NASA Making the “Warp Drive” – Faster than Light Spaceship

NASA scientist Harold White announced that he and his team are working to build warp drive spaceship that could travel at a speed faster than light. The idea went shocking the world as it disobeyed the laws of physics. It is like going against the very established physics principles and accepted theories of scientists including Albert Einstein!

The theory of Special Relativity does not allow objects to move faster than the speed of light within spacetime. Light speed barrier is hence termed. It requires energy to increase speed of moving objects. And to match the speed of light, it would need infinite amount of energy. Existence of negative energy is already a topic of debate; and here we require a great amount of negative energy environment around a moving spaceship.

NASA explains the idea of Alcubierre’s Warp drive through a simple example moving sidewalks at airports. The concept is made analogous to walking on a moving sidewalk, provided that the sidewalk moves faster than one’s walk. This can be executed by contracting spacetime in front of the ship and expanding spacetime behind the ship.

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What is all to overcome?

The requirement of negative energy is the major issue. The problem arising would be controlling an environment of negative energy and its effect which is separate to the ship’s working. The situation in which ship would move is completely unknown i.e. warp bubble exceeding speed of light. Warp drive also recalls the time travel issues as in case of Worm Hole transportation.

Mark Rademaker, artist, who worked with White in designing Warp drive ship explains that craft consists of the main ship settled between two massive rings of negative energy which would develop the warp bubble. This new version of the ship is more compact and chunkier. According to Harold White, the design accounts for the predictions made according to mathematics of an Alcubierre warp drive currently.

NASA considers the warp drive and faster-than-light travelling spaceships projects at an ‘speculation’ stage. The development cycles of NASA describe this to be an early stage for warp drive. It has only passed the initial ‘conjecture’ stage of development.

The whole concept of warp drive seems impossible to many, however, works of White have grabbed the attention of scientists across the globe. Criticism and research may lead to a positive results. Comment and debate on possibilities of this project.

Source: NASA

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