Once again science news lagging to be covered in main stream media blows by what could be the biggest thing to effect man kind since the moon landing. It would actually make landing a man on the moon look like a walk in the park compared to what was presented on September 14 at the 100 Year Starship Symposium. The unimaginable just became closer to becoming a thing of reality to bend space and making it even easier than ever thought of before. The topic of warp drive has always been one of our favorite science fiction movies and novels. Now it is said to be a very possible reality and even more likely in the future. Physics has said for a long time that it is possible to bend, twist, and fold space and light. Folding space was thought to take a massive amount of energy to achieve, well beyond comprehension other than in a mathematical equation. What does warp drive mean for you and me?
Warp Drive would be the most profound scientific achievements ever done. Most people can’t even fathom the process or what it even does or mean. A lot of people don’t even realize things of science fiction are taken from things that are possible and proven through math. Warp drive would be a way to compress space in front of an object and expand it rapidly behind the object in a manner of equating to speeds of ten times the speed of light. Now to attempt to explain this it takes a lot of time and it is such a complex theory it is hard to simplify but I will try. The laws of physics states that bending, folding, twisting, and even crunching space itself is possible given a large enough mass and that mass is created by a lot of energy. Our sun has a large enough mass it bends the fabric of space, easy way of thinking of this is to imagine a trampoline is the flat surface of space and you placed a bowling ball in the center of the trampoline. The mass of the bowling ball which took energy to create bends the surface of the trampoline. Now imagine an even bigger mass than a bowling ball, eventually it would bend the surface so much that it would touch assuming it didn’t tear. That is how space can be folded, essentially manipulated by a heavy mass which you could imagine would take a lot of energy because it would have to be larger and heavier than the sun to fold it upon itself.
Warp drive uses the concept of compression and expansion which takes less mass to achieve. Think of it like a wave in the ocean it builds a mass amount of energy and starts because of the compression behind it pushing it faster as it rises and expands towards the beach. The wave can travel many miles per hour and think of a surfer on that wave the wave pushes him towards the direction of expansion (the shore line) although he himself stays essential at the same point in the wave and his body is stationary of the board. He travels toward the shore line with little effort and the more that wave is pushed by the compression of water behind it, he travels faster towards the shore. Essentially if you could sit in your car in the highway and pull the road towards you by folding it in little ridges to draw it closer to you at the same time unfolding those ridges out behind you after driving over them, you would be progressing towards your destination in half the time and the more you could fold the road like an according in front of you the faster you get there without truly driving any faster. This allows a person to never exceed the speed of light by actually moving the space around them.
The scientist that made the profound and awesome claim is currently in lab testing at the Johnson Space Center. The effects would allow man kind to travel to stars in time for us to be alive and see what was discovered and changing history forever. It opens other door as well such as time travel. Yes, that is correct being able to travel into the future because time is not a constant as we like to think of it. Astronauts that are in space right now are actually aging slower than we are on earth by a very small amount. Satellites that help with GPS are actually adjusted to compensate for time traveling more slowly while they are whipping around the earth at 17,000 mph. As man travels faster in space the slower time goes for them while the earth stays at the same rate of time. That is correct, a person traveling at close to the speed of light goes for a trip that is 5 light years away it takes you in the traveling craft five years while time on earth has past 86 years. If you were to come back it would exponentially be an even larger amount of time for a various amount of reasons. Now go look at the stars and try to wrap your head around that.
