
Meet the NASA scientist devising a starship warp drive - ohjeez
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929300.300-meet-the-nasa-scientist-devising-a-starship-warp-drive.html#.UhJQjry9wu5
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Steuard
White claims to have calculated a way to substantially reduce the energy
requirements to form a warp bubble, and without reading his papers I suppose I
should provisionally believe him. But the required energy has to be _negative_
(as he confirms here), and I have never, ever seen him or anyone else suggest
how he plans to accomplish that. Negative vacuum energies like what he's
relying on have never been observed in the universe (directly or indirectly),
and would violate a number of "energy conditions" commonly believed to hold
for realistic matter. It would be _very_ exciting if those energy conditions
really were violated, but it's an extraordinary claim that backed by _zero_
evidence.

With that in mind, I continue to be puzzled by the amount of press that this
story seems to receive.

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chunky1994
As far as I know, negative energy is theoretically still sound; I may be quite
mistaken though. What "energy conditions" would negative energy (or mass for
that matter) be violating?

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solistice
Negative refraction is just as strange a concept, and we seem to be slowly
getting there technologically. So I'm actually hopeful this will happen
someday.

~~~
VLM
Unfortunately negative refraction a secondary effect where you have negative
permittivity and permeability at the same time. Negative permittivity is no
big deal, metals act like an electron plasma gas around certain frequencies
and get all weird, something like the color transmitted thru thin films of
gold and how weird gold, silver, copper act in the THz range and all that. The
"magic" is creatively negating both .. At The Same Time. Then the negative
refraction / metamaterial effects take hold.

Kind of like you can compress ammonia (a bit) and nothing terribly interesting
happens, and you can cool ammonia gas (a bit) and nothing terribly interesting
happens, but do both at the same time and you've invented liquid ammonia and
refrigeration and all kinds of nifty stuff.

On the other hand energy/mass seems rather fundamental. There are no multiple
"easily" negatable components you can play with mixing together. There's no
"add a to b to get the mass" going on. So you can't get sneaky with
combinations and initial conditions to magically make negative mass/energy.
It's really a different kind of problem.

The whole topic is pretty interesting to me because the first metamaterial
stuff was constructed out of printed circuit boards with weird etchings right
around the ham radio microwave 6cm and 9cm bands, which is right up my alley
(doing weird ham radio things involving PCBs and such around those
frequencies) Unfortunately I have been unable to figure out any practical
engineering demo (like, an antenna or a waveguide or some such) that would be
ham radio applicable in a real world demonstration. I guess I could make a
really weird lens and place it in front of a 6cm horn waveguide antenna, but I
can make a much simpler microwave lens antenna using about 1940s tech. Lens
antennas using plates of styrofoam and aluminum foil work pretty well at 10
GHz ham radio band for example, but I digress.

Metamaterials are kind of a solution in search of a problem right now, like
lasers in 1960s or home computers in the 80s or whatever. Most likely, much
like the examples, it would be pretty hard to predict today just how important
they might be in the future. Or maybe we're seeing the next "magnetic bubble
memory" or magnetic amplifier technology or fluidic analog computing or
whatever. Hard to predict.

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dandrews
He mentions the 100YSS Symposium, which was conveniently held in my neck of
the woods in 2011. It was exciting to be among a couple hundred smarter-than-
average people who wouldn't so much as crack a smile when the word "starship"
came up in conversation. Outside-the-box ideas, lessons taken from ISS, Orion,
nuclear propulsion, radiation shielding, social engineering, violation of the
2nd Law, other cool stuff. It was a _brainstorming_ excuse, and an opportunity
to dream big. If you live near Houston, and you'd care to rub shoulders with
some not-stupids who think seriously about this stuff, you might check this
out. [http://100yss.org/symposium/2013](http://100yss.org/symposium/2013)

~~~
mapt
Space exploration is not handicapped by technology, but by societal willpower
in the absence of an existential crisis like the Cold War. The Alcubierre
Drive is fine as a theoretically impossible physics plaything, but the
expansion of the species beyond the Earth only requires funding to achieve
using much more modest means. For every _one_ space science mission that goes
forward, our academic system produces 500 concepts that are judged too
impractical or too expensive, and 50 that arrive at group consensus that it
would be productive to move forward and submit proposals. 5 of them get funded
into fully developed systems, and 4 are cancelled just shy of completion
through because the JWST has cost overruns or the new Majority Leader /
President wants to make his mark with an arbitrary decision like cancelling
the 6 year old 20-year-plan for a Mars base in exchange for a 20-year-plan for
a Moon base (that will be cancelled in six years).

The path is there, the end discoveries (relative to many other fields)
relatively certain, we just don't like to make the effort in any concerted
way, and our government is broken; Congress would _prefer_ it if they could
just run NASA on a soundstage.

~~~
simonh
I do agree with your overall premise, but societal willpower in this case is
really just a proxy for cost. Space exploration is fantastically expensive. Of
course it doesn't help that the Space Shuttle and therefore the ISS were
hopelessly cost inefficient, but even without the shuttle tax space
exploration is still very costly.

This is why SpaceX's plans for substantially reusable launch vehicles is so
exciting. They have a credible roadmap towards cutting launch costs by a
factor of ten or more. We're in one of those situations where yes, we could
spend more billions on space exploration right now, but there's a very real
chance that if we maintain current space spending for just a few years those
extra billions could buy us a huge amount more. I bet projects like the
planned asteroid mining venture are watching SpaceX's technology development
program with bated breath.

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mathattack
At first I thought he would be a quack, but his technical credential look
legit. [http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/team/harold-
white/](http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/team/harold-white/)

I just wish he would explain a little better why this was an allowable
violation of relativity.

~~~
Tloewald
I think the problem with the warp drive is topological. His drive relies on
expanding space behind you and contracting it in front. OK. But what happens
when you turn the drive off? Assuming all this squashing and stretching
doesn't involve discontinuities, at best you're back where you're started
from. At worst, you're in some kind of weird messed up crappy nook in
spacetime where you're a long way from your starting point and your
destination.

~~~
mistermcgruff
My understanding is that using a substance called "spice gas" you're able to
enable this drive through a process called "folding."

~~~
textminer
HN-as-a-hivemind really should approve of this sort of snark. It's nerd-snark!

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leokun
Wouldn't an Alcubierre drive just always take you into the past? If you leave
Earth using this drive and get to some distant star at FTL using this
mechanism, maybe you escape relativistic effects, but you'll still get there
before light from our star arrives there. And then when you go back wouldn't
you arrive before the light left? It doesn't seem to make sense to me. Maybe
someone can explain away my misconception about how that works?

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mratzloff
Say we are having a swimming race and both leave the same starting side at the
same moment. I get to the other side of the pool and return to the starting
position before you reach the opposite side of the pool. Just because I lap
you doesn't mean I travel back in time.

~~~
leokun
Ok, that makes sense, but what happens to the light being emitted from your
internal ship lighting. Are you traveling faster than that? How do you look
around?

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dlhavema
the wikipedia article linked above talks about this, saying that the "...This
method of transport does not involve objects in motion at speeds faster than
light with respect to the contents of the warp bubble; that is, a light beam
within the warp bubble would still always move faster than the ship. As
objects within the bubble are not moving (locally) faster than light..."

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portmanteaufu
I would love it if there were a straightforward way to donate money directly
to NASA. I'd happily fund an indiegogo project for warp systems.

~~~
DennisP
This is just indirectly related to space travel, but there will probably be an
indiegogo project for aneutronic fusion in the near future:
[http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_l...](http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_lyftenbloggie&view=entry&year=2013&month=08&day=07&id=100%3Aplanning-
for-crowdfunding-campaign-underway&Itemid=90)

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damian2000
Is this anything like cold fusion?

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DennisP
Quite the opposite, it's extremely hot. They got a paper published in _Physics
of Plasmas_ saying they'd reached temperatures of 1.8 billion degrees C.

That's hot enough to fuse boron-11 with hydrogen. You end up with three helium
nuclei and some x-rays.

There are several attempts underway, though the one I linked above is the
cheapest and apparently the furthest along. I wrote up some descriptions with
references here:
[http://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestI...](http://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/10/planId/1304006)

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nickff
I am often distressed by the time, energy, and resources people consume in an
attempt to escape reality (i.e. video games, films, alcohol, and drugs).
Reading about endeavors like this renews my optimism for the future.

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ohyes
I take issue with video games and film being a waste.

The entire idea of a warp-drive comes from science fiction and people
daydreaming/trying to escape their current reality. The Hyperloop is directly
out of Heinlein. Subterranean cannons on the moon as a public transport
device... Without escapism we lose the essence of human creativity, imagining
a future that is different from the present. Do you think we would have
bothered to build rockets and go to space/the moon if science fiction hadn't
whetted the public's curiosity?

If anything, the problem is that current escapism kind of sucks and we need to
do it better.

edit:lose/loose

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tiglionabbit
How do we get this "negative vacuum energy" stuff?

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deerpig
But the question remains. How did he drop the energy requirements by orders of
magnitude, and from my fuzzy memory of such things, would that even be enough
to make a warp drive practical?

If he's right, it would be at least, a step in the right direction....

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mjfl
He is only testing the ability to warp space. The setup is extremely simple
actually. All he is doing is splitting a laser, one part goes through an
extremely charged toroidal capacitor and the other goes through nothing. If
the path lengths of these two lasers are the same, but the interferometer
reads that the lasers are out of phase, then you have possible warping of
space. Most of the cost is probably in the high-precision interferometer.

~~~
tiglionabbit
If you notice a discrepancy, isn't it more likely that one laser was "slowed
down", rather than sped up? You'd get the same effect by shining the laser
through a thick pane of glass: it arrives out of phase on the other end as if
it were slowed down.

~~~
mjfl
Assuming this experiment is done in a vacuum, I've never heard of a static
electric field changing the index of refraction of a vacuum.

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tocomment
Does anyone know how they will test it in the lab? I thought we haven't
discovered negative matter yet?

~~~
jared314
The White–Juday warp-field interferometer

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White%E2%80%93Juday_warp-
field_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White%E2%80%93Juday_warp-
field_interferometer)

~~~
tocomment
But how can a charged capacitor warp space? I thought only matter could warp
space?

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lcampbell
I don't understand physics to any degree, but I was under the assumption that
EM fields also warped space (albeit orders of magnitude less). I found some
explanations that are way above my head on Quora:

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Physics/Can-a-large-energy-field-
other-...](http://www.quora.com/Physics/Can-a-large-energy-field-other-than-
gravity-warp-spacetime/answer/Tu-Anh-Tran)

[2] [http://www.quora.com/Physics/Can-a-large-energy-field-
other-...](http://www.quora.com/Physics/Can-a-large-energy-field-other-than-
gravity-warp-spacetime/answer/Frank-Heile)

The second seems to suggest that energy fields, in general, do warp space.

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robertfw
considering e=mc2, it's not surprising that matter and energy can both
accomplish the same thing - they are the same thing

