{"id":16981,"date":"2012-09-18T11:28:21","date_gmt":"2012-09-18T15:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16981"},"modified":"2018-10-25T10:09:39","modified_gmt":"2018-10-25T14:09:39","slug":"dont-give-up-hope-for-warp-engines-just-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/09\/18\/dont-give-up-hope-for-warp-engines-just-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t give up hope for warp engines just yet"},"content":{"rendered":"

As we all know, Star Trek<\/em>‘s faster-than-light warp engines were mere plot devices, not actual ones. There’s no way to travel faster than light, so even our great-grandkids won’t be tripping off to distant (or even nearby) star systems. But wait … NASA’s Harold White<\/a> looks poised to become the latest hero of the “we wanna go faster than light” brigade:<\/p>\n

A top NASA boffin has outlined ongoing lab experiments at the space agency aimed at first steps towards the building of a warp-drive spacecraft theoretically capable of travelling at 10 times the speed of light.<\/p>\n

The latest developments at the “Eagleworks” super-advanced space drive lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center were outlined by NASA physicist Harold White at a conference on Friday. The Eagleworks lab was set up at the end of last year to look into such concepts as the Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster and also so-called “warp drives” along the lines proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, subsequent investigation appeared to show that while the warp drive might work it would be unfeasibly power hungry: it would require a minimum amount of energy equivalent to completely annihilating the mass of the planet Jupiter.<\/p>\n

However White and his NASA Eagleworks colleagues say that’s not necessarily so: it’s all down to the shape of the ring. An improved doughnut design, as opposed to a flat ring, would get the requirement down to something more like just annihilating the Voyager One probe craft.<\/p>\n

Voyager masses in the region of 800kg, so by our calculations one would still need a lump of antimatter (or other reasonably compact super power source) which — if it were mishandled — would explode with a force of some 17,000 megatons, equivalent to several global nuclear wars all in one (or 600-odd Tunguska meteor strikes etc). This would inconveniently take humanity’s current atom labs billions of years to make, and there would be other practical issues (see our previous antimatter-bomb analysis here, and then there’d be the exoto-doughnut to fabricate etc).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As we all know, Star Trek‘s faster-than-light warp engines were mere plot devices, not actual ones. There’s no way to travel faster than light, so even our great-grandkids won’t be tripping off to distant (or even nearby) star systems. But wait … NASA’s Harold White looks poised to become the latest hero of the “we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,44,15],"tags":[69,1241,513,85,716],"class_list":["post-16981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-space-science","category-technology","tag-nasa","tag-quantummechanics","tag-research","tag-sf","tag-spacecraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4pT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16981"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45461,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16981\/revisions\/45461"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}