One of the most fascinating science fiction concepts in Star Trek could become a reality

Over the course of nearly 60 years of films and shows, the “Star Trek” series has featured high-tech communications devices that vaguely resemble ancient cell phones, magical replicators that can conjure almost any known being at will, and a galaxy full of aliens that look just like humans (although There is a strong legal reason for this now). But for every goofy-looking mask or turbo lift that requires passengers to grab a handle, there are countless gadgets and theories that have an actual scientific basis. Now, one of the most far-fetched ideas may be closer to becoming a reality than ever before.

Even the most casual “Trek” fans have heard of the Warp Drive device that allows various Federation starships to warp through space in the blink of an eye (relative). There’s a reason why faster-than-light travel has remained a staple of science fiction for more than a century. Space is very, very big, and humanity has always dreamed of venturing far, far away. However, until now, this technology has not only been considered beyond our reach, but it definitely is impossibleBecause it defies all laws of physics as we know them. The biggest one of them all? You will not travel faster than the speed of light, which is the universally accepted speed limit of the universe.

As it turns out, maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board. According to a recent article by National GeographicThere may be a way to turn this piece of fiction into reality… and Star Trek could be the main reason behind it. Astrophysicist and warp drive researcher Alexei Bobrik was quoted as saying: “It’s amazing how science fiction writers imagine things, and then we discover they can make them work. It’s really very beautiful.”

Believe it or not, Gene Roddenberry (He had a reputation for being a stickler for the rules) and his writers for “Star Trek: The Original Series” were ahead of their time. Despite the visual similarity to how the Millennium Falcon travels through hyperspace in Star Wars, the use of warp drive in Star Trek is much closer to matching real-world physics than we expected.

According to the established rules of the franchise, a warp drive essentially works by folding the spacetime around a moving spacecraft into a bubble, which is then accelerated to speeds far exceeding the speed of light. (This is definitely a very simplified version, because it involves a lot of math and decimal points that can’t be properly explained here. I’ll leave that to the wiki fans(Thank you very much.) Compared to other sci-fi properties that rely on wormholes or slipstream methods or the like, “Trek” successfully avoids the annoying problem that a certain genius named Albert Einstein came up with — the theory of relativity that states that no object in the known universe can actually move faster than light. While this may seem like it involves things like starships, the movie “Trek” posits that it’s not the USS Enterprise that is being warped to impossible speeds, but actual Space-time.

This technique is key, apparently. We’ve seen this in live action before, as depicted in one of the great shots in 2016’s “Star Trek Beyond” (it’s drawn from actual physics, as shown for Trek Core here). National Geographic spoke with science advisor and Trek astrophysicist Erin MacDonald, who explained:

“If you wrap your ship in the fabric of space-time and then that fabric travels faster than light, carrying you along with it, that is not actually violating any laws of physics.”

Well, just to be clear, we’re not completely At the point where we all can Enroll in Starfleet Academy We venture to the stars with wide eyes and pure hearts… but we get a little closer! The National Geographic report goes on to explain how the biggest hurdle is not the concept of a warp drive itself, but rather the massive amounts of energy required to power it. A 1994 paper published a theory that compresses spacetime in front of a spaceship and expands spacetime behind it, the first accepted scientific model to show the idea of ​​warp in action. The only drawback? To move even the smallest objects, this method requires energy equivalent to the mass of our sun.

Fortunately, science has progressed by leaps and bounds since 1994. Alexei Bubrik, the previously mentioned astrophysicist, has teamed up with Gianni Martier to find a solution to a warping bubble that is far more feasible than previous solutions. While their energy currently requires much less energy (somewhere on the level of a few Jupiter-sized objects), they have not yet been able to overcome the ability to travel faster than light. But even this small amount of progress represents the biggest step yet toward a functional distortion engine. It was now just a matter of making it so…or, in non-Picard terms, figuring out how to increase speed while reducing the amount of energy required.

The report warns that we are still “several years” away from ever implementing any of this on a working spacecraft – slight Less optimistic than the 2063 date for “first contact” with the Vulcans, after a successful test of the warp drive in the canon franchise – but we still consider this a win.