Ever since Einstein taught us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light
through a vacuum, there’s been a long line of people trying to prove him wrong.
Hyperdrives have been a staple of science-fiction for years, as far-flung devices which enable
characters to conquer the laws of physics.
But, are we about to see them in the real world, too?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re uncovering the extraordinary reality of hyperdrive technology
in real life.
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In fiction, hyperdrives are needed because the distances in outer space are too vast
to travel without one.
It would take existing tech like the Voyager space probes, for example, at least 18,000
years to travel just one lightyear… but most of everything interesting is much further
away than that.
So, we need something faster, much faster.
Because science tells us that the speeds we require aren’t possible, enter the hyperdrive;
a term which dates back to the mid-twentieth century sci-fi boom.
Nowadays, a hyperdrive is such a common trope, such a necessary requirement for any space-based
story, that almost everybody understands what it does - that it gets people to places really
quickly.
What we don’t so often think about, though, is how it does what it does.
In actuality, hyperdrives aren’t devices which accelerate a craft to incredible speeds;
not quite.
Instead, they serve as a necessary piece of equipment to enter “hyperspace”, which
is a sub-region of regular space where it’s possible to accelerate to incredible speeds;
to exceed the speed of light.
The hyperspace idea dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, but now it’s a useful construct
in science-fiction because it solves most of those pesky problems encountered when trying
to show faster-than-light travel; problems like how you’d go about braking at these
incredible speeds without hugely overshooting your destination… or how you’d avoid oncoming
stars, planets or asteroids on your trip.
Moving at FTL speeds in regular space would be just supremely dangerous.
In hyperspace, though, a “super-space” realm which allows you to instantly decelerate
just by jumping in or out of it, your superluminal highway is suddenly a much safer prospect.
And so, the closest thing we have in the real world to a hyperdrive is the Alcubierre Drive,
a device first proposed by the physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.
Appropriately enough, he’s said to have come up with the idea while watching “Star
Trek”.
The Alcubierre Drive is still yet to be built, but in theory it would be a device capable
of “warping” the spacetime surrounding a craft by expanding it behind, and contracting
it in front.
A vehicle equipped with an Alcubierre Drive would then move in an “Alcubierre bubble”
with distorted spacetime all around, giving the illusion to passengers on board that it
was accelerating at fantastic speeds, despite really moving at a slower rate.
The concept is sometimes likened to how a wave moves a surfer without the surfer themselves
accelerating – the surfboard is the ship; the wave is spacetime.
What’s crucial is that, relatively speaking, a craft with an Alcubierre Drive wouldn’t
at all be exceeding the speed of light within its “bubble”… so it amounts to a way
to technically travel faster than light without violating the laws of physics.
What’s even better, though, is that the calculations behind the Alcubierre Drive are
sound; increasing numbers of scientists and engineers agree that it is technically possible
to build one.
Why, then, if we’ve known how to build something like this since the ‘90s, haven’t we built
it yet?
Ultimately, it comes down to one factor: energy.
According to the Baylor University physicist Gerald Cleaver, for an Alcubierre Drive to
get us to our next-closest star after the sun (Proxima Centauri - around 4.24 lightyears
away), it would require the energy equivalent to the total mass-energy of Jupiter.
And, perhaps unsurprisingly, we don’t currently have any means to generate anything like this.
There is a suggested solution, though, and that’s dark or exotic matter.
For a pop culture example, it’s dark matter which powers the Planet Express ship in “Futurama”,
which itself functions by remaining stationary and moving spacetime around it – along Alcubierre’s
line of thinking, then!
Unfortunately, in the real world, we don’t yet know what dark matter is or how to even
properly detect it, let alone how to use it as a fuel source.
So, the Alcubierre Drive is, as it stands, a little like inventing the car without having
any gasoline to make it work; a fantastic idea, but practically impossible for now.
With exotic matter out, then, one alternative is to tweak the calculations and modify the
design to reduce fuel demands.
When the energy requirements for the drive are already so high, it might seem impossible
to lower them to an even close to practical amount… but, perhaps not.
In 2011, the physicist Harold White first proposed a modified version of the Alcubierre
Drive, reducing the energy requirements so much that, to work, it could potentially require
only the mass-energy equivalent of Voyager 1 - a considerably less energetic demand than
Jupiter.
The results of White’s experiments - which are ongoing and carried out at NASA, using
something called a White-Juday warp-field interferometer - have so far been deemed inconclusive
… but Alcubierre’s ideas are clearly still front and centre when it comes to hyperdrive
attempts.
The Alcubierre Drive isn’t NASA’s only hyperdrive project, however.
And something which seemingly doesn’t rely on exotic matter is the Cannae Drive.
The Cannae Drive is an alternative propulsion system which basically works by converting
contained microwaves into radiation pressure, to create thrust - in what’s called a “cavity
thruster”.
It’s technology similar to the EmDrive, which also uses contained microwaves to generate
energy, earning it the nickname the “Impossible Drive” in some sections of the media.
But these systems are beginning to seem increasingly not “impossible” in real life.
They both apparently break the “momentum conservation” laws of physics, but they’ve
also both been shown to work during numerous experiments - including, in 2016, when NASA
actually built a small-scale working model!
In theory, a craft using any type of cavity thruster would be able to travel much faster
than one powered only by a conventional engine and fuel, not least because it would also
be so significantly lighter.
It’s still early days, but it has been speculated that a Cannae Drive could get human travellers
to Proxima Centauri in only a few decades, compared to the tens of thousands of years
it would take a Voyager probe to get there.
There is another school of thought, though, that perhaps it isn’t the hyperdrive itself
that we should be focusing on, at all.
Instead, we should take a step further back from even the Alcubierre approach - where
a hyperdrive device creates its own hyperspace to work within - and just focus on how to
unlock hyperspace in general, for even conventionally powered vehicles.
It’s a theme which again comes up time and time again in sci-fi; Einstein-Rosen Bridges,
or wormholes.
While they remain theoretical constructs that haven’t been created or observed, wormholes
manipulate spacetime by creating alternative pathways between different points… and have
been deemed mathematically plausible.
For the purposes of today’s question, though, the space between wormholes might be seen
as similar to the idea of “hyperspace”; as a sub-space region we could move around
in.
Once more, you could potentially make a trip at FTL speeds by travelling between two particular
points faster than light outside of the wormhole could… but without locally exceeding the
speed of light and breaking the laws of physics.
How close are we to creating wormholes of our own?
Well, not that close… but we are seeing advances made all the time.
In 2015, for example, a team at the Autonomous University of Barcelona built a device which
managed to forge a path through space without any evidence of a magnetic field.
It’s magnetism was essentially invisible, meaning that the path - dubbed, by some, a
wormhole - couldn’t be detected from the outside.
True, it’s a long way from that to genuine, time-hopping, galaxy-breaching tunnels through
space… but the groundwork is being laid.
And, in a totally theoretical and far off future world, if we were to suddenly find
ourselves capable of mastering and manipulating wormholes, then perhaps we wouldn’t need
a hyperdrive at all.
Or, maybe “hyperdrive” would simply be the name we’d give to any technology capable
of producing the wormholes for us to walk through.
There’s no telling how far hyperdrive technology could go, but thanks to the hypothetical Alcubierre
Drive, the almost practical Cannae Drive, and our ever-growing understanding of how
to bend and shape spacetime… this hallmark of science-fiction could one day be the key
to exploring galaxies far, far away.
What do you think?
Is there anything we missed?
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