Warp drive: Fact or fiction?

First things first

Before we get to travel vast distances in space, we first need to lay down some facts. The speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s. To put that into perspective, the moon is only 384 400 000 m away from the earth, so if you travel at the speed of light, you would be able to go to the moon and back in just over 2.5 seconds. Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity famously explains how space and time are linked for objects that are moving at a constant speed in a straight line inside a vacuum. So, in simple terms, as a ship approaches the speed of light, its mass becomes infinite, and it is unable to go faster than light.

Due to this speed limit, it is very unlikely that humans will ever be able to explore beyond our local part of the Milky Way. To escape the Earth’s atmosphere, we need to reach 11 190 m/s, anything below that you might reach space, but you will be stuck in orbit. To stay in orbit, you will need to maintain a speed of at least 7 777 m/s. Looking at these speeds, it is no wonder that we need something more to really explore space and the reason why it will take almost seven months to travel to Mars.

So, what is Warp Drive exactly?

Warp Drive is a technology that allows space travel at faster-than-light speeds. Unfortunately, to make it work, you need to add some fiction. It works by generating a warp field to form a subspace bubble around a spacecraft. This allows for distortion of the local space-time continuum and makes it possible to travel at velocities that could greatly exceed the speed of light.

Creating these warp bubbles are nothing new to science as they were already proposed back in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre. At that point, it was thought that the only way to produce a warp drive was by generating vast amounts of negative energy by either using some undiscovered exotic matter or by manipulating dark energy.

This was until Erik Lentz of the Göttingen University in Germany created a theoretical design of a warp drive that is grounded in conventional physics. His design overcomes the requirement of exotic matter used in previous designs by reimagining the shape of warped space.

After studying previous research on warp drives, Lentz realised that there were specific forms of space-time bubbles that other scientists overlooked. These bubbles, called solitons, took on the shape of compact waves that maintain their whip while moving at constant velocity, like that of a single ripple moving across calm water.

Lentz then revisited Einstein’s equations for different soliton configurations until he found one that worked with conventional energy sources. The next hurdle would be to figure out how to bring down the astronomical amount of energy required to make such a design work. Creating a warp bubble around a 200m wide spacecraft traveling at the speed of light will require roughly 100 times the energy contained in the mass of Jupiter or 30 orders of magnitude higher than the power of a modern nuclear reactor. Current designs will therefore not fit on spacecraft until the power issues have been sorted out, but fortunately, several energy saving mechanisms have already been proposed in earlier research that can potentially lower the energy requirement by nearly 60 orders of magnitude. So, still a bit of work to do, but this brings warp drive much closer to fact than to fiction.