Faster than light: Can ships with warp drives break the light-speed barrier?

The warp drive—science fiction that could very well become reality. At the very least, the concept doesn't contradict any known laws of physics. But whether it's actually possible to build a spaceship with a warp drive capable of traveling faster than light is what we'll try to figure out in today's video!

[madcow]

14:47 You don't need an FTL cylinder, you just need to build a hyperloop between here and your destination. Get Elongated Muskrat started on the tube technology!

[Benson_aka_devils_advocate_]

I've always daydreamed about this topic. And I always come back to the speed of sound and how we once thought that impossible.

Time and time again someone comes along and says, _well actually...._ whenever we say something can't happen. We obviously have an incomplete understanding of physics. We don't know what happens inside a black hole or what 95% of the universe is made of.

Who knows, someday someone will figure something out that will make it seem so simple. Such as germ theory. We believed in aether for generations after all. It's just a matter of letting science do what it does best, answer the hard questions!

[Imorg]

About a year ago Cool Worlds took apart the warp drive and explained why it's all but impossible as a practical faster than light vehicle.

[legiran]

Yes. Only if you find a way to bypass space itself.

[ronrothrock]

I do believe we will be able to travel across space at speeds that appear to be faster than the speed of light, but all of the things in this video I do not think will be the way in which this is achieved. The "warp bubble" idea sounds nice, but I do not think we will find "negative mass" and achieve it that way. I suspect the way we will be able to do it is like the wave analogy. We will figure out how to create a gravitational wave that we will ride to the destination. That wave will be created once (per trip intended), either by the ship itself or with "jump rings". The ship will contain the tech needed to "ride" that wave.

With that said I also think there are too many things that we misconceive about space that we need to understand better. For example, the dark energy and the alt theories you mentioned at the end. I, too, think the universe is not expanding and there are alternative explanations. For example, the main reason for believing in the expansion of the universe, and its accelerating expansion, is the red shift. Occam's razor suggests that it is more likely that light that has been traveling for a long time slowly "decays" or "loses energy" and it's wavelength "gets longer". And this is just one very simple theory, but there are others that are way simpler than "the universe is expanding at an ever faster rate". The whole notion is ridiculous.

Another thing that I don't see is people attacking from this angle: the concept of the speed of light being constant. If you look at the way we calculate it, there is a serious problem. Speed, aka velocity, is defined as distance divided by time. What are distance and time? Well distance is defined as how far light travels in a given time (at least the modern definition is that.) And time is (currently) defined as a certain number of vibrations of a cesium atom in it's lowest energy state. Well what is a "vibration"? A vibration is the back and forth motion (or elliptical for a 3 dimensional rotating or orbiting structure if that is what is happening in the atom). Either way, a vibration frequency has a distance that it travels back and forth. So what you have is distance being defined by time and time is defined by distance. So, of course, the speed of light is constant. It is because the 2 terms in the equation define each other. Once we figure out a different way to calculate either time or distance where they dont define each other, we will then 1) likely find that the speed of light is not constant, 2) find ways to travel "faster than light".

[KeystoneInvestigations]

All we need to do is have Lieutenant Commander Scott (Scotty) show us how to do it!

[ADude-fz]

Call me a delusional optimist if you must, but it was once considered to be impossible to break the speed of sound…

Here’s a new one for ya, just popped into my head…

We’ve used “gravity assist” to accelerate spacecraft. And we’ve been playing around with ion drives…. What if we were to install a significant mass as part of a spacecraft, then use magnetic fields to guide ions in a path around that mass, much like gravity assist around a solar or planetary mass?

Just a thought…

[Rhaxin]

26.000 ly from Earth to the centre of the galaxy, not 50.000 ly

[philplasma]

Isaac Asimov in I, Robot had a super computer, what today we would call AGI, solve the problem of achieving FTL space travel. Why not feed Albucierre bubble mathematics to our most advanced AGI and have it develop an FTL engine.

[Italianjedi]

So if we could harness dark energy; we could achieve anti-gravity and warp?

[sandydougal]

This video starts with a falsehood. Einstein’s theory does NOT forbid FTL travel. But it does not allow transition from slower to faster than light speed and vice- versa.