The Problems Of Light-Speed

Time is significant; it can be spent in many different ways. You can learn an instrument or a new language. However, when it comes to space, things take a considerable amount of time. It takes over 240 years for Pluto to rotate around the sun, and over 230 million years for the sun to orbit the Milky Way. And the main element that takes time in space travel is distance.

It takes at least 7 months to travel 33.9 to 62 million miles to Mars, so imagine trying to travel interstellar.  The main solution to traveling these long distances is a warp drive. A marvel of sci-fi technology, often included in shows and movies such as Star Trek and Star Wars, as a way to warp space near the ship to propel it at speeds faster than light. This technology has been dreamed of by scientists, engineers, and astronomers from around the world. But there are many hurdles to creating a drive like this, and it may be impossible.

How Does A Warp Drive Work?

Most fictional spacecraft use a warp drive that converts energy into a large energy field (the warp bubble) around the ship. This bubble bends space around the ship and propels it forward. However, scientists today believe a much more realistic warp drive would be a ring around the ship, which is made of exotic matter (that may have negative mass or density). This ring expands space behind the ship and contracts space in front of the ship, which then propels the ship at ridiculous speeds.

The Problems Of Making A Warp Drive

Here are a few of the main problems and hurdles that we face when trying to design a warp drive:

1. Energy Requirements — A real-life warp drive would require an extremely great amount of energy. In 1997, Chris Van Den Broek estimated that the required amount of energy for a warp drive would be approximately three solar masses (still a ridiculous amount!)

2. Control Problems — The occupants of the ship would have no way to control, steer, or even stop the spacecraft, since the photons inside the electricity field would pile up at the front and remain still relative to the motion of the ship. This means that anyone inside the warp bubble cannot control or even create the warp bubble in the first place. This is because the photons cannot get to the front of the bubble, which is where they need to be. They also would not be able to communicate with the outside world. This issue is similar to the concept of horizons in black holes. Once you have entered the event horizon (the point of no return) of the black hole, there is no way again that you can ever interact with the outside universe.

   
   

3. Radiation — In a recent paper by Brendan McMonigal and some colleagues, they found that as you travel at light speed, photons pile up at the front of the bubble. And as soon as the warp stops, all of those photons are released, creating enough energy to destroy an entire planet. Stefano Feinazzi and some colleagues in 2009 found that Hawking radiation would be created at the rim of the bubble and that the Hawking radiation would have the Planck temperature (180,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit!). A temperature only detected in the Big Bang. This means that the warp bubble would collapse almost as soon as it was created due to the high temperatures.

   
   

4. Causality — The warp drive can create CTCs (closed time-like curves), AKA backwards time travel. The problem is that the machine can create paradoxes, such as the grandfather paradox (a man goes back in time and kills his own grandfather, but that means he wouldn’t exist, and he couldn’t go back in the first place). The laws of general relativity by Albert Einstein state that backwards time travel is possible, but the ability to predict physics breaks down when doing so. Stephen Hawking explained that it might be impossible, since according to his Chronology Protection Conjecture, whenever someone attempts to use the time machine, quantum effects will cause the destruction of the machine. One of the creators of the modern prototype of a warp drive, Miguel Alcubierre, acknowledges that his design is indeed a time machine. Alcubierre stated in an interview, “And there’s a proof, a general proof that any method you come up with that allows you to travel faster than light, can in principle be turned into a time machine. That’s true of the warp drive. Somebody else [a man named Allen E. Everett] proved it about a year later.

Conclusion

The work that these many scientists and physicists have put into trying to make a working model is amazing. It’s almost like a playground to play around in and create new theories, and have fun. Sadly, the challenges we face are so massive that it seems almost impossible that anyone will ever build a warp drive. Requiring many new physical properties to be discovered in just the right way we want. It is almost similar to hoping for magic like in Harry Potter. Searching for shortcuts and cheat codes in the Universe and its properties may reveal a way to easily travel beyond. And the many people who have contributed to our modern model of a warp drive will be remembered as making one of the coolest and exciting designs ever.