NASA physicist working on warp drive

[sean miguel]

(CNN) -- Thanks to a NASA physicist, the notion of warp speed might just travel out of sci-fi and into the real world.

NASA's Harold White has been working since 2010 to develop a warp drive that will allow spacecraft to travel at speeds faster than light -- 186,000 miles per second.

White, who heads NASA's Advanced Propulsion Team, spoke about his conceptual starship at a conference last fall. But interest in his project reached a new level this week when he unveiled images of what the craft might look like.

According to NASA, there hasn't been any proof that a warp drive can exist, but the agency is experimenting nonetheless. Although the concept doesn't violate the laws of physics, that doesn't guarantee that it will work.

"We're starting to talk about what the next chapter for human space exploration going to be," White said at SpaceVision.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/12/tech/innovation/warp-speed-spaceship/index.html?iref=allsearch


It's still in the conceptual stage so I'm thinking maybe a year or two away. Make it happen.

The whole relativity thing and bending of space and time is way over my head. But the notion of breaking the light barrier is so fascinating. And it wouldn't be the first time that science fiction became science fact. Think of the possibilities - to go where no man has gone before, to seek out new life forms and civilizations and kill them.

 

[ban-one]

go where no man has gone before, to seek out new life forms and civilizations and kill them.

Some how I think that last part may end up reversed. We go out and introduce ourselves to new life and far more advanced civilizations that then decide to come here and kill us. Or atleast enslave us. I've seen Stargate there toward the end where they did just that.


Also, from my limited knowledge on the subject, I think the hyperdrive will probably be what gets us out of our solar system. That being said, if the warp drive can work, I think we'll probably have both. The faster hyperdrives to go between systems and galaxies, and the slower warp drives getting us around within systems.

 

[sean miguel]

Some how I think that last part may end up reversed. We go out and introduce ourselves to new life and far more advanced civilizations that then decide to come here and kill us. Or atleast enslave us. I've seen Stargate there toward the end where they did just that.

If so, I for one would like to go on record welcoming our alien overlords.

While you all are slaving away in the salt mines I'll be in a cush office overseeing things.

 

[ban-one]

If so, I for one would like to go on record welcoming our alien overlords.

While you all are slaving away in the salt mines I'll be in a cush office overseeing things.

If you end up overseeing things from a cushy office, I suspect it'll be 'you' in your body possessed by an alien being and you helplessly watching.

Meanwhile, I'll take what I've learned from watching scifi over the years to be the best damn resistance leader there ever was

 

[Jagger69]

Great research. Too bad NASA's funding has been cut off for the most part. Obama and our idiot congress would rather spend our tax money on wars and shit than to continue to fund a way to reach for the stars. Now it looks like we are going back into a totally fucked Iraq so I don't see anytying changing to any significant degree.

Obama's administration has been a total disaster and congress shares equal blame. The republicans are nothing but obstructionist cocksuckers and the democrats are clueless when it comes to finding answers to our myriad of problems.

 

[1sikkpuppy]

Think of the possibilities - to go where no man has gone before, to seek out new life forms and civilizations and kill them.

You're right, so many possibilities.

Meanwhile, I'll take what I've learned from watching scifi over the years to be the best damn resistance leader there ever was

 

[Rattrap]

It's still in the conceptual stage so I'm thinking maybe a year or two away. Make it happen.

The whole relativity thing and bending of space and time is way over my head. But the notion of breaking the light barrier is so fascinating. And it wouldn't be the first time that science fiction became science fact. Think of the possibilities - to go where no man has gone before, to seek out new life forms and civilizations and kill them.

I imagine it's a little more than a couple years away. Many more; the problem with going faster than light is that the acceleration to light speed requires effectively infinite energy due to mass, and as we all know, infinite anything doesn't exist in reality. The most promising discovery on this end (and I say this without nearly the theoritical physics background to evaluate this with any authority) is the Higgs Boson - as mass is the biggest problem with that infinite energy business, being able to manipulate mass would be the way to go (if anybody's ever played Mass Effect on the Xbox, think Element Zero).

All of this is well within the possibility of 'not possible', which is to say I don't think anybody knows at this moment. Certainly by technology standards we aren't anywhere near being able to accomplish any of this. But I find all this nonetheless quite compelling, if for nothing else that without faster-than-light travel, we'll never see much further than our solar system and certainly never our stellar neighbors:

The Voyager 1 spacecraft is on an interstellar mission. It is traveling away from the Sun at a rate of 17.3 km/s. If Voyager were to travel to Proxima Centauri, at this rate, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive. If we could travel at the speed of light, an impossibility due to Special Relativity, it would still take 4.22 years to arrive!

- http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/cosmic/nearest_star_info.html

For some perspective, Mars at its closest recorded distance to Earth was 56 million km - a distance that would take our fastest spacecraft around 40 days to reach or a little over 3 minutes at light speed.

Great research. Too bad NASA's funding has been cut off for the most part. Obama and our idiot congress would rather spend our tax money on wars and shit than to continue to fund a way to reach for the stars. Now it looks like we are going back into a totally fucked Iraq so I don't see anytying changing to any significant degree.

Obama's administration has been a total disaster and congress shares equal blame. The republicans are nothing but obstructionist cocksuckers and the democrats are clueless when it comes to finding answers to our myriad of problems.

NASA is one of the few things that strikes any patriotism in me. One of the truly great American instutitions.

 

[FreeOnes_Adam]

And yet we still can't make a CD case that doesn't crack just by picking the thing up.

The hell?

 

[sean miguel]

The "year or two" prediction was tongue-in-cheek on my part. I'm sure I'll be long gone by generations over by the time faster-than-light travel becomes a reality, if ever.

Excellent Mass Effect reference too. That game is f'n awesome.