If correct, White’s team has possibly discovered the world’s first warp drive. Photo by Austin Neill courtesy of Unsplash. Like riding a wave at Newport Beach, the Alcubierre theory would involve riding the warped fabric of space to your next interstellar destination.
However, the latest DARPA-funded research released by White and his team indicates that the energy requirements would be much less than initially believed. Some of the theoretical energy requirements do not exist - or, at least, have not yet been discovered. In visualization, the concept was compared to a surfer riding a wave - a metaphor often used to describe how a ship could travel the stars.Īlcubierre’s math, though reportedly sound, had some unresolved problems. He posited that it was possible to manipulate the fabric of space itself in order to achieve faster-than-light travel.Īlcubierre said it might be possible to expand the space behind a starship and contract space in front of it, thereby reducing the intervening gaps between planets and stars to very short distances. In 1994, Alcubierre made waves in the physics community when he published his findings on the theoretical possibilities of “warping” interstellar space. It would ensure that travel would take only days instead of a possible 2 million or more years, even at faster than light speed.
If you used a Slinky for visualization, as seen above, the Alcubierre Drive expands the spring behind the spaceship and compresses the spring in front of it, leaving the space outside the spring alone, and the space inside the spring relatively normal.
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