One step closer to interstellar travel. I must say, I have been waiting for the day where this would be possible. My original goal in studying physics was to help find a way to get people off of Earth and on to another planet, giving the human race more time to learn and create. This idea came from the problems we have with our planet (I was mainly concerned by overpopulation and global warming) and I wanted to do something to help the human race, but I wanted it to be something that would last. So why not just find a way to a new Earth? We could split the population or depending on how bad our Earth has become, maybe we could look for a more suitable planet for our entire human family. Of course, traveling through space has always been a difficult task. Getting people around our solar system is still unreasonable and we would need to look to other star systems to find a new home, which would be light years away. Fitting everyone in the ship for this trip would be a different problem.
Well, it seems researchers are on their way to solving our space travel troubles. After crawling through mathematical loopholes, scientists have devised a way to test the possibility of creating a warp drive that will allow a ship to travel at a speed faster than that of light. As you may or may not know, we cannot travel at the speed of light or faster. There is a simple reason for this, to not jump over anyone's head (including my own), particles of light (photons) have no mass and because of that they are able to move through space at this incredible speed. If you take a person, which has mass, and attempt to move them, the faster you want them to move, the harder you have to push. It takes a lot of energy to move something at a speed close to that of light and because the object moving has mass it will take an infinite amount of energy to get it to reach the speed of light. This is why the bubble warp drive is necessary. Instead of pushing on the object and getting it to move at incredible speeds, which is impractical, scientists want to try to compress and expand space around the object, effectively moving the object through a warped space and not actually doing anything to the object (if there are people in the object, they will not feel as though they are moving).
This is similar to sound waves in the air. When you clap your hands, the action of bringing your hands together quickly causes the air between your hands to be compressed. The compressed air is at a higher pressure than the air around it and high pressure air always wants to get to a lower pressure. This pressurized air pushes out and creates more high pressure air in the direction it is traveling and lower pressure air behind it. This action/reaction continues causing a wave of pressure to propagate outward from your hands. You hear it when it reaches your ear, but the particles in the air are not traveling from your hands to your ear, the energy you put into the clap is. It is traveling at the speed of sound and similarly, I'm assuming, the ship using the warp drive will take advantage of this mechanic. I do have a question though.What if this just creates a wave in space and it doesn't move the ship at all? But this question comes from the fact that I am trying to simplify the idea by comparing it to something somewhat different. I am doing this in order to simplify the idea and because physics, like history, tends to repeat itself, so the mechanics of compressed and expanded space may be similar to other mediums.
Let's hope their research comes through for the good of space exploration, human relocation and maybe even extra stellar vacation.
Thanks to Alexi Parker for the link.
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