Warp drives may swim through spacetime

I recently wrote about how viscoelastic fluids can be used in liquid body armor to stop bullets. While spacetime isn’t a fluid in the traditional sense, it has many of the same properties. In particular, it deforms when a massive body or any energy at all passes through it. The spacetime manifold resists deformation and seeks to return to flatness whenever a massive body passes on. This property is elasticity.

In addition, the more quickly the object deforms spacetime, the more resistance one encounters. This is because spacetime deformations contain energy which itself gravitates and affects other massive bodies, so the deformation of spacetime by a massive body causes additional deformations between the deformed spacetime and the spacetime nearby. These are in the form of high frequency gravitational waves that quickly dissipate. Essentially, like a viscous fluid, spacetime damps disturbances nonlinearly. The shorter wavelength those are the faster they get damped.

This becomes a problem when you want to build a warp drive, which is all about deforming spacetime. A non-viscous spacetime would allow a warp drive to generate a standing wave which would travel faster than light forever, carrying a ship with it at a cost of no additional energy. A non-elastic spacetime would not resist deformation.