Warp Drives and Wormholes...

Topics: FTL, Space Exploration, Spacetime, Star Trek, Wormholes

Since the 1994 paper by Miguel Alcubierre (and the physics caveats to attaining it), there has been some interest in this area just because of the vastness of interstellar space and the limitations since the Mercury Space Program of Newtonian Space Travel.

Also, it is unlikely we will come in contact with 5-dimensional hyper-humans that want to see to their ancestors' survival by popping up a wormhole next to Saturn (note: not a spoiler to "Interstellar" by now).

The problem being addressed is species survival - dinosaurs were animals with small brains that had a really BAD day 65 million years ago. We homo sapiens (Latin: "wise man") are not. With our demand for energy and resources going unabated, and the fact that our neighboring planets are so far uninhabitable, we are reduced to several options:

1. Conservation and resource restrictions: This has proven untenable as our economy at this point in history has been based on scarcity and charging a premium for that scarcity.

2. Plus, we'd have to forgo our Victorian compunctions regarding birth control, and stop encouraging both large families and early teen motherhood by ignorance of the same.

3. Terra-forming other planets: Which, I guess is the attraction to Mars and the four presumed volunteers to a one-way mission to the Red Planet (good luck). Mars has no breathable oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere; it is roughly 1/3 g, so bones would lose calcium and muscles would atrophy; temperatures can dip below -87 degrees Celsius (or, -124.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Getting there would take 150-300 days unless the VASIMR plasma rocket is available by 2020.

4. Conversion to non-fossil fuels based energy infrastructure: see #1.

Alpha Centauri is 4.367 light years away, that's if we had a craft that could attain 99.9999% of c, the speed of light. It sounds ideal until you take into account the affects of time dilation: that would be roughly 3,088 years for any twins our astronauts had back on Earth. The "right stuff" would be similar to those embarking on Mars One - not just the vastness of space, but of time itself as a gulf.

That's also if there's a habitable but largely uninhabited planet around its twin or triple star system. It would take our Newtonian conventional rockets 165,000 years to reach it (75,000 by Dr. White's comparison to Voyager), enough time and 6,600 generations in the first case for our descendants to forget WHY they were sent there in the first place. If they survive at all, humanity would be decidedly different than the breed that left the cradle of Sol and Earth Millennium ago. What is now us, would be a distant or forgotten memory.

Whether eventually warp or non-causality impacting relativistic speeds, humanity will have to decide it wants to travel to another world, and try not to replicate the mistakes we've made on this one on the next.

Speaking of Warp Drive...

...whether or not we achieve it, it is fascinating that we're giving science discussions on it! Besides, this KILLS any previous designs of starships (without being too far off as well).

Instead of nacelles, it looks like we'd have two hoops enclosing the vessel. No "pivoting at Warp 2" recommended...see the video presentation below.

The dilemma can be summed in this humorous meme (not meant to insult anyone, but if you do a Google search, it's likely to come up):

Source: Motenes

The science behind the humor: it took about as much fuel as the shuttle weighed to get it into orbit. Fuel would then be spent (emptied), and Newtonian mechanics - momentum and gravitational pull of planets mostly - would be the predominate force moving a craft forward.

The only interstellar vehicle that's left our solar system is Voyager 1 on August 25, 2012, launched in 1977 when I was decidedly (blessedly) in high school. With abs...and hair on my head...

35 years is a long time for a one-way trip. NASA is attempting to reduce such journeys to a human lifetime, and maybe make it a round trip. Even 1/10 c (the speed of light) would be a civilization-changing accomplishment.

Look at the picture above. Nope, it’s not a snapshot of a Star Wars scene, or any other sci-fi movie. It’s what you get if you combine a NASA physicist working on achieving faster-than-light travel with a 3D artist, and the result is freaking AWESOME. And yes, you heard correctly, there are scientists working on faster-than-light travel, and this is what the ship could look like in the future.

Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/space/nasa-reveals-latest-warp-drive-ship-designs#EPvMa3eRlv4Ekmb1.99

#P4TC links:
"As Dreams Are Made On," September 21, 2012
"Alcubierre Drive," October 28, 2012
"Warp Fields and Research Efficacy," July 26, 2013

The Matter of Matter...

A faux historical account of Earth "pre-warp"

Warp drive, as enthusiastically a Trekkie I am, was a plot device created by Gene Roddenberry to get his astronauts from "here-to-there" in a reasonable amount of time to tell a story in an hour or less. NASA on the other hand, needs something other than chemical rockets that once the fuels expended to get the rocket into orbit - Newton's Laws dominate. Which is why currently a manned trip to Mars would take ~ 7 months to 300 days, and have astronauts with muscles of mush and bone mass of jello. VASIMR may get us there one day, thanks to the diligent research of people like Franklin Ramón Chang Díaz, PhD.

Abstract

The Alcubierre warp drive allows a spaceship to travel at an arbitrarily large global velocity by deforming the spacetime in a bubble around the spaceship. Little is known about the interactions between massive particles and the Alcubierre warp drive, or the effects of an accelerating or decelerating warp bubble. We examine geodesics representative of the paths of null and massive particles with a range of initial velocities from -c to c interacting with an Alcubierre warp bubble travelling at a range of globally subluminal and superluminal velocities on both constant and variable velocity paths. The key results for null particles match what would be expected of massive test particles as they approach +/- c. The increase in energy for massive and null particles is calculated in terms of v_s, the global ship velocity, and v_p, the initial velocity of the particle with respect to the rest frame of the origin/destination of the ship. Particles with positive v_p obtain extremely high energy and velocity and become "time locked" for the duration of their time in the bubble, experiencing very little proper time between entering and eventually leaving the bubble. When interacting with an accelerating bubble, any particles within the bubble at the time receive a velocity boost that increases or decreases the magnitude of their velocity if the particle is moving towards the front or rear of the bubble respectively. If the bubble is decelerating, the opposite effect is observed. Thus Eulerian matter is unaffected by bubble accelerations/decelerations. The magnitude of the velocity boosts scales with the magnitude of the bubble acceleration/deceleration.

As you read through the paper, please note the possibility of incinerating the star system/planet/people we'd be trying to hurry up and visit ("we come in peace" \\//_?).

I think - as even Star Trek alludes to - our first interstellar space faring will likely be at sub light speed in sleeper ships. Better to crawl first before running: 1/3 c to begin.

Someone will just have to invent inertial dampers since the Higgs Boson has been discovered so we don't kill ourselves or anyone else out there (another convenient plot device to avoid describing space faring humans as "street pizza" due to rapid acceleration).

In light of crawling, colonizing the moon, mining the asteroid belt and establishing a permanent base on Mars would be a good 1st start. Sagan mentioned terraforming the Red Planet or Venus in his book "The Cosmic Connection," which would be a practical solution on a global economy based on consumption. On the Kardashev scale, we are primitive.

Eventually, our toy/sandbox will be empty on the sandlot we're accustomed to playing in. Staying earthbound as a species will soon be the equivalent of not accepting potty training at the age and maturity one ought to be. Kind of gross, too.

Physics arXiv: The Alcubierre Warp Drive: On the Matter of Matter

Brendan McMonigal,∗ Geraint F. Lewis,† and Philip O’Byrne‡
Sydney Institute for Astronomy, School of Physics
A28, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

Related:
Amazon: The Physics of Star Trek, Beyond Star Trek; Lawrence Krauss

Krasnikov Tube...

Source: see paper at link

Abstract

The "warp drive'' metric recently presented by Alcubierre has the problem that an observer at the center of the warp bubble is causally separated from the outer edge of the bubble wall. Hence such an observer can neither create a warp bubble on demand nor control one once it has been created. In addition, such a bubble requires negative energy densities. One might hope that elimination of the first problem might ameliorate the second as well. We analyze and generalize a metric, originally proposed by Krasnikov for two spacetime dimensions, which does not suffer from the first difficulty. As a consequence, the Krasnikov metric has the interesting property that although the time for a one-way trip to a distant star cannot be shortened, the time for a round trip, as measured by clocks on Earth, can be made arbitrarily short. In our four dimensional extension of this metric, a "tube'' is constructed along the path of an outbound spaceship, which connects the Earth and the star. Inside the tube spacetime is flat, but the light cones are opened out so as to allow superluminal travel in one direction. We show that, although a single Krasnikov tube does not involve closed timelike curves, a time machine can be constructed with a system of two non-overlapping tubes. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that Krasnikov tubes, like warp bubbles and traversable wormholes, also involve unphysically thin layers of negative energy density, as well as large total negative energies, and therefore probably cannot be realized in practice.

Physics arXiv: A Superluminal Subway: The Krasnikov Tube

Miguel Alcubierre Moya...

If humanity does it, it will not be the fictional Dr. Zephram Cochrane of Star Trek folklore...

Miguel Alcubierre Moya (born 1964, Mexico City) is a Mexican theoretical physicist.[1] He obtained a degree in physics, and a Master of Science in theoretical physics at the School of Science of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

At the end of 1990, Alcubierre moved to Wales to attend graduate school at the University of Wales, Cardiff, receiving his doctorate through study of numerical general relativity.[1][2][3] After 1996 he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, developing new numerical techniques used in the description of black holes. Since 2002, he has worked at the Nuclear Sciences Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he conducts research in numerical relativity, employing computers to formulate and solve the physical equations first proposed by Albert Einstein.[4] The solitary wave solutions proposed by Alcubierre for the Einsteinian field equations may possibly prove general relativity consistent with the experimentally verified non-locality of quantum mechanics. This work militates against the idea that quantum non-locality would ultimately require abandoning the mathematical structure of general relativity.

On 11 June 2012, Miguel Alcubierre was appointed Director of the Nuclear Sciences Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

Alcubierre is best known for the proposal of "The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity" which appeared in the science journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.[5] In this, he describes the Alcubierre drive, a theoretical means of traveling faster than light that does not violate the physical principle that nothing can locally travel faster than light. In this paper, he constructed a model that might transport a volume of flat space inside a "bubble" of curved space. This bubble, named as Hyper-relativistic local-dynamic space, is driven forward by a local expansion of space-time behind it, and an opposite contraction in front of it, so that theoretically a spaceship would be placed in motion by forces generated in the change made by space-time. Wikipedia

Abstract

It is shown how, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the "warp drive" of science fiction. However, just as it happens with wormholes, exotic matter will be needed in order to generate a distortion of spacetime like the one discussed here.

Physics arXiv: The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity
Miguel Alcubierre, Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Wales, College of Cardiff, UK

Amazing Mexicans: Miguel Alcubierre Moya, PhD

#P4TC links:
Alcubierre Drive
As Dreams Are Made Of
Warp Fields and Research Efficacy
I'm Given Her All She's Got, Captain

Warp Fields and Research Efficacy...

Actually, it's called a White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer, part of on-going experiments into the Miguel Alcubierre paper of how to achieve warp drive without violating Einstein Relativity.

Credit: see link @ end of post

The Michelson-Morley Experiment was also an interferometer, invented to measure what was called the "luminous ether" and it's motion relative to the Earth. They didn't find it, but they were one of the giants on whose shoulders Einstein stood when his annus mirabilis happened in a German patent office in 1905. Poincare-Lorentz-Einstein: Sometimes previous failures can set up fabulous successes.

The NASA research paper is part of the focus of the 100 Year Starship project by Mae Jemison, M.D. and former astronaut. Giving oneself a century to develop a technological advance will be a test of our patience in a download, microwave dominated world.

In science, there are specialities and camps, e.g. those who pursue String Theory and those who compare it to bovine excrement. There's a strong consensus in our understanding of Special and General Relativity that there is no such thing as a "light barrier" analogous to the sound barrier that you can just speed beyond. We are all time-traveling forward, and experiencing the effects of that through Entropy: anything faster-than-light would inevitably lead to travel backwards. The equations show issues of causality (i.e. "what if you killed your own grandfather" paradox), that can't be remedied in a single hour on a Trek episode.

Research has been placed in the confining rubric of "the market," as something MUST be produced of immediate value before it's worthy of being examined. The increase of knowledge, being more informed about a subject and where to go with it than you were before, has lost most of its value. Under this criteria, Edison's invention of the light bulb in 1,000 steps (failures) would not be tolerated; we'd all still be using candles and homing pigeons.

The set of "Star Trek: Into Darkness" was shot at the actual National Ignition Facility as the cargo bay and warp core of the Enterprise. Nuclear fusion with lasers - creating a sun on the Earth - is a long shot, but a worthy experiment in that as I recall from the Science Channel, a single glass of water (source of Deuterium) could power a city the size of Los Vegas or New York. Such a long shot, unsuccessful up to this point, could truly make us energy independent not just as a nation: the price of food is tied to fossil fuels used to harvest them and to ship them to grocery stores and other countries. The cost of food is directly proportional to your grocer's fuel cost: notice it between the beginning of summer and Labor Day (at least in the US). Heating costs would be reduced. The nature of wealth and income inequality would take on a whole new meaning, that sadly would probably be resisted by the energy industry. This, I think should be an interim step before interstellar travel if possible is attempted, which in the Common Era with our predilection towards self-centered avarice would make us all the galactic equivalent...of locusts. Such I do not wish us to proliferate to our neighbors, nor reap the reciprocity of their responses.

Sometimes, science is as much a candle as it is a shot in the dark: the knowing, wonder and application occurs on the other side of your previous ignorance. That enlightenment, above whether or not we achieve something like warp speed, should be vigorously pursued.

NASA: Warp Field Mechanics 101, Dr. Harold "Sonny" White
NY Times: Faster Than the Speed of Light?
SPACE.com: Research Warps into Hyperdrive

From Impractical to Plausible...

Loose relation (to the Bloomberg embed) Star Trek Federation:

As a SyFy novel, it's not for the faint-of-heart, nor slight of attention span, as in you really need to know your Trek Universe. Without giving up too much of the plot, it does raise some interesting caveats: it points out in its fictional realm authoritarians typically want control over others, and fight any change - Warp Drive or 1st Contact, even the kind that insures the survival of the species. This Zephram Cochrane is more like the one in TOS versus the TNG/Borg Paramount version. It's kind of like reading The Pursuit of Happyness, and then seeing the movie (I did). As in "Pursuit," both remarkably different from each other, but each deeply satisfying in their own right.

How does it relate to this post? One way is the well worn cliche "life imitates art," but the other that concerned me as I flew through this enjoyable novel: what forces would try to resist this next "giant leap for mankind?" If I've learned anything, science is political, and our current in-species prejudices could quickly (and disastrously, I'm afraid) become xenophobia.

I'd love to live to see this happen. Wars are either fought over limited resources, or in our nature. Initially, a Moon or Mars base, then further out like Titan, a candidate for microbial extraterrestrial life as well as Terraforming; also a base of operations further from the sun's gravity well, like growing crystals on the ISS in Earth orbit could lead to physics experiments essentially macro scale versions of what's proposed above.

The world (and the universe) would indeed become a very small place.

Thank you Dr. Mae Jemison and Dr. Miguel Alcubierre.

Alcubierre Drive...

"… [it] is shown how, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the ‘warp drive’ of science fiction." (Alcubierre paper abstract)

By placing a spheroid object between two regions of space-time — one expanding, the other contracting — Alcubierre theorized you could create a “warp bubble” that moves space-time around the object, effectively re-positioning it. In essence, you’d have the end result of faster-than-light travel without the object itself having to move (with respect to its local frame of reference) at light-speed or faster.

The only catch: Alcubierre says that, “just as happens with wormholes,” you’d need “exotic matter” (matter with “strange properties”) to distort space-time. And the amount of energy necessary to power that would be on par with — wait for it — the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

So we’re back to “fuhgeddaboudit,” right?

Maybe not. According to NASA physicist Harold White, the energy problem may actually be surmountable by simply tweaking the warp drive’s geometry.

White, who just shared his latest ideas at the 100 Year Starship 2012 Public Symposium, says that if you adjust the shape of the ring surrounding the object, from something that looks like a flat halo into something thicker and curvier, you could power Alcubierre’s warp drive with a mass roughly the size of NASA’s Voyager 1 probe.

In other words: reduction in energy requirements from a planet with a mass equivalent to over 300 Earths, down to an object that weighs just under 1,600 pounds.

Time Tech: NASA Actually Working on Faster-than-Light Warp Drive

As Dreams Are Made On...

Prospero:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158

HowStuffWorks - Warp Speed

You can blame it on my reading material.

Though "real Sci-Fi fans" would differ with me, I had to take a "Star Trek" break from my usual (and quite depressing) dystopian literary diet and read two from Old School Trek: "The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh," part 1 and part 2 by Greg Cox. Khan as a four-year-old was written just as arrogantly as Ricardo Montaban portrayed him in the original series. If you're familiar with the "Space Seed" episode, it fleshes out a probable history of the genetically engineered race of supermen juxtaposed in real-world events of the 70s and 90s quite well.

Hence, the posts this week have been somewhat targeted.

So, I was probably primed to find these items:

"Perhaps a Star Trek experience within our lifetime is not such a remote possibility." These are the words of Dr. Harold "Sonny" White, the Advanced Propulsion Theme Lead for the NASA Engineering Directorate. Dr. White and his colleagues don't just believe a real life warp drive is theoretically possible; they've already started the work to create one.

Yes. A real warp drive, Scotty.

Gizmodo: NASA Starts Work on Real Life Star Trek Warp Drive

Abstract Excerpt: NASA/JSC is implementing an advanced propulsion physics laboratory, informally known as "Eagleworks", to pursue propulsion technologies necessary to enable human exploration of the solar system over the next 50 years, and enabling interstellar spaceflight by the end of the century.

NASA Technical Reports Service:
Eagleworks Laboratories: Advanced Propulsion Physics Research (PDF embed)

Warping in Houston...



Credit: Adrian Mann. Daedalus was conceived as a two-stage vehicle, which would attain a speed of 12 percent of the speed of light, for a 50-year voyage to reach Barnard's Star



Scientists, visionaries, entertainers and the public will gather in Houston this week for the 100-Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss space travel to another star.

...at its farthest, Mars is about 20 light-minutes away from Earth, and even Pluto is only about 4 light-hours distant. But the nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, is more than 4 light-years from Earth, meaning a vehicle traveling at light-speed would take 4 years to arrive.

Since the fastest spaceships ever built can't even approach light speed, a probe or manned vessel would take many, many years to reach even the nearest stars.

That's why the 100-Year Starship initiative, a project started with seed money from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA ), has targeted the goal of developing a vehicle that could reach another star in 100 years.

Toward that end, the independent, non-governmental 100 Year Starship organization is hosting its public symposium Sept. 13 through Sept. 16 at the Hyatt Regency in Houston. Speakers include symposium chair Mae Jemison, the first female African American astronaut, as well as astronomer Jill Tarter, a co-founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, Johnnetta B. Cole, director of the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, space journalist Miles O'Brien, and photographer Norman Seeff.

"Star Trek" actors LeVar Burton and Nichelle Nichols will also participate. The event is backed by former President Bill Clinton, who will serve as the symposium's honorary chair.

"Taking place the week of the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's speech delivered at Rice University challenging America to send a man to the moon, the symposium will hold a salute to fifty years of human space flight and NASA's Johnson Space Center," symposium officials wrote in an announcement.

Space.com: Interstellar Starship Meeting Warps Into Houston This Week

I'm Given Her All She's Got, Captain...

The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity, Miquel Alcubierre (1^st paper on the subject)
Photon propagation in a stationary warp drive space-time, Claes R Cramer

I'll Probably Hate Myself Later...

After all, Neutrinos have this little thing called "mass" (which, we don't quite know how much that is, mind you), it is > 0.

Lorentz Transformation for Mass

Do me and yourself a favor: 1 pound = 0.454 kilograms. Do that with your weight. I promise not to look.

Now make yourself travel at ~ 0.99c, plug it into your calculator and see what comes out. Even staying at one pound, the observed mass comes to ~ 3.21 kg. Mass, or "stuff" causes drag; slows everything, even a Neutrino -- down. For the case of v = c, your calculator would register an "error": division by zero yields infinite ( ∞ ) mass for any object, thereby needing infinite energy to propel any mass to the speed of light. Even that feat would require the literary invention of the Trek Inertial Damper.

Mind you, Special Relativity doesn't say a particle can't travel faster than light: like light always traveling at the speed of light and having no "mass"/inertia to drag it down (let mass_original for a photo = 0, because for photons: it does), tachyons would just always travel faster than light and have "imaginary rest mass" (like imaginary numbers, the error when you take the square root of -1). So...it gets a little strange, even to Einstein (the quote references a debate with Neils Bohr over Quantum Mechanics, that he ironically helped to create).

My advice: remain calm. These things kind of work themselves out in the long run.

1. Discovery magazine link (with some trepidation):
Rest Easy, Einstein -- Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Would Not Violate Relativity
2. Neutrino Mass
3. Wikipedia: Neutrino