r/videos • u/CircumspectCapybara • 8h ago

ScienceClic: The Alcubierre Warp Drive — What would it look like?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCAVh1wpBMU
45 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

68

u/DeepSpaceNebulae 8h ago

We’re so close! All we need is a material that doesn’t exist!

10

u/conventionistG 2h ago

Not just a material per se, but a different form of matter, namely negative matter (or maybe negative energy - potato, potato × c).

6

u/Party-Programmer2480 8h ago

yeah the bubble shape sorta warps space visually

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u/Codezombie_5 1h ago

And the chronology protection hypotheses to be null.

5

u/MarvinLazer 2h ago

Mig-Well? At least put a little bit of effort into how to pronounce the name of the dude whose idea you're discussing, jesus christ.

12

u/fatboyneedstogetlaid 3h ago

I look at it this way: When Issac Newton published his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687 we had most of the math needed to go to the moon. It just took engineering 280 years to catch up. We seemingly now have the math for a warp drive. We just need to work on the engineering part.

21

u/DeepSpaceNebulae 2h ago

Idk, Newtons Mathematical Principle of Natural Philosophy was modeled on real life and measurable phenomena and didn’t require a theoretical apple that falls up

12

u/conventionistG 2h ago

Correct. Negative matter isn't an engineering problem at this point.

4

u/CircumspectCapybara 6h ago

They kind of mention it in passing in the video, but it's important to note due to the rules of relativity, while an Alcubierre bubble is a theoretically possible spacetime geometry according to pure GR (if you have the required negative energy distribution, but we don't know if that's physically possible in our universe), the inside of the bubble is causally disconnected from the outside, making it sort of like a black or white hole or the space beyond the observable universe's cosmological event horizon that's receding away from us faster than light and which we can never interact with or influence or vice versa anymore.

2

u/nadmaximus 7h ago

Well it would be attached to some kind of incomprehensibly powerful energy source, and probably some kind of minimalist habitation pod.

1

u/Pyyric 1h ago

If we could do this, what would happen if you take your warp bubble of spacetime outside of the universe? Assuming the universe is finite and assuming that you can reach an arbitrary speed that allows you to reach the edge.

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u/The_Autarch 52m ago

nothing you're saying makes any sense. you can't be somewhere the universe isn't.

there is no edge of the universe.

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u/Pyyric 44m ago

We don't have words to describe a phenomenon we can't understand, please bear with me as a bend the language a little and please don't insult the word use.

The universe, if finite, has an edge that is speeding away at the expansion rate. We do not know if the universe is finite or not. We can only see the horizon from our location.

If we can travel faster than the expansion rate of the universe then we can travel to any point within the universe and conceivably move beyond it carrying our own bubble of space-time.

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u/doodlar 36m ago

So the white light at Near Death Experience is just us warping 6 million times the speed of light to somewhere else? 😎

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u/georgecm12 1h ago

It's fascinating how close Star Trek's (at least TNG and beyond) depiction of their version of warp was to Alcubierre's warp. In fact, Star Trek showed warp "bubbles" even before Alcubierre had published his paper.

Of course, Star Trek is fiction, and they definitely used some similar concepts to Alcubierre's theory, but in rather fantasy ways... but the fact that Alcubierre was able to take those concepts and actually figure out the math that shows that the fiction could be closer to fact than even the writers had envisioned.