If you are standing at point A and can travel one meter per second, it would take 10 seconds to get to point B. So, what does that mean? Imagine the distance between two points is 10 meters (33 feet). In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican theoretical physicist, showed that compressing spacetime in front of the spaceship while expanding it behind was mathematically possible within the laws of General Relativity. What if a starship could compress space in front of it while expanding spacetime behind it? “Star Trek” took this idea and named it the warp drive. Early science fiction writers John Campbell and Asimov saw this warping as a way to skirt the speed limit. This curvature is what you feel as gravity and why many spacefaring heroes worry about “getting stuck in” or “falling into” a gravity well. General relativity also describes how mass and energy warp spacetime – hefty objects like stars and black holes curve spacetime around them. General Relativity states that space and time are fused and that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Physicists’ current understanding of spacetime comes from Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity.

Credit: AllenMcC/Wikimedia Commons Compression and expansion This 2-dimensional representation shows the flat, unwarped bubble of spacetime in the center where a warp drive would sit surrounded by compressed spacetime to the right (downward curve) and expanded spacetime to the left (upward curve). I am now a theoretical physicist and study nanotechnology, but I am still fascinated by the ways humanity could one day travel in space. As a kid, I read as many of those stories as I could get my hands on. In Issac Asimov’s Foundation series, humanity can travel from planet to planet, star to star or across the universe using jump drives. But so far, faster-than-light travel is possible only in science fiction. If humanity ever wants to travel easily between stars, people will need to go faster than light. It would take just 20 seconds to go from Los Angeles to New York City at that speed, but it would take the solar probe about 6,633 years to reach Earth’s nearest neighboring solar system. The fastest ever spacecraft, the now-in-space Parker Solar Probe will reach a top speed of 450,000 mph. It is about 4.25 light-years away, or about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km). The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. Faster than light travel is the only way humans could ever get to other stars in a reasonable amount of time.

Possiblity of real warp drive