Can You Build A Warp Drive (In A Garage)?

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Previously on The Good Stuff, we talked with Laura Kreidberg, a researcher who studies exoplanets, planets outside our solar system around distant suns many light years away. Do you ever think we'll be able to get to these planets? Can we get there? Yeah. it would be really tough. So to put it in perspective, the most distant manmade object from the earth right now is Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, I think, so nearly 40 years of space travel. It is one light day away from the Earth. So it takes light one day to travel from Voyager 1 to us. The nearest star is Alpha Centauri. And that's about four light years. And so maybe if we had like nuclear propulsion technology that has not yet been developed and we reached speeds that are a significant fraction of the speed of light, we could reach Alpha Centauri in 100 years. So technically, we could travel to neighboring stars using existing technology. But the voyage could take three generations of astronauts aboard a spacecraft. And we can forget about any of those guys returning to Earth. So it doesn't seem very practical, does it? Nope. If we really want to travel to another star system in our lifetime, we're going to need a revolution in space propulsion technology, something out of science fiction, something like a warp drive in Star Trek. And a warp drive just might be sitting in a garage in Omaha, Nebraska. [MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Dave Pares. I'm the president of Space Warp Dynamics LLC. I also teach college at four other universities here in the local area. So I'm kind of a busy guy. We're also in the development of a functional warp drive. Ahead warp one, Mr. Sulu. Accelerating to warp one, sir. Warp drives have been a staple transportation method in sci fi for decades. [SCREAMS] But cant it ever be fully realized? In someone's garage? Where are we right now? What is this? This is the most compact laboratory that you'll ever be in. It's a makeover of a garage. This is where David Pares has been working on his warp drive for years now. You're in this garage, which seems pretty low tech. Do you think that impedes people belief in what you're doing? As the old expression you can't judge a book by its cover, well, just because it's in a garage doesn't mean we don't have high tech equipment here. We have some of the most advanced electronics sitting there in the other room. I got a very strict budget. And I got to make do with what I got. We're very creative. We stretch a dollar more than anybody can. I love hardware stores. I love lumber yards and stuff. We do a lot of things, just like what Robert Goddard did in his rocket development. And he used to go to hardware stores and do adaptive engineering. That's what I do. Most people don't believe what we do. The proof will be in the pudding when we lift this craft off the ground. The craft is Blue Bird II. And Pares hopes it'll be ready for its maiden voyage by the end of 2015. Well, it won't be a maiden voyage as much as a maiden hover. He hopes to lift it off the ground a little bit. Is that the ultimate goal here is to make a spacecraft? Well, that's my ultimate goal. I intend to go to space. I intend to go to the moon, go to Mars, and have some fun. But I'll be back before lunch. What is a warp drive? We are artificially inducing the compression of the fabric of space. Normally, that's done with mass, like a black hole, the sun, the earth. The mass actually compresses the fabric of space around them. That's what Einstein discovered. His theory of general relativity states that all mass warps space time. The greater the mass, the greater the curvature of spacetime around it. Even you and me are warping spacetime just a teensy bit. Pares's warp drive would do the same thing, just without the mass. When I think of a warp drive, I think of Star Trek and sort of sci fi. So does everybody else. Yeah. It seems like something that maybe shouldn't be possible. How does this, what you're doing here, relate to those-- that type of warp drive? Is it the same kind of thing? It generates a field, yes, but it's not quite the way they describe a warp drive. Back then, Alcubierre wasn't really around describing his theoretical principles. Yeah. Alcubierre was-- he came up with-- 1994, he came up with this concept and was ridiculed heavily by the scientific community. Miguel Alcubierre was and is a Mexican physicist. This is Matthew O'Dowd, host of Space Time. But he's also an astrophysicist. MATTHEW O'DOWD: Most famous, I guess, in at least popular consciousness for a paper he wrote in which he described a spacetime field in the language of general relativity that was capable of faster than light travel, his warp field. Called the Alcubierre drive, it could warp the geometry of spacetime in such a way as to allow a spacecraft to go faster than the speed of light. Although it's impossible for anything, any objects, energy, information to travel through space faster than the speed of light or even at the speed of light, there is no such limit on the speed that two regions of space can move apart from each other. Instead of accelerating a spaceship, the drive compresses the space in front of it and expands the space behind it, effectively moving the ship by moving all the space around it. The ship itself, on the other hand, would never technically move faster than the speed of light. In fact, the crew of the space ship wouldn't experience any acceleration. It would be like they hadn't moved at all. But there's just one problem. His proposal was it took an inordinate amount of energy to create a warp bubble. He estimated you'd need approximately the equivalent energy density of all of the mass in the observable universe. All the energy of the universe to make a warp bubble. Well, that wasn't obviously practical. Yeah. All the energy in the universe seems like a bit much. NASA has looked into the possibility of building a warp drive but is not actively pursuing any sorts of interstellar travel. Dr. Harold Sonny White has been spearheading this investigation for NASA. For the most part, his results have been inconclusive. But his team did lower the amount of estimated energy needed to create a warp bubble, down from the entire universe to maybe something the mass of a Voyager spacecraft. Still an amazing amount of energy and more than we're capable of producing with current technology. So that meant this could have been potentially hundreds or thousands of years away from actually being developed. But Pares believes that a warp bubble can be achieved right now, right here on Earth. And it already has been. Cases of aviation from pilots caught my eye of their claims that they were displaced and entering these thunderstorms and being linear displaced hundreds of miles downrange. One of these stories is the account of Bruce Gernon. In December of 1970, Bruce Gernon was flying through the Bermuda Triangle. Let's not say Bermuda Triangle. Let's say the Bahamas. OK. The Bahamas. He was flying through the Bahamas when his plane was engulfed by a huge ring shaped thunderstorm. To escape the storm, he flew through a tunnel in the clouds. And when he emerged on the other side, he found himself over 90 miles off course. By his estimates, he should not have been able to travel that distance in the amount of time he did with the amount of fuel he expended. Bruce Gernon believed that he went through a time warp. Most people didn't believe him. I mean, in the beginning when I started to investigate these cases, I was skeptical. You have to be skeptical. I've actually flown with Bruce. And I've actually talked with him extensively about what happened in his particular case. And I came across Alcubierre's theory. And the surprising part of it was that as you go through his theory, what Bruce describes goes step by step on what Alcubierre predicted. So from that aspect, I became a believer in the power of a thunderstorm. And if the conditions are just right, and you happen to be in the right place at the right time, there you go. You can get a compression of the fabric of space. But it's not sustainable. And I started to think about this. How could you actually artificially induce this on a craft? So David Pares set out to replicate the conditions of the thunderstorm by designing small fractal antennas arranged in an array on these panels, he could create an electromagnetic field similar to that which is created in a thunderstorm, just on a much smaller scale. And according to Pares, that field in turn would create a microwarp bubble by compressing the very fabric of space. So this is a pulling engine. So if you had this on a craft, it's going to move forward. You have it up, it's going to move up that direction. We hang them down from the vertical spring scales. And we have these mirrors attached where the laser bounces off. And it goes on to the projection screen of the garage wall. As this energizes, this pulls in that downward direction. And then the laser goes down the wall. It's pretty simple. And it's being pulled because the spacetime underneath it is being compressed. Right. The fabric space is being compressed into the motor. And it pulls it right down. And he claims to have done it. Here's a video of one of his experiments demonstrating his motors. You begin to see the laser move down the paper as the motor's being activated. And a warp field's being created. And it's pulling the scale in a downward direction. It pulls down to six centimeters, which represents 0.16 Newtons of force. In the last summer, we were moving four millimeters in 60 seconds. Now we move 20 centimeters in 15. So we've made massive improvements on these pullers. Well, we're here at the lab. Why don't we see this thing in action? OK. Let's do it. If you're game, I'll push the buttons. Yeah. Let's warp some spacetime. There you go. This one's on a vertical spring scale. So as the fabric of space is compressed in here, it will literally pull that down. All the hardware here is set up. We have our preamps. We're only doing up to 1000 watts of power today because of the nature of the etchings on the board. And we exceed that. We have a tendency to blow them off the board. Everybody ready? Yeah, I think so. Motor's onto the vertical spring scale there. And then the laser, we should see it move down the paper. OK. I'm engaging. [MUSIC PLAYING] It's getting up. Anything? It's one up. I just collapsed the field. What was it doing? We got about a centimeter up. OK. Hold on. Well, depends on where the mirror is at. If it's bent up a little bit, it's going to do the reverse of going down. Yeah, it's dependent on the angles. And you changed the angles from what we had set up last night. It was bumped around, yes. Yeah. So the motor didn't move much. He attempted the experiment again but didn't get any results. Supposedly, it moved about a centimeter the first time, but in the wrong direction. Pares said this was because the mirror was angled incorrectly. I think it's more and more difficult to do fundamental physics in a homemade laboratory. Typically these days, we need to build a giant particle accelerator, create a vacuum chamber. I would really hate to see that just you have to be NASA in order to do something. The name NASA just implies credibility. We have none. And like we said before is we don't really care. I think, in general, it's important to talk to a lot of other scientists, even if your theory is contentious, and you may receive some ridicule, there is so much expertise we can call on. But yeah, even some really contentious ideas ultimately prove to be right. You know, the earth does go around the sun, not the other way around. It doesn't mean you shouldn't persist if people don't agree with you. However, it's important to lay out your ideas very clearly. And these days, that means by writing it up as a paper and subjecting it to peer review. Our proof is what we've done. Our empirical results speak for themselves. And if people want to dispute it, great. Like I said, if that thing goes off the ground, it's a moot point. So I would hope that people can actually be creative, have imagination, have the discipline to sit down and not be swayed by people's comments. If you really believe, then stand up and be counted. So I didn't get to see the warp drive work. But David Pares hopes to get his quarter scale craft, the Blue Bird II, off the ground by the end of the year. So I guess we'll just have to wait and see, huh Craig? Yeah. So what do you guys think? Are we on the verge of making a new actual warp drive? Are you working on any scientific breakthroughs, legally, in the comfort of your own garage? Let us know in the comments. Thanks to Matt O'Dowd and Space Time to lending some space expertise. If you want to learn more about the warp drive, you can go check out this video from PBS Space Time. It's a really good channel. Check it out. Not as many beards over there, though. But that's fine. Thank you for watching. If you enjoyed this video, consider giving it a like and subscribing. And you could warp on over to our patreon page. And give us some support. See what I did there? Yep. Last week we talked about exoplanets. And this is what you had to say. Gy001 said that we've found planets that are as close as 12 light years away. And technically, we could go to them and live on them. But I think you're stretching the limits of the definition of technically. In this video, Laura mentions getting to Alpha Centauri in 100 years using nuclear propulsion technology that hasn't been developed yet. Alpha Centauri's about four light years away. So let's say 300 years to go 12 light years. That's longer than the United States has existed. And we had a civil war in there at some point. Now let's look at current technology. The fastest made object ever created is the Helios 2 spacecraft. And that achieved 252,000 kilometers an hour. It can travel 12 light years in about 50000 years. That's longer than all of recorded history. So we better hope Pares's warp drive works, because that's pretty much the only way we're going to get there in the foreseeable future. Space Time actually made a video about some hypothetical spaceships that could get to these stars. And you can check it out. Phxtonash asks, how can I tell that a planet has water like Kevin? Well, by its density. Since you can get a planet's mass and its radius, you can estimate its density. And Kevin has a pretty low density, ruling out a rocky surface. They've done some spectrographic analysis of its atmosphere and couldn't find significant amounts of helium or hydrogen. But they have found clouds. So one theory is that it's composed mainly of water vapor. Kevin could be composed of something completely different. And the water world theory would be wrong. But it's the best guess we have right now. Hoping it's water world. And I'm hoping Dennis Hopper lives on there. Leedle Lord was disappointed that we didn't mention the Drake equation. Well, we probably should have. But we did mention it in another video. And you can check that one out if you feel like it. It's pretty cool. We look for UFOs. Thanks for all the great comments. Next week, Craig trains to be an astronaut. Sort of. Kind of. I'm basically an astronaut. A little bit. I'm basically an astronaut. Yeah. OK. I'd send you to space. Now let's warp away. Brian, can you edit us like warping away? Yeah, like use like a ripple effect or something. Yeah. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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Channel: The Good Stuff
Views: 323,079
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Keywords: warp drive, warp, space, conquering space, Warp Drive (Literature Subject), General Relativity (Field Of Study), Spacetime, PBS Spacetime, Craig Benzine, Wheezywaiter, PBS Digital Studios, Miguel Alcubierre, Alcubierre drive, star trek, star wars, Mike Rugnetta, Joe Hanson, Science, physics, education, Omaha (City/Town/Village), funny, Research (Industry), nasa, vsauce, pbs, space time, veritasium, scishow, Its Ok To Be Smart, Matt O'Dowd, The Good Stuff
Id: ovDV711BszM
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)
Published: Tue Dec 01 2015
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