By Joshua Tyler
| Published
The trouble with traveling to other planets has always been the vast distances involved and the limitations of lightspeed travel. As far as we know, nothing in the universe can move faster than the speed of light.
This fundamental fact means that even if you go as fast as the laws of physics will allow, it would still take decades to reach the nearest inhabited planet. Science Fiction has long theorized that the solution to this problem might be warp drive.
The idea behind a warp drive, popularized by Star Trek but rooted in real theoretical physics, is that instead of moving a ship faster than light through space, you move space itself. A ship inside a “warp bubble” would stay relatively still while spacetime in front of it compresses and spacetime behind it expands, effectively carrying the vessel across enormous distances faster than light could normally travel.
Physicists have done real work to explore this possibility, but research from the University of Sydney suggests one huge obstacle: Space isn’t empty.
That big, black void between planets is actually full of radiation and tiny particles, which their research suggests would be “swept up” into the warp bubble and then focused into areas in front of and behind the ship. This wouldn’t actually be a danger for anyone inside the warp bubble, but for anyone hanging out at the ship’s destination, it would spell certain doom. They explain, “Any people at the destination would be gamma rays and high-energy particles blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for [forward] region particles.”
This problem might be solved by aiming your craft just a little off to the side of your destination, allowing the release of all that energy into some unpopulated part of space, but even that may not do it. It could be that the particles will blast away from the craft in all directions.
It’s hard to seek out new life and new civilizations if you wipe them all out the moment you arrive. When we finally get Starfleet up and running, we’ll probably need a better alternative to the warp drive.
