REAL Warp Drives? NEW research proposes a solution!

the speed of light is the cosmic speed limit of the universe it's the fastest speed at which two points in space can communicate with each other it's pretty fast relative to our human scales in just one second a beam of light can go around the earth almost eight times but the distances in space are so vast that even this maximum speed would be excruciatingly slow for interstellar travel to visit the planets around even the nearest star proxima centauri would take over four years and to go to some of the potentially life-supporting exoplanets we've found recently even at the speed of light it would take hundreds or thousands of years do we have to just accept that we humans are forever confined to our own solar system in star trek captains kirk and picard easily traveled to distant star systems in hours using warp drives that allowed them to travel hundreds to thousands of times faster than the speed of light if we could create even a modest warp drive that would allow us to travel say five times the speed of light we could get to proxima centauri in about one year this is only a few months longer than a trip to mars would take using today's conventional technology so may be doable in a paper published in 1994 mexican physicist miguel alcubierre showed at least theoretically that such a warp drive could actually work within the known laws of physics but in order for it to work this theoretical drive would require huge amounts of negative mass or energy such a thing does not exist so although it's a good mathematical exercise it's physically meaningless is there any hope for a physically feasible warp drive or is the final frontier of star trek just the stuff of childhood fantasy there may be hope because in a recent paper published by the advanced propulsion laboratory at applied physics authors alexei baubrick and johnny martyr outline how a physically feasible warp drive could in principle work without the need for negative energy allowing us to go to neighboring stars i spoke to alexi and johnny and in this video i'm going to show you how such a physically realistic spaceship could work and what it would look like if you are an obsessive trekkie like me you don't want to miss what's coming up right now [Music] to understand how these drives work let's do a quick review of the theory of general relativity because anything we do at high speeds in space time will be defined by this theory it was published in 1915 by albert einstein and it explains gravity not as a force but as a curvature in the fabric of space and time or space time i've made a couple of videos about this subject so check them out if you want a more detailed understanding of it but here's a quick recap of what the math of this theory says the main equation looks like this on the left hand side the r and g components describe the curvature of space time on the right hand side we have a bunch of constants including newton's gravitational constant g and the speed of light c which don't change multiplied by t this is the stress energy tensor this describes all the matter and energy that causes the curvature on the left hand side what alcabiri did in his papers figure out a shape that he believed spacetime needed to have in order for a ship to travel faster than light he determined that the ship needed to stay inside a flat spacetime bubble but this bubble of spacetime had to be such that it could move at any arbitrary speed then he solved the right-hand side of the equation to determine what the corresponding matter and energy he would need to generate the desired curvature that he envisioned and it looked something like this keep in mind that this is just a 2d representation of a 3d curvature this curvature has a stationary bubble in the center but space-time contracts in front of the bubble and expands in back of the bubble so al-kubiri found a solution that could carry real passengers in this stationary bubble if the space time around it was shaped like this the problem is the solution to the curvature required negative mass or negative energy in the stress energy portion of the equation this solution is mathematically consistent but negative mass is not known to exist note that negative mass is not the same as antimatter antimatter is like regular matter but with opposite charge it has positive mass so while el cabiari's solution works mathematically it is not a physically meaningful solution barbrick and martire looked more deeply into al kuberi's solution and came up with deeper insights about warp drives and potential solutions that are physically realistic one of the things they proved for example is that when you bend space time the way al kuberi did in his solution even if you have all the negative mass you need it does not mean that the spaceship in the center will automatically start traveling at high speeds you still need energy of some sort to make the spaceship move in other words the spaceship doesn't just automatically start accelerating to high speeds just because the space time around it is shaped this way some people had presumed that it would some momentum exchange vaguely similar to conventional rocket technology is needed where the momentum of the gases coming out of the rocket engine in one direction pushes the rocket in the opposite direction of course rocket engines would not work for acceleration that took you close to the speed of light so some other technology would be needed the other thing that barbrick and martire showed is that you could potentially travel a significant fraction of the speed of light but in order to travel faster than the speed of light or super luminally you would need super luminal matter in other words you would need matter that travels faster than the speed of light accelerating anything with mass to the speed of light let alone beyond requires an infinite amount of energy this would be true for any warp engine design and is a physical impossibility that cannot be achieved so with this seemingly severe limitation how do they propose that we can still travel to distant stars let's remember that the idea of the lqb area warp drive is to encapsulate a bit of space time creating a sort of bubble the passengers would be in a ship inside this bubble of space-time the ship itself would not be moving relative to the space time so there would be no time dilation for people inside the ship but this bubble of space time could in theory be moving at any arbitrary speed relative to the space time around it this is analogous to a person on a surfboard the person is standing still relative to the surfboard but the surfboard is moving relative to the sea around it since the ship can theoretically move many times the speed of light it could get to very far away destinations like proxima centauri which is 4.2 light years away for example in 10 months traveling five times the speed of light but as we learned no ship can physically travel faster than the speed of light because there's no super luminal matter the al-qabiri warp drive is science but it's also fiction what barbrick and martire figured out is that there's more than one way to skin a cat there is more than one type of warp drive they actually made four classifications of warp drives these classes are based on the speed inside the bubble and speed outside the bubble represented by v in and v out the alcubierre solution is just a class 3 warp drive in their classification where the person inside is moving less than the speed of light but the bubble is moving faster than the speed of light in this classification however only class 1 warp drives are physical because they can be made from positive energy and real matter and they don't travel faster than the speed of light thus in theory we can indeed make real warp drives maybe we can get to proxima centauri in 10 months without going faster than light you can do it through time dilation in general relativity there are two ways to produce significant time dilation you can either go really fast faster than 90 the speed of light or you can put yourself in a very strong gravitational field the stronger the gravitational field the slower time ticks relative to a weaker gravitational field what barbrick and martire proposed is that if a spaceship is constructed of a massive super-dense material perhaps close to the mass density of a neutron star then any individuals inside this ship could experience significant time dilation depending on the densities involved this time dilation could be very large so for example the type of ship that they propose is a spherical ship it could be perhaps similar in shape to the death star from star wars if we could build a ship that is about 620 meters in diameter not quite one kilometer with a mass of 10 percent that of the sun the people inside would experience time at about one-tenth that of someone outside the ship the formula for the dilation inside the ship looks like this where time inside is the time inside the ship and time outside is the time outside the ship our shell is the outer radius of the ship passengers on such a ship could go to proxima centauri in about nine earth years traveling at half the speed of light but only about 10 months would have passed from their perspective such a journey is only about three months longer than it would take to go from earth to mars using our conventional technology today so it may be doable now you might ask how would we get such a massive ship to move at half the speed of light because after all no ship accelerates without some energy part of the mass of the spaceship could be converted to the energy needed to propel the ship the energy required would be on the order of one-half mv squared the formula for kinetic energy the amount of energy needed to get this ship moving to half the speed of light is equivalent to converting about 13 percent of its mass to energy using the formula e equals m c squared no rocket type technology probably would not work because of the amount of fuel needed one possible solution could be fusion fusion can convert almost one percent of mass to energy which would allow much higher energy efficiency from a given amount of fuel but we don't have to stop there because our high mass density warp ship may allow us to take advantage of gravitational accretion energy this is a disc-like flow of dust gas and plasma orbiting around a massive astronomical object the friction and loss of angular momentum causes a huge amount of energy that could potentially be harnessed accretion discs can turn 10 percent of any given mass into energy which is highly efficient now you may say isn't this solution requiring mass densities similar to neutron stars just as unrealistic as al kubiari solution no because these are real and physical solutions neutron stars exist time dilation exists energy to propel ships exists yes we don't have the technology to make such a ship yet but there is nothing in the laws of physics that would prevent us from doing so the kind of negative energy to make an alcubierre drive on the other hand doesn't exist and even if we could make such a ship we would still not be able to accelerate it past the speed of light now it should be noted that in a recent 2021 paper by physicist eric lentz of gatingan university he showed that there exists space-time warp bubble solutions using only positive energies which can theoretically move at any arbitrary speed including faster than light so unlike the solution by alcubierre which required unphysical negative energy to create the warp bubble lens shows that no negative energy is required to create it the mathematics are quite complicated and the warp bubble would not look as intuitive or simple as alcubierre's solution but it is mathematically feasible this is a valuable contribution to warp drive research it would still require an enormous amount of energy to create such a bubble according to eric at least 10 percent the mass of the sun and acceleration to super luminal speeds it's still a problem as barbrick and martir showed but at least we have a theoretical framework which shows us that a warp bubble that can in principle move at any arbitrary speed is physically possible will we ever figure out a way to get this warp bubble moving faster than the speed of light never say never but unless some theoretical breakthrough rewrites laws of physics as we understand them it doesn't appear possible many challenges would remain but the point being made in these papers is important because it shows that interstellar trips are theoretically and physically feasible and so this is an important first step in our scientific journey towards the kind of final frontier universe trekkies like me have dreamed about it's taking this dream outside the realm of fantasy and into the realm of possibility warp drives are no longer considered science fiction so what's the next step to build this warp drive more research can reveal optimizations on how to make the drive more efficient we can start creating tiny warp drives in a lab and look for microscopic warp effects as a proof of concept a lot of work also needs to be done in material science and in constructing and developing new and efficient propulsion systems the international team at applied physics which includes barbaric and martyr said they will be publishing more on this subject and invites more scientists to join their cohort a link to their website is in the description so with all this happening the exciting thing is that especially for star trek geeks like me the question really is no longer if humanity will achieve warp travel but when and that is collectively up to us i'd like to thank today's sponsor brilliant for making this video possible if the study of warp drives interests you and you want to dive deeper into this subject then you need to get a better understanding of gravity and general relativity one of the best ways to do this in my opinion is through the active learning process offered at brilliant one of the great courses they offer is called gravitational physics it consists of 20 interactive lessons taking you step by step through the fundamentals of gravity it begins by giving you a foundation on newtonian gravity and shows you where it starts to buckle and takes you through to deriving pieces of general relativity along the way you can take quizzes and solve problems which makes learning these concepts stick with you long term brilliant has a special offer for arvin at spheres right now if you are among the first 200 people to click the link in the description you'll get 20 off the subscription if you haven't tried brilliant already this is a great opportunity to start so be sure to click the link in the description and if you have a question on anything you saw in this video please leave it in the comments and i will try my best to answer it i will see you in the next video my friend [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Arvin Ash

Views: 732,075

Keywords: warp drive, warp speed, space travel, alcubierre drive, interstellar travel, star trek, alcubierre drive simulation, negative energy, warp field, alcubierre drive animation, bobrick and martire, alexey bobrick and gianni martire, bobrick and martire warp drive, erik lentz, erik lentz warp drive, ftl, faster than light travel, can warp drive be achieved, time dilation warp drive, general relativity, physical warp drive, realistic warp drive, warp engine, real warp drive

Id: PA66ah9b0U4

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

real physics

and

based on things not known to exist

Hmmm

[u/SentientHotdogWater]

If he's talking about the papers I'm thinking of wasn't the entire point of both papers that the warp drives did not require negative energy.

Edit: Even says so in the video. The entire point of these papers is that we don't need negative energy anymore.