Matt Galligan

You read the title right. What most of the world probably thought was purely science fiction could indeed become a reality – faster-than-light (warp speed) space travel isn’t fiction anymore, scientists are actually working on it!

Now, I can’t fully explain it in detail because it effectively makes my brain hurt, but here’s the gist:

Actually traveling faster than the speed of light is incredibly difficult. It would require engines that are beyond our imaginations with fuel sources that not only don’t exist, but the engine itself would consume crazy amounts of such fuel (e.g. the volume of the planet Jupiter). So how do you get around that? Well you bend space and time, of course!

Since we can’t actually travel faster than the speed of light right now, scientists are just going to bend space to their will, literally. Imagine if you were in your car and driving 60 miles per hour but you were actually covering the distance of 1,000 miles in that same hour. Your car would remain the consistent speed, but the environment you’re traveling in is moving at 16x. That’s what scientists will do here – compress the space in front of the vehicle, and expand the space behind it, thereby making the spaceship move many light years but never surpassing the speed of light.

Yeah.

Here’s me right now:

http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/daydreaming-beyond-the-solar-system-with-warp-field-mechanics/