The US Starship Enterprise from the original Star Trek series
Star Trek warp drive is a possibility, say scientists
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Two physicists have boldly gone where no reputable scientists should go and devised a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light.
The advance could mean that Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive are now no longer the exclusive domain of science fiction writers.
In the long running television series created by Gene Roddenberry, the warp drive was invented by Zefram Cochrane, who began his epic project in 2053 in Bozeman, Montana.
Now Dr Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy have come up with a new twist on an existing idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics.
In their scheme, in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, a starship could “warp” space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it.
By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at faster-than-light speeds.
All this extraordinary feat requires, says the new study, is for scientists to harness a mysterious and poorly understood cosmic antigravity force, called dark energy.
Dark energy is thought responsible for speeding up the expansion rate of our universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light for a very brief time.
This may come as a surprise since, according to relativity theory, matter cannot move through space faster than the speed of light, which is almost 300,000,000 metres per second. But that theory applies only to unwarped ‘flat’ space.
And there is no limit on the speed with which space itself can move: the spaceship can sit at rest in a small bubble of space that flows at “superluminal” – faster than light – velocities through normal space because the fabric of space and time itself (scientists refer to spacetime) is stretching.
In the scheme outlined by Dr Cleaver dark energy would be used to create the bubble: if dark energy can be made negative in front of the ship, then that patch of space would contract in response.
“Think of it like a surfer riding a wave,” said Dr Cleaver. “The ship would be pushed by the spatial bubble and the bubble would be travelling faster than the speed of light.”
The new warp drive work also draws on “string theory”, which suggests the universe is made up of multiple dimensions. We are used to four dimensions – height, width, length and time but string theorists believe that there are a total of 10 dimensions and it is by changing the size of this 10th spatial dimension in front of the space ship that the Baylor researchers believe could alter the strength of the dark energy in such a manner to propel the ship faster than the speed of light.
They conclude by recommending that it would be “prudent to research this area further.”
But hold the dilithium crystals: Dr Chris Van Den Broeck of Cardiff University commented: “The problem with this and previous schemes (including my own) is that part of the exotic matter would have to travel faster than the *local* speed of light (roughly speaking, it would need to go faster than the speed of light with respect to the portion of space it occupies), and that’s not allowed by any established physical theory.”
And even if this criticism can be met, Richard Obousy computed the amount of energy required to start up a “warp” process (but not the total energy required to travel a specific distance) around a 10x10x10 metre-cube ship based on the required change in dark energy in a space equal to the volume of the ship.
The energy to kick start the drive turned out to be equivalent to turning the entire mass of Jupiter into energy, by Einstein’s famous E equals Mc squared equation, where c is the speed of light. Given the mass of Jupiter is around 2000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms, that is a big number.
“That is an enormous amount of energy,” Dr Cleaver said. “We are still a very long ways off before we could create something to harness that type of energy.”
Aftermath News 
Great. After the Illuminasties depopulate earth they get to pollute the stars and/or other dimensions. Or maybe move the work camps there to service earth.
And maybe I’m just a picky purist–but the above picture is not literally from the original TV series, but from the “enhanced” digital reworking. And that version also has dialog compression–which annoys me.
y does something always hav to be unlimited in these guys equations? ‘we can travel at the speed of light….BUT……but we need a gazillion gallons of fuel’.
Well the Romulans use a forced quantum singularity I believe–how much one of those go for?
I do believe in the very near future this will be possible. I also have a theory that time travel will become a reality of the future and that unexplained phenomina is a direct result of time travel from the future. In other words, if time travel is to be invented in the future, they can already be visiting us.Say for example, if a human being can travel 30 times faster than the speed of light, he can therefore stand up from a chair he has been sitting in and look at himself for a few seconds. Sound far fetched? Go back 20-30 years and see what science fiction movies were all about. Almost 90% of what was shown then, became reality now.
Screw the bubbles and stow the singularities, quantum or otherwise… and pass me another round of Romulan Ale, if you please.
maybe all tat can be done. patience is bigger than the sea…. a genius like einstein,newton MIGHT figure out space travel methods…if only.
Is intersteller space really a vacuum.What if at that speed what would be the result of hitting a piece of left over space dust or pebble. There would have to be some type of reaction. For every action, there is a equal and opposite reaction. ?
Even if the energy equivalent of the mass of Jupiter is required, could the energy be recovered to be reused afterwards? And would the ship need to carry the energy, or could it be beemed from its’ source? How many ships or trips could the sun power?
I am from the future. We got faster than light to work, but it’s never as nice as the brochure.
Aliens… be afraid…. be very afraid!
y does something always hav to be unlimited in these guys equations? ‘we can travel at the speed of light….BUT……but we need a gazillion gallons of fuel’.
y does something always hav to be unlimited in these guys equations? ‘we can travel at the speed of light….BUT……but we need a gazillion gallons of fuel’.
…………………………………………………………………
whts dis dark enery
can u explain abt dis???
we already gots a space ship. it’s called the earth. it traveles like a thousand miles an hour through space. yeah, sure it goes around in a circle and not where we might like it to go, but it’s consistent, self maintaining and comes equipped with alot of cool stuff to do while ‘yer aboard. what if a bunch of people got on a “ship” and blasted out into space? thats a long way to to get away from your friends and family or financial obligations. wehat about maintenance? seems like a car with it’s eleven thousand parts breaks down at the wrong time, as if there ever was a right time. a spaceship? i don’t know. just keep re-doing the star trek’s and put ’em on blu-ray with enhanced effects, 7.1 DTS MA lossless, new movie every so often and i’ll be fine right here. i can’t wait for star wars this fall.