Bending Time and Space: The Warp Drive Odyssey
Buckle up, folks, because we’re about to take you on a wild, warp-speed ride through the cosmos. Picture this: You’re sitting in the captain’s chair of a sleek starship, fingers itching to engage the warp drive. What’s waiting for you out there? It’s a place where stars streak past like neon blurs, and galaxies fold and unfold like origami in a cosmic breeze. It’s a reality that science fiction has tantalised us with for decades, and today, we’re on the cusp of making it real. So fasten your seatbelt, because we’re about to warp into a journey where the universe itself becomes your playground. Get ready, fellow travellers, to experience the future, not as a dream, but as a thrilling reality.
Cosmic Surfer
Well, in 1994, Dr Alcubierre presented the idea of a warp drive, based on a solution of Einstein’s field equations.
Our first step in making this visionary concept a reality is creating a hypothetical wrap-bubble in space-time fabric. This relies on an elusive concept of using negative energy.
Next, we use the wrap- bubble to move through the space. This will be the key to achieving faster-than-light travel. Think of it as a surfer who doesn’t move through the water very fast, but catches the wave, which carries them quickly. The interesting part is that the bubble will travel at arbitrary speeds and will not be constrained by the speed of light; so we will not violate the rules of Relativity since we do not actually move through their local spacetime; we are actually bending the rules of space-time to make faster travel possible.
Now, as the hum of the warp core reverberates through the deck as you prepare to push the boundaries of space and time, through the window, you start noticing yourself moving away from nearby celestial bodies
You are intrigued by all of this happening and your curiosity is insatiable but sit aback since the captain is here to answer all of your questions
How to generate negative energy
Curving spacetime in this way, in the form of a bubble, would imply the use of an object with negative mass. The existence of such matter seems counterintuitive — how can mass, which is such a fundamental dimension in our world, be negative? The entire concept of negative mass seems too absurd to exist. In the face of such absurdity, we employ a clever workaround, replacing the need for negative mass with another substance entirely. Mass and energy are essentially two sides of the same coin — this fact is a consequence of Einstein’s renowned mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2 . Negative energy, while still a somewhat unfamiliar concept, is more digestible than negative mass. However, creating negative energy is still an arduous task. In fact, negative energies on a macroscopic scale are yet to be experimentally observed. In the context of creating a warp drive, the microscopic amounts of negative energy which have been observed in experiments are sufficient to fulfil our requirements.
One method to manufacture negative energy is by placing two conducting parallel plates close to each other in a vacuum. According to quantum field theory, this vacuum is actually full of various kinds of fields. These fields constantly pop in and out of existence in their quantized states. When we place the two parallel plates together, the energy associated with these fields in the region between the plates is actually less than the energy due to the fields outside the plates. Since we have placed these plates in a vacuum, the energy associated with the fields must be zero, which leads to the conclusion that the energy between the plates is negative.
What is Stopping Us
Energy’s Bill — In the original solution of Dr. Alcubierre, the required negative energy was greater than 3 times the mass of the whole observable universe but after some slight modifications, it was brought down to a ‘few’ solar masses by Chris van de Broek. Still, the bill will be too hefty for cosmic budgets.
Enigma of Exotic Matter — In everyday terms, objects have positive mass and energy, linked by E=mc². However, for a warp drive, negative energy is needed, which is challenging to explain concisely.
Lack of sufficient hydrogen — Physicists suggest collecting hydrogen during starship travel to avoid storing massive fuel loads. Krauss notes the need for a massive, 25-mile-wide device to capture enough hydrogen. Despite hydrogen’s cosmic abundance, space contains just one hydrogen atom per cubic square inch.
Casimir Effect — It is a very small attractive force between two uncharged but conductive parallel plates held very close together. The idea of an Alcubierre warp drive rests on the principle that under the right conditions, spacetime itself can contract. The idea of an Alcubierre warp drive rests on the principle that under the right conditions, spacetime itself can contract. The Casimir effect here would drag a spacecraft forward by contracting space itself in front of the vessel’s nose. This would mean that a hypothetical vessel could break the “cosmic speed limit” by arriving at its destination faster than the speed of light, without ever having to accelerate its squishy human passengers to relativistic speeds.
Horizon Effect — Inside the warp bubble, occupants can’t control its speed or direction, as events within the bubble’s future light cone are unaffected by present actions. According to Barceló, Finazzi, and Liberati’s quantum theory-based argument, FTL is hindered by the intense Hawking radiation generated, leading to extreme temperatures and overall instability.
Basically, to interact with the outer surroundings the message will be sent via photons, but as the ship is at superluminal speed, The photons find themselves trapped, unable to escape the warp bubble’s grip.
Dilemma due to Causality — Well, there’s the causality conundrum. Faster-than-light travel threatens the principle of cause and effect. Imagine a scenario where a message signal travels from person 1 to person 2. Causality insists that the signal reach person 2 once it’s been sent by person 1. Breaking this fundamental rule could lead to time travel into the past, a realm where tachyons, those hypothetical particles, may outpace the message signal, unable to interact with objects moving at ‘slower than light’ speeds, in short, it’s scary.
The possibility of a singularity — Another issue is that to create a small size of diamond bubble, a huge amount of energy is required and if that much energy is in the form of mass, it can lead to the collapse of spacetime and create a black hole or a naked singularity and this is frightening!
Alternatives
One physicist named Eric Lentz figured out another way of making the warp drive possible using the concept of the existing positive matter. He claimed that by making use of high-energy Plasma, in such a way that
It creates a diamond-like structure around the spacecraft craft that can separate out along with the expanding space at superluminal speeds.
However, this idea is still debatable, another method suggests travelling faster than light using the time dilation phenomenon due to mass in space, to build our ship with this material which will cause time to flow at a slower rate than at Earth.
As you feel the engines close on the deck you see you have reached your destination, you gaze at the magnificent yet mystical clouds of star dust around you and you are left in awe at the marvel of warp drives.
The Vision of the Stars
The human race has strived to achieve more; it has thought that not even the sky’s the limit. It would be magnificent if we could perform space travel as presented in Star Wars. However, these all are still visionary ideas coming from curious minds; we need to advance a lot further in this field to make space travel happen the way we imagine. Hard to believe, but once achieved, this exceptional idea will not hold much remarkability, and we will then still hope to achieve more in future.
Sources:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.07125.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.06824.pdf
https://daily.jstor.org/the-real-warp-drive/
