Originally, the warp drive was an invention of science fiction. Now it has come to light that the U.S. Military is looking into the possibility of developing warp drive for real space travel. Yesterday a report was released by the Defence Intelligence Agency that ponders on the possibility to create such a propulsion system.
Image by NASA
About 10 years ago the U.S. Department of Defense paid a number of researchers to report on some highly unorthodox propulsion systems. The reason behind this research was two-fold. Mainly the U.S. Department of Defense wants to be prepared if any potential adversary might develop a novel technology. On the other hand, of course, they want to see if investing into any of these ideas makes any sense. Two of the experts that were contracted for this task came up with a 34-page report outlining the possibility of faster-than-light travel using the warp drive.
The warp drive is a highly fictional concept. The reason that science fiction authors exploited the idea of a fundamentally different propulsion system to anything we know has its origin in real physics. Ever since Einstein, we know that it is impossible for anything to travel faster than the speed of light through space. This means that it would take the fastest possible space-ship about four years to travel to our nearest star. And it would take hundreds of years to travel only around our stellar neighbourhood. This does not make for interesting science fiction stories. Introduced by the Star-Trek series, the warp drive became an essential tool for science fiction authors to keep long-distance space travel interesting. With this hypothetical drive, one could somehow move through space faster than light. Of course, most science fiction authors ignored the implications of time-travel and causality raised by this sort of travel.
Image by Stargazer
In 1994, however, some serious scientists published a theoretical paper that outlined how warp drive might be possible without breaking the rules of physics. They came up with the idea to create a space-time bubble around the space-ship. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light through space. But the space-time bubble is a heavily distorted region of space that moves with the ship. So essentially, the ship is sitting still inside the bubble and it is the distortion of space that can move faster than light. So it looked like the warp drive is possible after all.
There is a catch, however. To create the bubble, one would need serious amounts of negative mass. Negative mass or negative energy is something that is purely hypothetical and probably might not even exist. Even if it existed, to pull of a warp bubble only a few metres across, one would need the negative mass equivalent of a black hole. It seems impossible to get this kind of mass without travelling the long distances to the stars first.
Theoretical physicists like to have a bit of fun. So some of them took up the idea of the space-time warp bubble and looked at the consequences. They weren’t very encouraging. First of all, it turned out to be impossible to control the warp bubble from the inside. This means, once set up the bubble would travel indefinitely and never stop. Unless someone from the outside made an effort to destroy the bubble. Of course one could imagine warp travel along established routes with terminals at either end. But these would have to be set up first using conventional space travel. A very time-consuming task. And even then, a small mistake would mean a slow and lonely death for the passengers who would never be able to leave the bubble again.
The second consequence is even more damning. When the warp bubble hits only the smallest piece of dust the dust is turned into deadly radiation inside the bubble. Only a few little rocks floating in space would be able to create conditions inside the bubble that is similar to the centre of the sun. No known spaceship would be able to survive this inferno.
Is the U.S. Military seriously considering this type of drive as a possible future technology? One clue can be gained from the fact that the report was even released. The fact that the public is able to read this report can tell us that the officials in the military don’t think that the ideas presented in the report are serious enough to keep secret. Most of it is well-known in physics. The rest is made up by randomly picking different concepts in physics and claiming that they might be used to create the negative mass.
It is also interesting to note, where the authors of the study are now. The first author was a freshly graduated PhD at the time when he wrote the report. He is now a member of the Icarus Interstellar society. The other author calls himself Senior Research Physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, an organisation that was founded by Parapsychologist Harold E. Puthoff.
It seems that, at the time that the report was commisioned, the U.S. Military simply wanted to cover all possibilities but quickly saw that there was not much serious science in this report.