Alcubierre gives us an update on his ideas on Warp training

If you want a sci-fi epic spanning the entire galaxy, you’re going to need faster-than-light travel. The alternative takes decades or centuries to reach an alien star system, which isn’t as fun. So you start with a wild science idea, add some technobabble, and poof! As fast as possible to the stars. Everything from wormholes to hyperspace has been used in science fiction, but perhaps the most well-known FTL trope is the warp drive.

Warp Drive has been used in science fiction since the 1930s, but it was popularized by the 1960s TV show Star Trek. Although based on the theory of general relativity, where space and time can be distorted by gravity, the TV series did not go into detail. Spools of chain, mumbles, dilithium crystals. Never mind that relativity clearly says that objects cannot travel faster than light. Without warp training, Captain Kirk would never be able to woo beautiful aliens.

Still, the idea was intriguing enough that a few scientists were attempting to develop a theory on how it might work. For example, physicist and science fiction author Robert Forward came up with several ideas. But things really took off when Miguel Alcubierre published an article in Classical and quantum gravity it could really be called warp training.

The paper demonstrated how the general relativity allowed for space could be distorted in a way that allowed FTL travel. Theoretically, a ship could never travel by space faster than light, but you could form a warped space bubble around the ship, allowing it to reach distant stars in no time. The idea became known as Reader Alcubierre.

There was just one problem. While the Alcubierre reader was possible in general relativity, it only worked if you could get your hands on a planet of some kind of negative mass alien material. All known matter has a positive mass, so it is a kind of breaking of agreement. Even Alcubierre said the idea probably wouldn’t work in real life.

New research solves some of these problems but introduces others. Alcubierre and Lobo’s work mainly focuses on the low-field distortion effect. They find that the small distortion effects behave in the same way as an unresponsive reader, like what has been proposed with the EM reader. They also found that while training still requires negative mass energy, it could hypothetically be done with a positive finite mass vessel.

Another recent article by Erik Lentz takes a different approach. He notes that there are some string configurations that look like solitons. Solitons are a self-reinforcing ripple effect. Solitons can retain their shape while moving at a constant speed and have been observed in water and other fluids. Lentz demonstrated that while soliton warp bubbles would require an incredible amount of dense matter, the energy of matter should not be negative.

These two ideas also have another problem. By creating a relativistic bubble around the ship, they effectively isolate the ship from the outside world. This is known as the horizon problem, and it means that a ship’s warp bubble cannot be controlled from inside the ship. The voyage of the vessel should be controlled from the outside. Jean Luc Picard could be the captain of the ship, but he could not just “make it so”.

Obviously, warp training is still hypothetical. There are deep theoretical challenges, not to mention engineering ones. But maybe we’ll have it all sorted out by the 23rd century, and we can finally quickly warp towards the stars.

Reference: Alcubierre, Miguel. “The Warp Reader: A Lightning-Fast Journey into General Relativity.” Classical and quantum gravity 11.5 (1994): L73.

Reference: Alcubierre, Miguel and Francisco SN Lobo. “Warp Drive Basics.” Wormholes, warp drives, and energy conditions. Springer, Cham, 2017. 257-279.

Reference: Lentz, Erik. “Breaking the Distortion Barrier: Hyper-Fast Solitons in Einstein-Maxwell’s Plasma Theory.” Classical and quantum gravity (2021).