Will future humans use warp drives to explore the cosmos? We're in no position to eliminate the possibility. But if our distant descendants ever do, it won't involve dilithium crystals, and Scottish accents will have evaporated into history by then.
Warp drives have their roots in one of the most popular science fiction franchises ever, but they do have a scientific basis. A new paper examines the science behind them and asks if a warp drive containment failure would emit detectable gravitational waves.
The paper is titled "What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse," and it is posted to the arXiv preprint server. The authors are Katy Clough, Tim Dietrich, and Sebastian Khan, physicists from institutions in the U.K. and Germany.
There's room for warp drives in General Relativity, and Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre described how they could theoretically work in 1994. He's well-known in space and physics circles for his Alcubierre Drive.
Everyone knows that no object can travel faster than the speed of light. But warp drives may offer a workaround. By warping spacetime itself, a spacecraft with a warp drive wouldn't be breaking the faster-than-light (FTL) rule.
"Despite originating in science fiction, warp drives have a concrete description in general relativity, with Alcubierre first proposing a spacetime metric that supported faster-than-light travel," the authors write.
There are clear scientific barriers to actually making a warp drive. But it's possible to simulate how one would work and how they may be detectable via gravitational waves in the event of a failure.
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