If you could travel faster than the speed of light,
where would you go?
This is WHAT IF,
and here's what would happen
if we had working warp drive technology.
For all we know,
nothing can travel faster than light.
Lightspeed seems to be the universal speed limit
for everything that's moving in space.
Unless we build a spaceship
capable of distorting space-time.
A spaceship equipped with warp drive.
Our craft would be encased by a large ring
that would compress space-time in front of the spaceship
and expand it to the rear of it.
It wouldn't be the spacecraft moving over the cosmic speed limit.
It would be space-time itself moving around the spacecraft.
Once we figured out this method of propulsion,
we could start our cosmic conquest.
How far into the vastness of the Universe would we make it?
If the warp drive could accelerate our spacecraft
to the speed of 10 times faster than the speed of light,
it would only take us about 75 seconds to get to Mars.
It would take even less time to get from the Earth to the Sun -
some 50 seconds of space travel
and there's our star right in front of our eyes.
From there, we'd speed to the inner limits of the Oort Cloud -
the beginning of the edge of our Solar System.
At 10 times the speed of light,
we'd get there in about 72 days.
After 83 more days in space,
we'd arrive at Alpha Centauri -
a star system that hosts the potentially habitable exoplanet -
Proxima Centauri.
Our very first interstellar colony
would settle on Proxima Centauri,
but humanity won't stop exploring.
Our next stop would be the Gliese 667 Cc -
the hotter and bigger version of Earth
about 23.5 light-years away.
This exoplanet might not turn out to be too hospitable,
but it could be worth sending a crew
on the 4.5-year roundtrip to check it out.
Other manned crafts would take on trips
to Kepler-442b and Kepler-452b -
the next exoplanets
on our list of potentially habitable worlds.
Those spacecraft would have to speed up a little -
unless they wanted to spend over 120 years in space
covering a distance of over 1,200 light-years.
At a speed of one thousand times faster than the speed of light,
they'd only need about 437 days
to reach those Kepler exoplanets.
Even when surpassing the lightspeed limit,
we'd still have to spend years traveling across space;
searching out other habitable worlds
and their inhabitants,
if there are any.
The Universe is big.
Very big.
And it keeps expanding.
We'd never be able to travel to the edge of it,
even with working warp drive.
Our home galaxy, the Milky Way,
is about 200,000 light-years across.
Even if we could achieve the speed of one light-year per hour,
it would take us 22 years
to reach the outmost corner of our own galaxy.
Let's come back down to Earth for a moment.
The fastest space probe we've ever come up with
is 90 million times slower
than our hypothesized lightspeed spacecraft.
We've got a long way to go
to achieve a Star Trek level of interstellar travel.
And don't forget that using warp drive technology
would require an enormous amount of energy in the first place.
Maybe we should start investing our resources
into building a Dyson sphere around the Sun
to fill all our energy demands once and for all.
But that's a story for another WHAT IF.