- [Narrator] Fight the law,
and the law wins.
Bend the law,
and you've got yourself a warp drive.
(techno music)
- Ever since humans have looked up at the stars,
we have dreamed of taking our place among them.
But there's one small problem.
Space is huge.
The universe itself is 28.5
gigaparsecs from end to end,
and I don't even know what that is.
I just know it's really big.
Alright, but why don't we just go faster?
Well, we have this little issue
with the universal speed limit.
That's the speed of light.
Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
Even if we could travel at that speed,
and we can't,
it would still take us years
to get to the closest star.
Science fiction writers
solved this problem by inventing a plot device.
The warp drive, a gadget that magically
transports their ship across vast
empty reaches of space faster than
the speed of light.
It's a good thing, too,
because without it,
the only thing Captain Kirk would have
boldly gone to is our cosmic back yard.
So, it sure is sad that the warp drive
is just a work of fiction.
Or is it?
A few theories have been proposed
that might actually,
well, work.
One that has both nerds
and scientists excited is
known as the Alcubierre theory.
Instead of trying to beat the speed of light,
which is physically impossible,
the Alcubierre drive would
warp space time itself.
The idea is this device,
which would look kinda like a football
with a ring of negative mass surrounding it,
would be able to contract space time ahead of it
and expand space time behind it,
thereby traveling through space
at 10 times the speed of light
while keeping general relativity intact.
Think of it like a map with point a to point b,
and instead of having to trace your finger across,
you just fold the map over
so the two points are next to each other.
There is one small issue.
It has a pretty enormous mass energy requirement.
The original theory stated you
would need the mass of Jupiter.
That's right, the planet.
And when you take Einstein's equation
E equals mc squared,
that is a ridiculous amount of energy,
more than any source could ever provide.
But, there's some good news.
In 2012, Harold "Sonny" White,
a NASA engineer and physicist,
said that by tinkering with
this theory a little bit,
we could bring that mass energy
requirement way down.
You could change the shape of that
ring of negative mass,
and get the requirement to about 700 kilograms,
and now we're talking.
White led a team of engineers over at NASA
to build what is known as
the Juday-White warp-field interferometer,
which is just as interesting
to look at as it sounds.
It's a beam splitting interferometer
that measures tiny warps,
and maybe even induces them,
into space time.
It's not anything that's going to
get us over to the
Andromeda Galaxy any time soon,
but it's a start.
So, Lieutenant Sulu, let's punch it.
(warp drive whining)
Okay, there's still some things
we need to work out.
First, we don't know that
negative mass actually exists.
There's some evidence that it does,
but we've never directly observed it.
On top of that,
while the mass energy requirement
is much lower than Jupiter,
it's still incredibly high.
700 kilograms of mass energy
represents way more energy than
even the most powerful atomic bomb ever detonated.
But, these problems are not necessarily insurmountable.
And some scientists think this technology
will be a reality within 100 years.
Imagine that.
We'll be able to travel the universe
at 10 times the speed of light.
If you remember our episode about Proxima b,
when I said it would take us at least
44 years to get a look,
with this technology we could
be there in no time.
We would become a transgalactic species,
and we could boldly go where no human has gone before.
Well, I've got a question for you guys this week.
Do you think this technology
will become reality within a century?
Why or why not?
I want to hear your thoughts
in the comments below.
Thanks to Toyota for sponsoring
our show and making it possible.
If you enjoyed this episode,
why don't you hit that little
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Then set your warp drives to factor five
and head over here for some more videos.
(inspirational music)