Will We Ever Build Warp Drives? (feat Dr. Miguel Alcubierre!)

what are you doing with all those devices oh i'm watching bulgarian netflix on my phone and on my laptop here i'm watching a documentary that's only available in how is that possible we are nowhere near chernobyl oh that's because i'm using surf shark my robot lady surfshark is an award-winning vpn that secures your digital life with top of the line servers that encrypt your data and allow you to change your ip address on an unlimited number of devices to stay anonymous online and hide your true location hackers streaming services social media sites they can't control what you see and do if they don't know where you are if you want to try surf shark you can go down to the link in the description box below tell them ya boy sent you by using the offer code my name kyle and get 83 off three months free and a free 30 day money back guarantee uh you're welcome now aria why don't you start the episode i need to pull up australian reddit on my watch yeah it's upside down but it's still good well aria it's time to settle in for the long haul to proximate should i initiate suspended animation suspended now how long could it really take 4.3 light years for a ship like this you know 69 420 years later we're here oh uh well that took way too long didn't it dear viewer we have a problem if humanity is to ever brave the enormity of interstellar space the basic spaceship concept and engine like those that fill my hangers simply are not going to cut it no we need and i'm running out of clone versions of myself no we need some technology to come around and kick our technological butts into warp drive and we're going to learn all about warp drive today from the very scientists who popularized it welcome to the facility first why is warp drive a thing why do so many sci-fi stories like star trek incorporate it and why do actual scientists publish actual papers on it well the simple answer is distance let's say we wanted to go to the closest star outside of our own solar system this is proxima centauri which is 4.3 light years away or 40 trillion kilometers right now our fastest rockets have maximum velocities in the range of under 100 kilometers per second do the very simple math and you see that you might have travel times just to the nearest star of tens to hundreds of thousands of years even at the speed of light it would take you four years and can you imagine spending 48 months in economy class uh no way so to explore the cosmos efficiently we simply must go faster but faster in a specific way see if you get really close to the speed of light you encounter relativistic problems problems like once you move really really really fast time starts to slow down for you relative to the rest of the universe and then you have an interstellar like situation and that's not all right all right all right so what if instead of moving you through space you move space through you this is the central idea of warp drive and to explain it and visualize it for you i need a very expensive and very hard to find scientific instrument a slinky imagine if you will that this slinky is some volume of space time and this lego minifig represents you you can imagine yourself moving through this volume of space-time like you would in a rocket ship or something like that the problem here is is that the vastness of space prevents anything like timely travel even with the very best rockets you simply do not have a hundred thousand years to sit in a spaceship next to a guy in disgusting shorts and sandals so instead of moving you let's move space time warp drive is basically the attempt to realize the physics i'm about to show you now watch the position of the figure in this space-time volume as i do something very specific i'm going to compress the space time in front of you which will expand it behind okay so watch watch the position let's see that again so if i can press space time and expand it behind see how the minifig moves even though it hasn't really moved in the usual sense this is in effect warp drive so you're not breaking any physical laws and then you're not spending nearly as much time stuck next to that guy who is ordering way too many tiny wines on and he's hogging the armrest and he smells if a warp drive could warp space-time in a specific way it would solve some of the problems that we talked about for one inside of a warp bubble if you will inside of this compression and expansion of space-time there is no time dilation for you you and an outside observer would record the same passage of time and there'd be no mcconaughey situation everything would still be all right all right all right it would also theoretically allow you to travel faster than the speed of light because while nothing with mass you can travel faster than the speed of light space itself can simply put a warp drive in the best case scenario could get you to something 4.3 light years away for example in under 4.3 light years now scientists have taken this possibility quite seriously for a long time we even have simulations of what this warping of space time would look like to the naked eye check it who says check it what year is it 2004 just play it you can see that the warping of light is quite different from the warping you may have seen simulated around a black hole or a wormhole and this is thanks to the specific bubble geometries required to make all this work these velocities even push past c or the speed of light because of what the warp drive is doing to space-time now i should be very clear putting a warp bubble around a spaceship theoretically is not the problem there are many decades worth of research trying to figure out the actual solution to this problem the most famous of which is the alcobieri drive first explored in 1994 by physicist miguel acobieri and even more recently there have been not one but two papers trying to push more realistic warp drives even further but all these proposed solutions come along with their own problems the el cabiere drive requires negative energy which isn't a thing and the more recent papers need like the mass equivalent energy of jupiter to work so where is warp research today how far can it go are we close well i'm no expert obviously so why don't we talk to the man himself physicist miguel alcubierre to see what he thinks seriously does he know you're just like a dollar store thor on the internet yeah i know we're really going to talk to him don't tell him who i am though he might just hang up the phone thank you so much for joining me and uh before before we were getting into it i kind of laid out for my audience what warp drive is and why we want to do it and i wanted to talk to you who more or less single-handedly with your research popularized the most popular idea surrounding warp drive i kind of wanted to just quickly get your take for a general audience why do we want warp drive and why do we think about why do you distinguish scientists like yourself think about this thing yeah why well i'm a fan of science fiction so that's that's the number one reason i always watch star trek and read a lot of science fiction and in reality the stars are very far away and they are extremely far away the closest star to the sun is four light years away that means light takes four years to get there and we know since the beginning of the 20th century though over 100 years ago that uh nothing can travel faster than light according to relativity and it's not just because einstein said though the theory has been tested and tested and tested over 100 years and it's never failed so so it is actually an empirical fact today so that that puts it in a bit of a trouble because if we ever want to visit the stars and we can't travel faster than light then it's going to be pretty boring it's going to be extremely hard to do it's going to take forever to reach them even at the speed of light it would take us years and normally we wouldn't even be able to travel at that speed so that put me to thinking maybe there's a way around it and in fact there is a way around it and we know about it and we've known about it for decades which is the expansion of the universe the universe is expanding we know that and the the galaxies that are far away from us moving away from us very fast and the furthest in the fairer way they move faster away from us and so a lot of people always ask is it possible to have a galaxy that's so far away that it moves away from us faster than light and the answer is yes and then they they they ask well doesn't that biological activity and the answer is no because it's space that is expanding it's not so much the galaxy that's moving it's spacing between that it's expanding and that doesn't violate any loss of relativity but this happens that the scale of the cosmos of an extremely large difference but my idea was maybe maybe there's a way to make it happen at small distance so expand space in a small region behind you and and contract it in front of you and that that would allow you to travel in principle fast and light now there's a lot of caveats a lot of problems with the idea it's not as simple as it sounds but at least it tells you that it's not straightforward just to say that it's impossible it's not quite that straightforward what are what are some of the common pitfalls that people get wrong about what this could do or can't do a lot of people think that traveling faster than light is just a matter of more technology and eventually we will do it because technology is advancing all the time it's not as simple as that i mean this is a law of physics so going around the law of physics it's it's much more complicated yeah yeah good luck so that that's that's what people think a lot of the time also they tend to think that i designed an engine or a spaceship so they asked me so when is your spaceship gonna be ready i have no idea i didn't design a spaceship i don't design engines i'm not an engineer what i did was i i presented a scenario of what we would need to do to space this expansion of space and contraction of space so this is a geometry of space time so i i thought of a geometry of spacetime that would allow it now how do you actually control the geometry of spacetime at will that's that's that's the engineer's problem exactly and i have no idea how to do it people are calling it now is it by a different name in the physics community and i like it they call it a warp bubble it's not a drive because there's no engine that's ever been designed to do this but it's a bubble of distorted space-time geometry so that that makes more sense to me because we don't know how to create it but if we could it would be sort of a bubble of exported space recently like within the last month there was not one but two papers published trying to put warp drives or warp bubbles in a more uh physical space or what they're calling a more physical space i wanted to kind of get your idea on where that research is and where do you think it's going yeah i i read both papers i mean over the years over the past 25 years i've seen many papers about it about over 100 maybe 200 papers of people looking at this idea but the main problem there's actually several problems one of the most important problems was the negative energy part we don't think no of anything that has negative energy for people that don't know cystic negative energy doesn't sound that strange right but but if you remember e equals m c squared the famous equation of einstein that tells you energy and mass are equivalent negative energy would be equivalent to negative mass and that that should scare everyone right yeah i know it's like it's like dividing by zero we shouldn't be doing that exactly so that's been the biggest hurdle and of these papers one of them actually looked at a very general class of geometries that they could think as sort of more generalizations of the word right and they sort of did a classification and they showed that in some cases you could use this sort of idea of warp bubbles to travel slower than light using only positive energy i think that's interesting but if you can only travel slower the light is not terribly interesting but i i think the paper was nice i mean it was a nice paper with a lot of organization and they did this classification of different ideas but the second paper actually is more interesting because it shows that we could travel faster than light with a word bubble using only positive energy this is a very complicated idea i mean it's actually the paper is very very technical but in the end he shows he finds a solution in which you can have a warp bubble traveling faster in life with only positive energy so that's a huge advantage but it's still actually in that paper he shows that yes you could use positive energy but if you wanted to move an object the size of a regular airplane with a work bubble at exactly the speed of light not even faster than might be just that speed of light you would need positive energy equivalent to about 20 or 30 percent of the entire mass of the sun converted into energy yeah it's something it's something like but it's it's like a it's like a trillion times more energy than like the gravitational binding energy of the planet you know something ridiculous i mean in its own in his whole life the sun is not gonna convert more than five percent of the total mass into energy but this thing you would need 20 or 30 percent of the total muscles unconverted into energy to move an object the size of an airplane at exactly the speed of light not even faster so it's still a huge problem right but at least it's positive energy it also means that all my talks are wrong because whenever i talk about this thing as it i said you need negative energy and now it turns out you don't you still need huge amounts of positive energy which still makes it completely impossible it's not the only problem there's all the problems but at least this one seems to have been solved uh at least in this conceptual way right do you think that something like a warp bubble is ever going to be within our you know the impractica in in practical engineering um for humanity because as you were saying um the there's caveats on kind of both ends of the spectrum it's either you need so much energy that it's ridiculous or it's a kind of energy that doesn't exist do you think do you think that we're proceeding towards something like that because as you opened with you know even fusion drive isn't going to get us to the nearest galaxy or the nearest star in anything like a human lifetime so um do you think we might see this sometime in the future i'm suspicious as a scientist i would have to say it's unlikely but at least it looks unlikely at this point but i hope that i'm wrong i keep hoping that i'm wrong and somebody very clever in the future will find a way to do it there's still things about the universe we don't really understand we don't understand what's dark energy we don't understand what dark star dark matter is and uh even dark energy would be interesting dark energy makes the expansion of the universe accelerate so it means it has some sort of anti-gravity so something like that if you could ever if you could learn what dark energy is and maybe control it then maybe would use it for something like this but this is my hope and as you mentioned the fusion drive would be ideal to move inside the solar system you had a fusion drive we could get to mars in a matter of weeks or to jupiter in a matter of a month or a couple of months without it it takes 10 years to get to jupiter so a fusion drive would be fantastic for the solar system but outside the solar system there's nothing that wouldn't work at all it would take still decades to get to alpha centauri so we we really need the world drive at some point and i do hope as a star trek fan as a scientist science fiction fund that this will happen sometime in the future but it's not sometime soon right if it turns out to be possible it's still going to take a big century it's not around the corner you're very enlightening a very friendly and wonderful guy i hope we can talk again soon and yeah thank you so much for your time thank you very much for the invitation for your program now exiting the facility thank you so much to the vernery staff at the facility for the direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i want to recognize research assistant chris cavazos and visiting scholar master jeff if you want to join me at the facility if you want to drape on a silky white lab coat get behind the scene photos talk with me on discord get videos early see members only live streams of yours truly not like that you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and join the facility staff today and hey if you support the facility just enough you get your name on aria here each and every week and as you can see there's literally hundreds and hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass the thank you so much to miguel uh akubiere which i had to practice many many times for actually taking the time out of his very very busy schedule to talk to me and to his son raul for putting us in touch who was watching an office hours live stream at the time that was amazing that we got in touch in that way i hope you enjoyed the conversation but if you were to put a gun to my head don't do that and ask me if warp drive will happen in our lifetime i'm going to lean towards probably not even if we have the theoretical solution as i was trying to point out the practical the engineering part of that solution is so intractable right now having the mass energy of jupiter or negative energy these are things that we probably won't ever get our engineering hands and minds around not unless we raise ourselves up to the next level of civilization so it's it's a fun idea that tests your physical knowledge of the universe but are you gonna be getting to proxima centauri in anything but economy class i don't know you're def that guy next to you he's gonna be wearing shorts and he's gonna be hogging all of the arm restroom for four years thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 427,979

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, warp drive, star trek, alcubierre drive, warp drives, miguel alcubierre, faster than light, warp speed, speed of light

Id: KGBMf-U-uD0

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Morzo_Voidmaster]

"What if, instead of moving you through space, you move space through you?"

I didn't realize that warp drives are NSFW.

[u/scmoua666]

T.L.D.W.: It's apparently possible to make a warp bubble with only positive energy (no need for negative mass), but to propell the mass of a plane at the speed of light, it would take 20 to 30% of the mass of the sun converted to pure energy.... So hopefully Dark Matter research will help or there's another workaround.

[u/Vindepomarus]

Dollar-Store-Science-Thor 😂🤣😂

[u/the_author_13]

No mention of Zephram Cochrane. 0/10