![]() So, as an old thought experiment suggests, if you put one twin on a spaceship traveling at the speed of light, they would seem to be much younger than their twin who stayed behind on Earth. Normally, objects traveling at the speed of light would be thought to age much more slowly, relative to the outside world. In another interesting twist, the passage of time would be conserved for any travelers. Lentz found that certain soliton configurations could be formed using conventional energy sources, without violating any of Einstein’s equations – and without requiring any negative energy densities. In this case, solitons are propagating through spacetime itself. Solitons are seen under certain circumstances in waves in water, atmospheric motions that produce strange cloud formations, or light traveling through different media. These bubbles took the form of solitons, compact waves that travel at a constant velocity without losing their shape. ![]() While studying previous warp drive proposals, Lentz realized there were specific configurations of spacetime bubbles that had been overlooked. Göttingen University astrophysicist Erik Lentz proposes a way to create one of these “warp bubbles” from positive energy sources. Solving this issue was the goal of the new paper. It’s all well and good to casually talk about generating a bubble of negative energy, but doing so would require exotic forms of matter that aren’t exactly easy to come by – if they even exist. Of course, this Alcubierre warp drive had problems of its own. In the center is a “flat” region of spacetime where the object can travel in comfort, where any occupants wouldn’t even feel like they’re moving. The idea involves generating a bubble of negative energy around an object, so that the fabric of spacetime ahead of the object contracts and the space behind it expands. In 1994, Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre outlined a design for a warp drive that could theoretically allow something to travel faster than light without breaking any physical laws. Plus, it would require infinite energy to accelerate to that speed.īut perhaps there are some loopholes. That’s because as an object moves faster, its mass increases, so by the time you reach the speed of light that mass would approach infinity. The problem is, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, it’s physically impossible for anything to travel faster than the speed of light. Some hypothetical warp drive designs could get there in as little as five months – shorter than our current journey time to Mars. If we could travel at the speed of light, the journey drops to a little over four years, meaning a return trip could easily fit into a normal human lifespan. Using current chemical rockets, it would take more than 50,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbor.Īnd that’s where the FTL dream comes in. While there are almost certainly other Earth-like planets out there somewhere, the universe is just too damn big for us to reach them in any practical time frame. So we should turn our attention to other stars. In fact, nowhere else in our solar system really works for us. But where can we go? Elon Musk might have his heart set on Mars, but conditions there are hardly ideal. If humanity is going to stand the test of time, we need to expand beyond Earth. ![]() Now, astrophysicist Erik Lentz has outlined a new theoretical design that could allow FTL travel based on conventional physics. Such a technology would of course be incredibly handy to us in the real world, and while these “warp drives” have been considered theoretically possible, they usually involve exotic physics that are out of our reach. ![]() Faster-than-light (FTL) travel is a staple of sci-fi, hand-waving away multi-millennia journeys between stars. ![]()
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