Dude, for real?!?! Yep, that’s the scuttlebutt! I don’t know about you, but I’ve been waiting for this news since I was a kid. If they get in high gear, I may actually fall within the age-range to see Warp Drive.

What’s this all about? Well, back in ’94 Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre put forth a concept for a real warp drive which at that time was impossible, mainly due to the immense fuel requirements.

Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.

Here’s how it works.

An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.

Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn't being warped at all.

With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.

The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

But recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.

So far, White and his colleagues are doing experiments with space-time warps on a tiny scale at the Johnson Space Center.

I wonder if they could use similarly small sized warp fields…to, say, transport one or two people at a time to another location, very quickly. Hmmmmm. I know a magical land, run by a certain mouse, that I might like to visit more often…if the trip were quicker.

The video below describes, in detail, the science behind the warp drive.

Read the full article here

(Source: Space.com)