So, you don't need a creepy spice-addicted mutant pilot swimming around in a chamber to bend space?

Maybe you do. The thing is, the 'exotic matter' that an Alcubierre drive requires is matter which has negative mass (This should not be confused with antimatter, which has positive mass like normal matter). Since none of our experiments have managed to find any matter with negative mass, I do not think we will be seeing this particular kind of propulsion system anytime soon.

Maybe you do. The thing is, the 'exotic matter' that an Alcubierre drive requires is matter which has negative mass (This should not be confused with antimatter, which has positive mass like normal matter). Since none of our experiments have managed to find any matter with negative mass, I do not think we will be seeing this particular kind of propulsion system anytime soon.

Things are only impossible till they're not, though. I don't think an 18th century scientist would have been able to even conceive the recent advances of modern physics. I do not doubt for one second that we'll find something - perhaps not warp drives, but something.

[quote name='mdwh' timestamp='1348063803' post='4981684']
[quote name='slicer4ever' timestamp='1347989976' post='4981306']
i'm assuming that it needs to be at a constant output to maintain the warped space(although the article talks about oscillating could reduce the power needed), so that means the device powering it has to be capable of powering pretty much the entire world today...constantly.

I'm not sure what you mean by constant output - the amount given was a measurement of energy, not power, so using that amount of energy "constantly" makes no sense. Presumably it's a figure that is meant to entail a total amount of energy required, for whatever length of time they imagined would be required.

If it meant to be units of power, then the article messed up, and we have no idea what is actually meant (is that one voyager per second? One voyager per hour?)
[/quote]
I took the article to mean that you would need a consistant output of voyager's per second, but they never clearly state the duration that the energy must be maintained in comparison to the length of a trip. considering the device would be constantly warping space, then i'd imagine the energy output would need to be maintained over a long duration, or "constantly".
[/quote]Though they also don't say what the time unit was - whether it was per second or what (seconds may be the SI unit, but given that we're measuring the energy in units of "voyagers", this isn't exactly SI in the first place:)).

Maybe you do. The thing is, the 'exotic matter' that an Alcubierre drive requires is matter which has negative mass (This should not be confused with antimatter, which has positive mass like normal matter). Since none of our experiments have managed to find any matter with negative mass, I do not think we will be seeing this particular kind of propulsion system anytime soon.

The drive has popped back up in the news because NASA scientists think they've refactored the design to require much less ridiculous amounts of energy, and they've actually begun a real experiment to test if they can create a positive/negative space-time warp bubble in the lab, right now, using something called a "White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer".

From my non-physicist googling -- it seems for a full-scale ship, they would want 500KG of undiscovered exotic matter with negative mass... however, for a small scale experiment, they can get by using existing known methods of generating regions of space with negative energy, such as the Casimir effect and squeezed light.

With alchemy people tried to transform lead into gold, if they only had the exotic matter called philosopher's stone. Now we have nuclear reactors, with much more useful applications than producing gold, which in the end resulted too expensive to be interesting anyways. So by the time technology will be able to create useful space-time bubbles, we could have something better, like mining external planets to build a shell around the sun, that feeds a global virtual reality machine for us to live inside, thus making space-time travel irrelevant. The energy ejection of the sun could be controlled to automatically move to the next youngest star to replenish batteries, while we finally get on track with the Dark Flow and on our way to visit the next contiguous universe.

Well if the warp drive fails, we can always use cryogenic sleep pods with the sub light engine

Nah, you re-route the power couplers through the auxillary fluxuators, cut in the backup, and hope that the dilithium crystals ("exotic matter"!) can take the strain.

Everybody knows that.

So, you don't need a creepy spice-addicted mutant pilot swimming around in a chamber to bend space?

No, you don't. you need the mutant to use it's limited prescience to avoid jumping into or too close to objects.

The thing is, the 'exotic matter' that an Alcubierre drive requires is matter which has negative mass (This should not be confused with antimatter, which has positive mass like normal matter).

**raises hand**

negative mass sounds just as imaginary (no pun intended) as negative numbers. So how does matter have negative mass and still actually exists?

negative mass sounds just as imaginary (no pun intended) as negative numbers. So how does matter have negative mass and still actually exists?

Everything theoretical is imaginary. Otherwise it becomes actual.

I guess Exotic Matter is not just a made up word.