digital lens flare and glare, when it wasn't really needed...

...and I loved it.

I threw out my preconceived notions and ate it up. Freakin' fantastic! The caricatures of the classic crew were priceless, those people really did their freakin' homework. The tributes to the old series were abundant, I was rolling when Chris Pine lapsed into a straight-up and shameless Shatner impression, cocky as hell, in the Kobayashi Maru sequence.

I mean, it got me, just as they planned. I loved the hell out of it.

Abrams got it right in the most important way — he did not labor the techno-babble. There were no 5 minute sequences of meaningless mumbo-jumbo about generating a tachyon damping shell or some damned stupid thing.

Techno-babble was largely absent from The Old Series, which is what made it work. It's like nobody remembers that space fantasy has gotta be about the people, not the friggin machines. The later franchises (TNG, DS9,Voyager, Enterprise) were burdened with techno-babble, and they never achieved the same spirit of The Original Series. Specifically, the first two seasons and maybe one or two episodes of the third season....



High-Five to the new Star Trek. Keep it simple, stupid, and this legend will live forever.

— Doc Velocity





[edit on 5/13/2009 by Doc Velocity]