To Mars and Beyond, fast !

Everyone wonders about the journey to spaces, galaxies, and many more curiosities lie around our whole big universe. There is an article “To boldly go where no man has gone before: faster-than-light travel in 21^st century”, written by an engineering student specializing in electrical engineering, Michael Kukar at USC’s illumin website,  which would really interest masses of people who want to keep an update on every progress being made in our space science. This article is approx. 2000 words long and references nine different interesting sources which involve theoretical books, scientific discoveries publications around aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, spaces and many more.

It’s in everyone’s knowledge that speed is all about relativity and masses and as per Albert Einstein’s theory light travels at the highest speed being the lightest and so the fastest way to travel to space would be to travel at light speed but since even the closest star after sun, Alpha Centauri is 24 trillion miles away and would take generations to be there unless we find a new way that would make the traveling time shorter. This article discusses the same kind of possibilities that are emerging around us by dedicated scientist working in this field, and one of the theories that interests most to this scientist are that instead of looking for greater speed, why not decrease the distance between the source and the destination and that in order will give an impression of traveling to the same location as before at much lesser time. This idea has been inspired by a famous sci-fi series “Star Trek” which uses a “warp drive” to travel to the galaxy.

In 1994, a theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, in order to achieve the same utilized the fabric of space and time and created a device like warp sphere that would travel at speed of light years abiding by the Albert Einstein theory and at the same time parallelly using the idea of contracting the distances by creating a ripple in space and time in the shape of a bubble, called warp bubble and achieving the goal of shorter travel timespan.

But there is a huge gap between the theory and the reality,  which was brought in light by Dr. Harold White in 2011. The energy created by a regular warp bubble shape would create very few ripples and thus for harnessing higher frequency of ripples, the shape of these warp bubble need to be changed and hence that called the concept of Casimir Effect and antimatter that would manufacture a higher negative energy needed for the whole operation. There is still a lot of pending work and experiments to be done to come to the point where this discovery could be used in reality. Most of the experiments have been tested and applied successfully at a very small level like laboratories and many other challenges like detecting a presence of warp field lie ahead of us.

Still, there are a lot of issues and problems that have to be addressed like setting the direction of  travel to space as created ripples could make the warp wander off in any direction if not controlled , and to solve this, there have been few proposals like altering Dr. white’s original formula and applying some trigonometry to the same. The second and the most concerning alarm is the fuel cost. The antimatter used to create a higher amount of negative energy for higher ripple would cost a huge amount of antimatter fuel for covering such an epic distance like the galaxy. But that said, there lies a huge possibility ahead for greater achievements because of the groundwork has already been laid and hence in the near future, the solutions to things like fuel cost, the direction of travel and many more will be solved as our technology advances in parallel fields like would decrease the fuel cost.

Keywords :  Space, Galaxy, warp field, ripple effect, the universe, Casimir and antimatter, light years, energy

Reference: https://illumin.usc.edu/to-boldly-go-where-no-man-has-gone-before-faster-than-light-travel-in-the-21st-century-2/