Interstellar Travel: Moving Stationary Objects Through Space Time
Warp drive as we know it has always been a science fiction fantasy, until now. Scientist and Professor Miguel Alcubierre, National University of Mexico, a self-avowed science fiction fan, while listening to an episode of Star Trek in college, began to think about the idea of “warp drive” in the context of the Theory of Relativity. After a weekend of intense calculations, he discovered an equation that would allow a spaceship to travel faster than the speed of light without violating any of the principles of relativity.
Alcubierre published his equation in the “Classical and Quantum Gravity Journal,” explaining how a spaceship could travel across time and space and travel to the ends of the universe in days, weeks or months rather than decades, centuries or millennia.
Negative Energy Compresses Space
Like a modern day escalator, a spaceship would be pushed through space and time without accelerating and without moving away from its local environment. The space surrounding the ship would be stationary but the space behind it would expand and space in front of it contract, “bending space time” to bring the spaceship closer and closer to its destination.
To make space behind the spaceship expand, it must be filled up with “negative energy.” In short, if enough negative energy could be created, warp drive could occur. Steve Lamoreaux, Atomic Physicist at Yale University has spent the past 15 years proving that “negative energy” exists; if he is correct, the energy needed to make warp drive a reality exists.
Traveling Across The Universe In Seconds, Rather Than Centuries Or Millenia
NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Team is testing the same phenomena in its hopes that someday we will be able to truly explore the universe rather than see it from afar.
