What are some differences between wormholes and warp drive?

With a warp drive, space in front of the vessel is contracted while space behind it is expanded, creating a sort of wave that brings the vessel to its destination. With a wormhole, the ship (or perhaps an exterior mechanism) would create a tunnel through spacetime, with a targeted entrance and exit.

Is anyone researching faster than light travel?

If humanity wants to travel between stars, people are going to need to travel faster than light. New research suggests that it might be possible to build warp drives and beat the galactic speed limit.

Is wormhole faster than the speed of light?

But in reality, no. By going through a wormhole, you are traversing space-time. Which means the speed of light still applies. You would get to a place faster than someone who did not go through the wormhole, but you did not travel faster than light, because the wormhole is part of space-time.

What is the theory behind warp drive?

The Alcubierre metric defines the warp-drive spacetime. It is a Lorentzian manifold that, if interpreted in the context of general relativity, allows a warp bubble to appear in previously flat spacetime and move away at effectively faster-than-light speed.

Why can’t we travel faster than light through a wormhole?

The impossibility of faster-than-light relative speed only applies locally. Wormholes might allow effective superluminal (faster-than-light) travel by ensuring that the speed of light is not exceeded locally at any time. While traveling through a wormhole, subluminal (slower-than-light) speeds are used.

How can a ship travel faster than light?

The ship itself is never going faster than light with respect to the space immediately around it. Davis’s paper examines the two principle theories for how to achieve faster-than-light travel: warp drives and wormholes. The difference between the two is the way in which space is manipulated.

Why can’t we create wormholes or warp drives?

This is because the negative energy necessary to create a wormhole or warp drive creates a repulsive gravity that distorts light around the ship. So ships moving at faster-than-light speeds will not be able to observe their surroundings to calculate their location.

What are the benefits of a traversable wormhole?

Lorentzian traversable wormholes would allow travel in both directions from one part of the universe to another part of that same universe very quickly or would allow travel from one universe to another.