Is Warp Drive Possible and What Power Would It Require?

[QAT]

How would a warp drive work, and it is also that it would need tremondous power to operate, how much power, and what kind of power?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Since it's science fiction, there's no good answer to your questions.

 

[WhoWee]

I don't think this is what you had in mind - a "warped" drive?

http://www.wlky.com/r/24644744/detail.html

 

[WhoWee]

A few more akin

http://www.google.com/images?q=huma...tle&resnum=7&ved=0CEcQsAQwBg&biw=1600&bih=684

 

[QAT]

What about the Alcubierre drive (also known as the Alcubierre metric or Warp Drive). A speculative mathematical model proposed by the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre.

 

[loseyourname]

A warp drive works by creating a subspace bubble around a spacecraft , contracting spacetime directly in front of that bubble and expanding it around it so that you essentially shorten the distance between the spacecraft and its destination, allowing it to travel faster than light.

The amount of energy needed is never specified, but it's created by bringing deuterium and antideuterium into direct contact, creating electromagnetic radiation.

Believe it or not, the writers were geeky enough to explain this in a decent amount of detail, mostly by releasing bits and pieces during episodes that fans collated into engineering manuals and even diagrams of the warp core and warp drive. It's all complete nonsense, of course.

 

[Dickfore]

How is this in General Physics?

 

[Nabeshin]

What about the Alcubierre drive (also known as the Alcubierre metric or Warp Drive). A speculative mathematical model proposed by the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre.

It's a bit tricky to universally define energy in GR, but the answer is a whole lot of negative energy. Let's say you want to create an alcubierre bubble around, oh I don't know, your house. Now I don't have any hard calculations (I could probably dig them up if you really wanted me to), but assuming you want to move at 1c, you're looking at (negative) energies on the order of the mass energy of a planet. At any rate, it's absolutely absurd how much exotic energy is required.

 

[brainstorm]

It's all complete nonsense, of course.

The big question is how many times did you try to build it your garage before settling on this conclusion?

 

[JDługosz]

Some short-duration Gamma Ray Bursts may be civilizations that just invented Warp Drive.