Warp drive

by John G. Hartnett

Gene Roddenberry’s classic sci-fi drama, Star Trek, made famous the warp drive, a theoretical concept whereby a spacecraft travels Faster Than Light (FTL).

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A ‘trekky’ enthusiast once told me that the warp speeds described on the television shows and in the movies may be calculated as follows. Warp factor w, from the original Star Trek series, means that the spacecraft travels at w³ times the canonical speed of light (c ≅ 300,000 km/s or 186,000 miles/s).³ Therefore warp factor w = 7 means the spacecraft travels at 7 = 343 c. It would be unusual to hear that the starship the USS Enterprise (see Figure 1) had exceeded warp factor 9, which is about 729 times the speed of light.

To travel even around the local neighbourhood of our galaxy warp factor 9 (from the original TV series) just won’t do it. The nearest star to our solar system is about four light-years away. So travelling at warp 9, you would take two days to get there. Not too bad. But what about going to other star systems?

To travel 50 light-years, which is a very small distance in the galaxy and which includes very few stars—only 64 sun-like stars—would take you 25 days at this speed. Within a distance of 100 light-years from Earth there are known to be only 512 stars of the same spectral class as our sun¹ and very few of those might be candidates for a solar system that could potentially support life.² So it would be much better to be able to travel 100 light-years quite quickly; but that would take you 50 days. However in the TV shows they often arrive in just a matter of hours.

Years later, the next TV series—Star Trek: the Next Generation—solved this problem by introducing a new formula that increased the warp speed in a highly non-linear fashion, such that a warp factor of 10 meant infinite speed across the galaxy. Thus distances were no longer a roadblock to get around the universe in the 40 minutes or less available in a TV episode. For example, warp factor w = 9.9999 is equal to nearly 200,000 c.³ At that speed you could hypothetically travel right across the galaxy in only six months.

Alcubierre Warp Drive

But that is all science-fiction. What about a real warp drive? In 1994, a Mexican physicist by the name of Miguel Alcubierre came up with a proposal for stretching the fabric of space-time in a way which would, theoretically, permit FTL travel.

Alcubierre found a theoretical solution of Einstein’s field equations producing what has been called Alcubierre Warp Drive. Needless to say it is a highly speculative mathematical model, which specifies how space, time and energy interact.

To put it simply, this method of space travel involves stretching the fabric of space-time in a wave which would (in theory) cause the space ahead of an object to contract while the space behind it would expand. An object inside this wave (i.e. a spaceship) would then be able to ride this region, known as a “warp bubble” of flat space.⁴

The spacecraft hypothetically generates the warp bubble in its bow wake and collapses it behind the craft as it travels through space-time. See Figure 2. The speed of light within the bubble remains the same speed of light, c. The spacecraft undergoes no local acceleration—no huge g-forces are experienced by the craft.⁵ Thus Captain James T. Kirk, or anyone else on board, would not spill his/her coffee even as they go to warp 9.9999.

But the idea of warp drive presents a few problems.

For one, there are no known methods to create such a warp bubble in a region of space that would not already contain one. Second, assuming there was a way to create such a bubble, there is not yet any known way of leaving once inside it.⁴

That’s a problem. Once you enter hyperspace, or “subspace” as they called it in the original Star Trek series, you are stuck there, never to leave it again. That would have been a good story for an episode in the series.

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In 2012, NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory (aka Eagleworks) even announced that they had begun conducting experiments to see if a “warp drive” was possible. The team lead scientist, Dr Harold Sonny White, described their work in a NASA paper titled Warp Field Mechanics 101. In 2013, White and members of Eagleworks published the results of their 19.6-second warp field test under vacuum conditions. These results, which were deemed to be inconclusive, were presented at the 2013 Icarus Interstellar Starship Congress held in Dallas, Texas. I cannot find any report of any progress after that time.⁶

Real physical evidence also suggests that FTL space travel is impossible.⁷ It is a problem of energy, which is well understood by physicists. Alcubierre’s theory requires the use of large amounts of a never observed type of “exotic matter” that violates known physical laws. It is needed to produce a negative type of energy to fold space into the warp bubble. This hypothetical negative energy involves either tachyons (which travel faster than light speed) or a naked singularity (which is a black hole without the event horizon).

Still, one of the most dubious is Dr. Alcubierre himself. He listed a number of concerns, starting with the vast amounts of exotic matter that would be needed. “The warp drive on this ground alone is impossible,” he said. “At speeds larger than the speed of light, the front of the warp bubble cannot be reached by any signal from within the ship,” he said. “This does not just mean we can’t turn it off; it is much worse. It means we can’t even turn it on in the first place.”⁸

But even if such a drive could be developed it has some serious problems to overcome. When the spaceship reaches its destination it has to stop, and that’s when the problems begin. Metaphorically hell breaks loose!

Researchers from the University of Sydney have done some advanced crunching of numbers regarding the effects of FTL space travel via Alcubierre drive, taking into consideration the many types of cosmic particles that would be encountered along the way. Space is not just an empty void between point A and point B… rather, it’s full of particles that have mass (as well as some that do not.) What the research team—led by Brendan McMonigal, Geraint Lewis, and Philip O’Byrne—has found is that these particles can get “swept up” into the warp bubble and focused into regions before and behind the ship, as well as within the warp bubble itself.

When the Alcubierre-driven ship decelerates from superluminal speed, the particles its bubble has gathered are released in energetic outbursts. In the case of forward-facing particles the outburst can be very energetic—enough to destroy anyone at the destination directly in front of the ship.⁹

Anyone waiting at the destination would be blasted into oblivion by a beam of gamma rays resulting from the extreme blue-shifted particles released from the forward region of the warp bubble as the spaceship comes out of warp drive. But this is all theoretical anyway.

Why even consider FTL travel?

The galaxy is enormous in size (about 100,000 light-years in diameter) and those who believe that life evolved on Earth see no distinction between our home planet and any other planet out there that might support life. Like many others, Gene Roddenberry imagined a universe full of creatures that have evolved along different evolutionary paths, producing all sorts of strange creatures not seen on Earth. Among them are many different forms of alien intelligent life.

There are those who imagine either that mankind will one day travel out there and meet intelligent aliens, like Klingons or Vulcans, or, that those alien civilisations have evolved to such an advanced state that they may have already invented warp drives and the ability to travel across the vastness of space to Earth.

This is pure fiction, which is evidenced by the plethora of sci-fi TV shows and movies that incorporate warp-drive-powered spacecraft. The alternative in the movies for sub-light-speed spacecraft is sleep chambers where the travellers are put into “hyper-sleep”—a form of suspended animation—for a 100 years or more to make the enormous journey, even to just one of those nearby stars.

Recently astrophysicist Paul Davies acknowledged the rarity of life in the universe. He admitted that Earth may be the only place where life exists.¹⁰ Certainly Earth is the only planet in the universe known to support life. This admission makes nonsense of belief in alien intelligent life on other planets outside our solar system. The question here for the Christian believer is: Did God create life on other planets? And if not, why did He create such a large universe?¹¹

Warp drives are really just about a type of faith—a blind faith. That type of faith posits that intelligent life is ‘out there’ (contrary to all evidence to the contrary^12,13) and that mankind will eventually break the seemingly impossible barrier of the vastness of space and break out into the galaxy.

To conclude that the alien races are so much more advanced than we are, and therefore they must have conquered the problem of warp drive, is pure storytelling based on evolution. It is a substitute for the Creator God.

Darwinian evolution is assumed to have increased the brain power of some putative alien race to the point where they teach tensor calculus in nursery school. Thus their adults are more godlike than we are and find manipulation of space, time and energy a trifling matter. With their machines they can create space and time and manipulate energy and gravity to make safe intra-galactic, even inter-galactic, travel possible. Hence they can visit distant places in the galaxy at will.

This article started out with science fiction and now it ends with science fiction. Believe me; it is more fiction than science because the starting premise—Darwinian evolution—is pure fiction. Prof. Richard Dawkins once famously said:

“Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening.”¹⁴

It has never been observed but that is what science requires—observation of evidence. What Dawkins is really referring to is historical science, not operational science. The latter can be observed while it is happening.¹⁵ The former cannot. As the famous evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr admitted,

“For example, Darwin introduced historicity into science. Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science—the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.”¹⁶

Perhaps the main reason NASA even considered conducting “warp drive” experiments is the entrenched belief in Darwinian evolution and the implied existence of aliens from other star systems. Hence the need to go out there and meet them.

Some even believe they have already made the trip there (Roswell, New Mexico¹⁷), while others say only interdimensional travel is possible. The latter folk communicate with ‘aliens from other stars systems’ using meditation and other New Age psychic practices. They have bypassed the impossibility of FTL travel and claim thought is not so limited. Hence, some say that they are in daily communication with ‘little green men’. It makes you wonder where this will lead!