In the Universe of Star Trek , humanity ventures out into the Galaxy on 5 April with the first ever journey on a ship capable of faster-than-light travel. Warp drive is the next obvious choice: Voyager 1, which has travelled furthest from Earth of any spacecraft, took nearly 35 years to leave the Solar System. Not exactly handy for interstellar travel. Luckily for humanity, theoretical physicists have been working on it.
According to General Relativity, the Universe is a flat sheet of space-time which is warped by any object with mass. The Alcubierre drive uses the same concept. Despite the hardships imposed by the war's aftermath and the lack of advanced materials, Cochrane was able to build a manned warp-capable vessel using a converted Titan II missile.
The successful first flight of his ship — the Phoenix — took place on April 5 , , and drew the attention of a Vulcan exploratory vessel, leading to the event known as First Contact. The Bonaventure NCC then became the first deep-space starship to have warp drive installed. Two NX class starships in tandem warp flight.
Development of warp technology by humans proceeded slowly over the next eighty years, after the flight of the Phoenix — due, in no small part, to the cautious advice of the Vulcans — and it was not until the s that a warp engine developed by Henry Archer at the Warp Five Complex could exceed warp factor 2. This engine was successfully tested in the second NX prototype by Commanders A. Robinson and Jonathan Archer to a speed of warp 2. Eight months later, Duvall achieved warp 3 with the NX Delta.
Warp 4 would be first achieved by the Franklin. By the year , warp technology was sufficiently advanced to begin the construction of Enterprise , a vessel capable of warp 5 and launched in ENT : " Fallen Hero ".
By , Starfleet warp drive technology had achieved the capability to reach warp 7, and these engines were being built into the latest class of Starfleet vessels as the NX class were being decommissioned. The USS Shenzhou at warp in Development and improvement of warp drive continued apace, and by the s , Starfleet vessels of the Constitution -class had standard cruising speeds of warp 6 and emergency speeds as high as warp 8 although under the right conditions, the engines could reach warp 9.
These ships took advantage of a major breakthrough in warp technology that took place between and , the breaking of the so-called " time barrier ".
TOS : " The Cage ". Higher warp factors continued to be reached, mostly through alien intervention, or dangerous malfunction. Later that year, the Enterprise accelerated to a speed of warp factor At that velocity, however, the ship came within moments of destroying itself. At around the same time, warp engines were being redesigned to allow standard speeds of warp 8 and above. During the refit of the Constitution -class, the cylindrical-shaped nacelles were replaced with a new flattened design.
Engines required precise tuning; imbalanced engines caused a wormhole effect that almost destroyed Enterprise on its first mission after refit.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Warp theory continued to advance with the development of the first transwarp drive engines in the mid- s , which would have theoretically allowed greater efficiency and any warp speed to be available for a ship. However, the transwarp experiment of USS Excelsior ended in failure, and the technology was abandoned at that time.
The Excelsior itself was deemed spaceworthy, retrofitted with conventional warp drive and commissioned as NCC under the command of Captain Hikaru Sulu. At some point in the 24th century, a new warp factor scale came into use, which placed warp 10 as a theoretical maximum. VOY : " Threshold ". By the time the Galaxy -class starship was being designed in the s , warp technology had progressed to the point where speeds of warp 9.
In , the warp drive on the Galaxy -class starship was managed by the warp propulsion power system. The tablecloth itself, on the other hand, can be deformed at any speed, as the universe itself shows in some situations.
At the instant of the big bang, for example, the original spacetime structure presumably expanded for a split second and did so much faster than any ray of light could travel. Even today, the expansion continues to drive extremely distant galaxies away at speeds faster than light, which means their light can no longer reach us.
Based on his discovery, Alcubierre surmised that it would only be a small step to a warp drive. The ship would remain encapsulated in a bubble, and the crew would not sense the magnitude of the interstellar journey. But formulating this idea in the language of general relativity immediately gives rise to major practical problems. First, to deform spacetime so radically, you would need to cram a huge mass into a bubble bounded by a wall thinner than an atomic nucleus.
Then you would need two forms of matter to maintain the bubble. The gravity of ordinary mass would cause the space at the front of the bubble to contract, moving the whole structure forward. But at the same time, the space at the back of the bubble would need to expand like rising bread dough. To make that expansion happen, according to Alcubierre, you would need some form of negative energy radiating a kind of antigravity.
For most physicists, that was the end of the thought experiment. But according to quantum theory, it can indeed have a negative value. This seems to occur only in rare special cases, however—on a tiny scale. In the so-called Casimir effect , for example, the quantities involved are so minuscule that any technological application seems absurd.
Alcubierre, now a professor of physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, concedes this point. He has now turned his attention to known phenomena, such as black holes. The warp drive concept, however, retains its fascination, especially for Trekkies—and for a few gravitational physicists, who occasionally publish variations on the idea. In his enforced isolation, Lentz found a way to construct a warp bubble using only positive energy. In so doing, he may have overcome the greatest objection to warp drives.
These equations can calculate how a particular distribution of matter and energy deforms spacetime. Researchers can also use them, as Alcubierre did, to determine the mass and energy needed to produce a specific curvature of space. Dealing with a dynamic, four-dimensional structure like spacetime is extremely complicated, however. Depending on the assumptions you make about a particular physical situation, you only take some of those terms into account. For theorists, it is an almost limitless playground.
Like his colleague, Lentz began by analyzing spacetime, modeling the multidimensional substance as a stack of very thin layers. It consists of diamond-shaped regions of altered spacetime that resemble a flock of birds. Creating such a spacetime geometry in reality would involve a complicated layering of rings and disks, not made of solid material but of an extremely dense fluid of charged particles, similar to the substance found in the interior of neutron stars, Lentz says.
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