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Original Answer Given Alcubierre's math, and White's calculations, it's a viable avenue of research to pursue. Whether or not it is practical as FTL, and given the expected maximum apparent speed of about 10 times the speed of light (White), and that the math says it should be able to be done, an attempt to implement a prototype series should be of immense ...

This is a repository community-wiki post with references to current work on Alcubierre drive at NASA (Harold White) and in other places. Harold White. Warp Field Mechanics 101 (2011). http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20110015936 Harold White. Warp Field Mechanics 102 Energy Optimization (2013). http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20130011213 (See also YouTube videos: http:...

Baryonic matter by necessity occupies spacetime, but since the theoretical Alcubierre drive warps spacetime, there wouldn't actually be any travel through it and no additional interaction with baryonic matter would occur due to it. Miguel Alcubierre's proposal for warp drive does call for exotic matter to create a distortion in spacetime, when perceived as ...

My understanding is that you're asking what the theoretical maximum speed would be if you could build and use a Alcubierre drive. I've done a bit of research and it seems the current thinking is that even though the physics of an Alcubierre drive don't break relativity they do not work in thermodynamics. In a paper by [Stefano Finazzi, Stefano Liberati, and ...

Exotic matter is an area that is worth looking at. The geometry of warp drive (or equivalently, Krasnikov tubes) is not really as interesting for FTL travel as people believe: Something that usually gets overlooked is the causality of the matter-geometry dependency. You need the matter to be deployed first on a space-like region between a home and a ...

Up to now, everything related to faster-than-light travel is pure speculations. You can do some magic with mathematics, insert negative densities for matter or assume the existence of tachyons traveling faster than light. In theory everything works out, but nobody has ever found such materials. Not even a hint that they might exist has been found besides ...

Do warp drives produce radiation? How much? Do small warps produce less? Physicists agree: We have absolutely no idea. Compared to the many unknown problems of an Alcubierre drive, dealing with radiation is a solved problem in general. You need either: Shielding Distance to not care about damages A layer of lead sufficiently many light years thick is known ...

Let's set aside, for the moment, field-warping, etc., and consider a hypothetical ultra-powerful propulsion system which has no significant effect on space-time beyond the immediate region of the craft itself. Let's also say that your craft can (somehow) negate the effects of extremely high acceleration. Even with this ultimate magic bullet, your ...

No, it does not. Gravity waves can't travel faster than the speed of light in the "direct" path, they will always appear to us as if that is the speed they are traveling. However, if space was stretched away from the source, it would take longer for them to get there, but they still would appear to be traveling at the same speed. Bottom line, nothing has ...

The Alcubierre drive requires exotic matter to contract space-time behind it. The contraction of space-time in the front requires equal amount of positive energy/matter. The negative mass/energy requirement as proposed by Ramon and Ford is about -10E64Kg. The same amount (10E64Kg) is required on the front. Now let us analyze this mass: Mass of Sun=1.989E30 ...

Both gravitational waves and the existence of the Alcubierre metric are predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity (GR). GR is strongly supported by a great deal of experimental evidence. In particular, gravitational waves were observed indirectly in 1974 through observations of the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar, and GR's predictions about ...

The two embedding diagrams show you the first half of the answer: the ship is always in an inertial frame, i.e. in free fall, but the local curvature of spacetime means that it’s “falling” relative to the distant frame of the Universe. This is basically like the way a body at rest near the Earth or a star will “fall” in a particular direction. The drive (...

This is a good question that I believe can often be difficult to conceptualize. I would like to start out with that firstly, the physics stack exchange can likely do a better job than I can explaining this. I have no formal background in physics but I believe I have an understanding of the way this works. So to start with, as you likely know, space can ...