Well, I think this article is worth linking to and presenting for your perusal and commentary. Firstly, as evidence that HuffingtonPost has totally become the National Enquirer. Secondly, because anything associated with space travel is cool, and the article dwells on Star Trek, which would be cool if it were about that, but if the article meant to talk about a real form of warp drive, they could have just put one or two Trek quotes in the opening paragraph and been done with it, but nooooooo…………………….., Third, or Fourth depending on how you’re counting, it doesn’t matter, the idea of faster than light travel is tempting, it is intoxicating, it’s exhilarating, because it would make space travel possible, it would allow us to make contact with distant, alien races, millions of years more advanced than our own, it would allow us to find worlds currently going through their cretaceous period and colonize them, it would change the human experience beyond recognition.
If you don’t want to read the article, because it really is a poorly thought out piece of crap, the gist of it is, if you can’t move through space at faster than the speed of light, the trick becomes to move space around you. Meanwhile, your ship is contained in something called a “warp bubble.”
I didn’t quite understand how this warp bubble was to be created, how it was to be maintained, and whether you’d still be able to use your mobile phones. I also didn’t understand how getting the universe to move around you was supposed to be more energy efficient as traveling faster than the speed of light.
Personally, I think if we’re going to be sending humans into space on a serious scale, we’re going to have to go the ark ship route, a toroidal city in space, with aeroponic gardens and artificial gravity in the spinning outer wing, where generations of humans could live relatively normal lives.
