Trekkies Rejoice Nasa Is Working On A Warp Drive

Modern smart phones already surpass the original Star Trek communicators, the replicator is well on its way to being reality, Microsoft has patented something that is beginning to look like a holodeck and now comes word, via Blastr, that NASA is working on warp technology:

"A team at NASA's Eagleworks research lab is working on "an interferometer test bed that will try to generate and detect a microscopic instance of a little warp bubble."

"In layman's terms: They're trying to figure out if they can find a "loophole" in physics to create a warp drive for interstellar travel at speeds much faster than traditional propulsion will allow. So fast, we could potentially make it to Alpha Centauri in under a month."

It is not just sci-fi nerds hoping for a win here either, from the CBS News:

An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.

"Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn't being warped at all."

"Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light," explained Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit group of scientists and engineers devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight. "But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light."

"With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit."

If you are not nerdy enough to have watched any Star Trek recently it may be time to revisit it and consider it as a possibility, rather than simply a fantasy. Apparently today's physicists and engineers apparently always saw it that way.



Reference: faces-on-mars.blogspot.com