Einstein tells us that nothing can move through space time faster than the speed of light. This is disappointing news as even our closest start (the sun) is around 8 light minutes away and the next closest start is around 10 light years away!
However, what if I told there you that through clever solutions to Einstein's general relatively filed equations it may be possible for a spacecraft to achieve speeds far exceeding our cosmic speed limit!
Welcome to the warp drive
This concept machine could reach speeds far greater than that of light speed, however it required a configurable energy-density field lower than that of a vacuum - that is to say negative mass must be created. A lot of negative mass.. Meguel proposed that the mass-energy equivalent of the entire universe would be needed to power his machine... talk about impractical..
A couple of years ago up until now, a number of scientists at NASA have been working on reducing the warp drives energy requirement. As it turns out, by rapidly oscillating the warp field one may be able to soften the fabric of space-time via higher dimensional effects. Literally, a hyper space warp drive. By shrinking down the warp bubble while expanding the internal volume to get us down to potentially not even needing negative mass anymore as quantum scale manipulations of the vacuum energy through the Casimir effect might be enough
WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR? LETS BUILD IT!
Contrary to popular belief, scientific progress requires a relatively significant amount of time. There are still a great number of questions left to be answered on how to build and more importantly operate a true warp drive. Just to name a few; how would you slow such a machine down? What would you make the machine out of? How is the most effective way of oscillating the warp field?
Fortunately there are a lot of intelligent people working on this project and with a lot of work and some luck we can turn science fiction into science fact!!
If you are interested and want to learn more then check out my references!
References:
Alcubierre 1994 http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0009013
Krasnikov 1995 http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9511068
Van Den Broeck 1999 http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9906050
Krasnikov 2002 http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0207057
Harold White, Warp Field Mechanics 101 http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/cas...
Harold White, Warp Field Mechanics 102 http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/cas...