Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder (below) broke the paper down when it first began circulating a few months ago. To anyone inside the bubble, the laws of physics would remain intact as the “passenger area” consists of completely flat spacetime. At least, that’s how it would look to an outside observer. The bubble (above) can behave however it likes, including accelerating to speeds faster than light. The paper doesn’t describe a vessel but rather a bubble of spacetime that could surround a vessel, a person, or anything else. Unlike the Alcubierre Drive, the Bobrick-Martire version doesn’t require unfathomable amounts of negative energy. That paper has now been peer-reviewed and published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. A new paper from physicists Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire started making the rounds late last year, claiming that a physical warp drive may indeed be possible. In 1994 theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a model for a warp drive vessel that didn’t violate the laws of the universe, but it required exotic negative energy that we can’t produce (it may not even be possible). The problem is physics: General relativity says that nothing can go faster than light, a claim that has thus far held up to scientific scrutiny. It would take millennia to reach Proxima Centauri with current technology, but if you can move faster than light, you could be there in no time. It’s four light-years away, which works out to trillions of kilometers, or miles, or leagues, or whatever - in the trillions, it doesn’t really matter. Let’s say you want to visit Proxima Centauri, which is the closest alien solar system. We still don’t know how to build it, but at least we know why we can’t build it yet. Physicists have speculated on the possibility of a real warp drive for years, but a new paper lays out a vision for a warp drive that might actually work. (Credit: Eduard Muzhevskyi/Getty Images) Exploring the universe in Star Trek is as easy as firing up the warp drive and zipping off to the next adventure, but real life is much more tedious without faster-than-light (FTL) travel.
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