Is Alcubierre drive real?

Yes, it is real. It’s just the science behind its theoretical performance is so mind-boggling, you’d swear it came from the overactive imagination of a Hollywood writer. According to The Conversation, the story of the Alcubierre Drive starts with the legendary Albert Einstein and his Theory of General Relativity.

Would a warp drive really be possible and how?

Warp drives are theoretically possible if still far-fetched technology. Two recent papers made headlines in March when researchers claimed to have overcome one of the many challenges that stand between the theory of warp drives and reality.

How does Alcubierre drive work?

Objects cannot accelerate to the speed of light within normal spacetime; instead, the Alcubierre drive shifts space around an object so that the object would arrive at its destination more quickly than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws.

Why is the Alcubierre drive so difficult?

Some scientists have criticized the Alcubierre drive, however, because it requires too much mass and negative energy for humans to ever seriously construct a warp-based propulsion system. NASA has been trying to build a physical warp drive through Eagleworks Laboratories for most of the last decade, but hasn’t yet made any significant strides.

Does Alcubierre drive work in free fall?

In particular, Alcubierre has shown that a ship using an Alcubierre drive travels on a free-fall geodesic even while the warp bubble is accelerating: its crew would be in free fall while accelerating without experiencing accelerational g-forces.

Is an Alcubierre-type warp drive possible?

Nevertheless, an Alcubierre-type warp drive might be realized by exploiting certain experimentally verified quantum phenomena, such as the Casimir effect, that lead to stress–energy tensors that also violate the energy conditions, such as negative mass–energy, when described in the context of the quantum field theories.

What is Alcubierre’s theory?

Alcubierre describes spacetime expanding on one side of the ship and contracting on the other, thanks to that enormous amount of energy and a requisite amount of exotic matter—in this case, negative energy.