I canna change the laws of physics, Captain!

But according to i09, you may be able to find a loophole in them.

How NASA might build its very first warp drive.

To use a word, fascinating. So, some clever scientists think that they’ve find away to travel fasting than light. Okay, the ship would not actually be traveling at FTL speeds, but it would warp spacetime around it so that spacetime itself is traveling faster than light. It’s a clever exploitation of a loophole in relativity that allows for spacetime to travel exceed what is otherwise the universal speed limit. And unlike most theoretical FTL schemes, this may not require a quantity of energy equal to the mass of Jupiter to get going. It really boggles the mind.

Warp Drive

Ironically, in recent decades, the Star Trek warp drive concept has fallen out of favor among science fictions writers, who have tended to either assume that faster-than-light will remain a pipe dream or it involves traveling through rapidly rotating black holes or some other scheme to create a warp drive. The problem with the wormhole model is that no one has figure out a practical way for a ship to travel through it without being ripped to shreds by tidal forces or being crushed. The warp drive idea spares us that risk.

Of course, we are decades or more away from using this method as practical method of travel. That’s assuming that we won’t find out later that it’s really impossible.

 

spaceship

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