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]
