The Science of Star Trek's Warp Drives

[@OrangeRiver]

I know I probably mispronounced Alcubierre throughout this video, but...I hope you can forgive me ;). So, do you think we could build a warp drive? How far away are we from that? Let me know down below! EDIT: The Parker Solar probe's fastest speed to date is actually less than a tenth of a percent the speed of light (0.064% or 0.00064c).

[@nolongerusingthisaccount]

It may not matter much to you but I am perpetually impressed with your explanations and attention to detail! Well done!!!

[@26denterprises]

Planck density shell engineering. That would rip enough out of the vacuum. Would need a relegated sector in the Oort cloud, safety first.

[@SnarkNSass]

I would pronounce it the same as you did. Live Long and Engage? 😂😉😁😎🖖🏻

[@OrangeRiver]

@subraxas A soliton wave is a wave that maintains its shape while propagating at a constant velocity

[@DATA-qt3nb]

I feel like 1000 years is pretty far out there, considering what we have done the last couple of centuries i think we could have something resembling basic warp drive by like 2200 or 2300ish. Great video as always man!

[@MatthewCaunsfield]

Great dive into the hypothesis, especially in reducing the absurdly high energy requirements

[@DomVonDoom]

I'm at the point now where I give my thumbs up before the video even starts. I love your channel man keep it up!

[@DavidNash1948]

Whenever it happens, my grandchildren have been instructed to be in Bozeman on 5 April 2063- - - "just in case" (cross fingers).

[@chrisinnes2128]

If I'm still alive in 41 years time I'll be there too " just in case "

[@maarkaus48]

My mom was a geologist, and when we watched star trek growing up, she would get snitty at Scotty handling "di-lithium' and she would say, hey that's just rose quartz. Then when he took out burnt DI-lithium she said 'hey thats just smoky quartz'. She then began to propose what real DI-litium would look like. It became a real science discussion that was distracting from the show, but it was fun. watching her get a bit fussy about when shows get minerals and crystals wrong was fun. I don't remember what her conclusions landed on, but she had some interesting speculations as to why di-lithium would have the properties it did.

[@Shazam999]

In the books (non-canon), one of them wrote about how something like 1% of quartz on Earth was dilithium.

[@beezelbuzzel]

Awesome as always! As far as "Trek Tech" goes, a cloaking device isn't nearly as far off as everything else. At least the visual aspect of it.

[@anthonylowder6687]

Thank you for the positive attitude on the very real possibility of warp drive as most of the videos I have seen on KZbin give a very pessimistic or altogether absolute negative attitude towards even the basic concept of warp drive. I wonder if the first warp ship will be call Enterprise, Einstein, Phoenix or Bonaventure(as seen in the Star Trek TAS episode Time Trap).

[@saxondark]

Another great video Tyler and very interesting plus the fact you used my fave scene from the Divergence episode of Enterprise was awesome nice work.

[@therandals]

Great vid! Two thumbs up! That said, I really wish that people would be more exact when referencing the speed of things; "C", the speed of light, is not 186,000 miles per second. It is 186,282 miles per second, or precisely, 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum.

[@waylonmccrae3546]

Finally ..... someone got it right !! Big Klondike Bar , & greatly deserved !! 👍🏻

[@therandals]

​@@waylonmccrae3546 Thanks! I'd do more than that for a Klondike Bar®😉...

[@neto135791]

hi, i loved your video, but you missed that scientists already created a warp bubble accidentally last year, in a nano scale and it fits perfectly with the Alcubierre drive theory. so at least in part its theoretical anymore

[@kevinjohnson7553]

Will we eventually build a warp drive, or some other form of faster-than-light travel? I believe so. Who knows how much of the physics we consider fact today will be either found to be incorrect or greatly expanded upon over the coming decades and centuries? When I was a kid, multiple universes were strictly the realm of science fiction. Now? Top theoretical physicists are seriously considering it. Anyway, great video Tyler.

[@OrangeRiver]

Thank you Kevin!

[@sonpopco-op9682]

There is already TONS of physics that has been stated to be true based upon false assumption. Stars made of gas? Every other element compresses to a metal. Faster than "light" travel will never be achieved. To travel beyond this temporal limit would require you to exactly duplicate yourself and exist simultaneously in two different locations.

[@kylereese4822]

@@OrangeRiver Yes... figured a possible way of doing it... i`ve put it on Musk`s twitter... :)

[@ThatBoomerDude56]

@@sonpopco-op9682 Stars do not compress because there is outward pressure from the energy that is being produced. Your analogy to being "compressed to a metal" (which is also technically incorrect) is not valid.

[@ThatBoomerDude56]

@@OrangeRiver Faster than light travel = travel backwards in time.

[@cdwarrior6582]

On a nano scale a warp bubble has already been accidentally created about 5 years ago. We’re closer than some might think.

[@brll5733]

This is missing the recent Lentz drive version, which does not require negative energy.

[@radaro.9682]

You didn't mention the accidental warp field created a few months ago.

[@ArronRatliff]

Even if some one cracks the mathematical formula for Warp Drive tomorrow. It'd still likely take hundreds of years for material sciences to catch up to build a ship. Hopefully by then we have limitless clean energy to power the ship. The dream of traveling among the stars is strong with humanity. It may take us a long time but we'll get there eventually.

[@protestantbeliever8124]

We have to build one. Vger is already out there now.

[@jackiereynolds2888]

I wonder if there are mind- boggling energy sources out there in our universe that we as yet know virtually nothing about ?

[@wulphstein]

Matter is made of fermions. If you realized that spacetime is made of some kind of boson, and figured out its properties, you might be able to figure out how to charge up those bosons with gravitational potential energy.

[@savannahhizer2341]

Thank you for posting this! I know almost nothing about this level of advanced physics [and only a little more about fictional warp drives!] and you explained it all so well. I'm going to use this video heavily for writing research :)

[@A4957_BT]

Im sure these r possible. Thnx 4 da amazing info vid, keep up da gud work sir.

[@kevinthomas2437]

This is Awesome thanks for sharing, absolutely love it!

[@anon-yw4wd]

From what I understood the warp bubble is a semi-extra dimensional space made up of space-time. It is not breaking the speed of light, it is side-stepping it.

[@JeremyWS]

I think we could build a warp drive, but I think it won't be for a long time in the future. I think that Star Trek's prediction for the invention of FTL travel is a bit optomistic. I think that FTL travel won't happen for a very long time, if ever. I hope it is at least achievable someday, though. I liked this video.

[@pistolp8037]

I wouldn't be so pessimistic about faster space travel. NASA just released a new Ion Drive they came up with that could hit 99% the speed of light, without violating general relativity, as long as the spaceship using it had a fusion reactor aboard it. That said, we're only now developing massive fusion reactors on Earth that are finally becoming energy positive (they create more energy than they consume), so if we could miniaturize fusion reactors in the next 100 years, then it would be easy to hit 99% the speed of light before the 22nd century. Right now the big problem with space is the lack of funding that goes to space agencies like NASA to research these drives and make them a reality!

[@TheBandit7613]

We're too busy building new, better ways to kill people. Priorities man, priorities.

[@sulanis8444]

That's the beauty of science and technology. We create an idea. think about said idea, share said idea, create said idea. It may take a day, a week, or a century. The point is that science is always evolving. Example: humans use to 100% believe that the sun resolved around the earth and not the other way around, were as today with new knowledge, ever better tools we are discovering new things that blew our minds from the previous year.

[@TheLastStarfighter77]

Great video! and very thought provocative, I always like to think outside the box especially with this subject and had the idea that it may not be us that creates or discovers FTL or similar operating space craft, it might be AI that does this? Food for thought 😉

[@ReiHinoSenshi]

Solaton wave was a episode of tng

[@ItsElectroax]

The same thing about a time to make an efficient fusion reactor was said... and we did it inside a few decades... I think we underestimate our capability...

[@garyrobbins283]

Don't worry folks, about 40 years from now a pig farmer from Montana will figure it out.

[@jasonhaymanonthedrawingboard]

It is part of the wave function. There is a few tricks out there that could get more energy out of space time. Rougewaves. Essentially spiking out of the perturbed space. Solitons are one solution. The other is pulses timed to increase energy density thus a massive warp bubble. You see rouge wave in the oceans. They occur due to variable wave geometry and cumulative effects. If the Casimir effect is taken into account? Then it’s possible. We all have seen what happened when you put detergent on oil when it on the waters surface. The same might be true here? Or when you place a different mass object near a small one and it moves away due to surface tension displacing it location. Just a question of how to achieve something similar concerning spacetime?

[@e.l.4409]

All we know is that it's really really really really really really really fun to take a speed of light ride.

[@Koexistence13]

Do one on inertial dampeners

[@Kualinar]

We MAY have already made a warp bubble... By accident.

[@sfkeepay]

The journey from “derided idea” to “routinely found under Christmas trees” is so common that naysayers ought to be more circumspect.

[@weightlifting_socialist]

One thing we can say for sure is that the first as fast and faster than light ship will be named Enterprise. Hopefully it will be with a world government and a society like Star Treks so we can all live the life we want to live.

[@davidlaney6153]

Star Trek was planted by Aliens to speed up our progress...

[@audigit]

so, impossible next Tuesday, then

[@keagaming9837]

I think it’s possible to build a warp drive this century, we of course need to find a way to produce or gain more antimatter… but it is possible. The first warp drive ships will be small, experimental, and expensive, but if humanity pulls itself together and focuses on the space industry, we can get warp drive by the year 2100.

[@hugobracamontesbaltazar]

Fool...

[@keagaming9837]

@@hugobracamontesbaltazar Hey, we need at least one person to be optimistic. I mean, it still is possible that we could get warp drive before 2100, very unlikely but possible.

[@daveridgeway2639]

Scientists DO call traveling faster than light speed "warp speed" it came from STAR TREK. Dave...

[@rickzabala6020]

What about ion drive??

[@scotth6814]

As Fox Muldaur would say, I WANT to believe. But, like time travel, I don't think it's possible. The universe has imposed a speed limit upon us, and the fines for speeding are unaffordable. Makes good science fiction though!

[@ajbonine69]

Remarkable work! Perhaps is better than not at all. May take a while, though.

[@onetruekeeper418]

Even warp drive may be too slow for space travel. What is needed is a technology to teleport from one point in space to any other point instantly.

[@protorhinocerator142]

Because the universe is so large, and the speed of light is so slow, even if we could go the speed of light (we can't) it would still be too slow for us to get around like they do in Star Trek. And since we want to go to places like that, we desperately want warp drive to work. Warp drive, hyperspace, or some other useful FTL drive would be needed to get us anywhere fun in anything approaching a useful amount of time.

[@preppertrucker5736]

Forget about warp drive, I’m looking forward to hyperdrive and trans warp corridors or even better yet a Stargate 👍

[@Andreas-gh6is]

Those that compare breaking the light barrier to the feat of breaking the sound barrier forget that we had a shitty concept of why supersonic flight might not be possible and we have very detailed models that say lightspeed is a hard limit.

[@milkywaytherapper]

LIVE LONG & ENGAGE...!!!

[@Jamex07]

I don't think replication can actually synthesize new elements. It just stores and transports matter in a confinement beam. Replication and transporter technology are supposed to be the same in principle. Except with replication you're using new matter to recreate a copy of a pattern, rather than reconstituting an original pattern.

[@harrykuehb8938]

Let's talk Starfleet's experience with faster than light travel as though it were real. 100 years to develop a FTL worth a dam, meaning a warp 5 engine. Just breaking the light barrier does help much. To Golden Star System it would still take 8 centuries. With a warp 5 you only need 40 years, definitely an improvement. But still it would two full generations to get there. So just going faster than light, even if possible doesn't end the problem of the vast scale of the universe.

[@kevanhubbard9673]

Light would appear to be part of the structure of the universe rather than a speed as such therefore, even if you had the energy, it's probably not possible to travel faster than light.Going faster than light either directly or someway around it like wormholes creates major paradoxes in space/time.I'm afraid that it's probably only possible to travel twixt the stars in sub light craft, emphasis on the sub!, which would take hundreds of years to reach just Proxima Centauri assuming some kind of yet to be invented fission or fusion drive but without that thousands of years.

[@anthonyb5279]

The are already 2 types of warp drives that work. Neither is faster than light. Both do use the Casimir effect sort of. They interact with sub space like Casimir effect but don't push together. relativistic effects are not mitigated. Will not be likely it will ever go faster than the speed of light, you still have that mater mass problem as you approach the speed of light.

[@hawkticus_history_corner]

I wouldn't write out this century yet. Our tech has been advancing at a pretty insane rate all things considered

[@doorran]

Well, we did transparent aluminum and flip phones. I wouldn't bet against us.

[@Thrakus]

How did they get so far in TOS? I mean they go to the end of space. Worm hole? That was always my guess but why not use the worm holes even again? Also why do they never use the tech they find like TNG gets warm wave tech which can send them 1 day at wrap 9 in only 20 sec at min speed of the wrap wave. One tested later same?

[@vernyanke1131]

Objects observed traveling faster than the speed of light by Hubble telescope. If true then warp speed is obtainable and a loophole in the theory of relativity is possible in my opinion.

[@NA-oq4ty]

No time is an artificial construct, and a workfield exists both in 4 dimensions and 3 dimensions at once since the fourth dimension is time, and we have not yet figured out how to manipulate time beyond the usual way of just living 1 Day at a Time. We can not make an engine

[@manw3bttcks]

The statement that existing space vehicles are so slow is sort of disingenuous, in cases like Parker SP and Juno which are really fast, we were trying to do a certain job and going even faster would not have worked. Suppose we could get Juno to go 1000 miles/sec, then we'd get there faster but probably wouldn't be able to stop to go into orbit. We haven't really tried to make a "fastest possible" space vehicle. If I were to ask a bunch of engineers to come up with a super fast ship they might try using a salt water nuclear rocket or some other bizarre propulsion

[@literalsarcasm1830]

They used to say it would take the combined effort of all of humanity a million years to figure out how to make a flying machine. Literally 19 days later, the first airplane was invented.

[@elonwong]

Also consider that physics involving flying for today is rather simple Back then, it’s impossible

[@literalsarcasm1830]

@@elonwong it's only impossible until it isn't.

[@jhonbus]

I don't know why anybody thought that, given everybody could see with their own eyes it was possible thanks to the millions of meat-based flying machines everywhere. If we had evidence of anything moving faster than the speed of light that would make the situation a bit more hopeful.

[@williamwester223]

@@literalsarcasm1830 "anything is impossible until it is done" some quote i heard somewhere

[@LisaAnn777]

Well somebody is already getting to Earth. They seem be able to do thousands of miles an hour inside our atmosphere without any atmospheric drag or anything. So it must be possible. Because they make our militaries top technology look like toys. 🛸

[@darrensmith6999]

Don't forget the Internal Dampening field for the ship so one dose not end up like chunky salsa during acceleration and deceleration. Pluss a forward navigation deflector and structural integrity field. (:

[@pwnmeisterage]

Don't forget all the fuel you need to generate power. And all the reaction mass you need to burn for acceleration. Even assuming (pretending) that Alculbierre's theoretical model does generate a "warp" field it still doesn't actually propel itself. You still need an actual propulsion system. You've still got to carry billions of tons of fuel just to get to the closest star at 1g acceleration.

[@prashank]

@@pwnmeisterageafaik you don’t need a propulsion if you configure your wrap drive in a way where gravity pulls and pushes you forward. That’s why you have no inertia in that setup so no G forces.

[@bramweinreder2346]

​@@pwnmeisterage the whole point is that Earth cracked the puzzle of energy abundance, so much si that they can convert matter to energy and vice versa, end world hunger, do away with the monetary economy, and give equal opportunity to those willing to put the work in. The technology responsible is barely described, in a matter that's not too restrictive for a hundred different writers to work with, but like magic it still needs to be consistent enough to be convincing.

[@wetguavass]

cup holder

[@JAGtheTrekkieGEMINI1701]

As a kid I really believed that humanity will achieve FTLS Travel during my lifetime... A boy can dream, right? As a man, I do believe that we will achieve FTLS Travel in the 22nd century... A man can *STILL* dream, right!?

[@gniccolai]

Time dilation it's not a "magical" property of things moving fast, it's simply a direct observation of the fact that reality takes time to propagate. If you look at proxima centauri now from earth, you see it as it was 4 years ago. If you could teleport there now, in 0 Time, or travel there in a few seconds, or hours, you'd get there at it's current time, which is 4 years in the future + the time you need to get there. Time dilation is the name of a formula used in relativity to express this concept. This means that 1) you can travel at any speed, nothing is stopping you from going a billion parsec per second, but the places you reach will be billion of years forward in time with respect to how you saw them when you left, and 2) ftl travel is actually traveling backwards in time. I.e. since NOW proxima is 4 years forward in time with respect to how you see it, to get there before 4 years from now you need to travel back in time; this would mean that, if you get to proxima before 4 of their years have passed, you could look back at earth and see your past self still making preparations for the trip. Hope this clarifies FTL

[@oldbloke135]

It's not reality that takes time to propagate, it is light. What you see is in the past because we only know about that reality by observing light that took four years to get here. If you could travel there instantly you would arrive in the present. You could look back at yourself on Earth in the past but you couldn't get to yourself at that time, or even send a message with your infinite speed transporter, because that reality ceased to exist four years ago. Proxima Centauri's current time is not four years in the future. It is the same as ours.

[@gniccolai]

@@oldbloke135 It's not light that takes time to propagate, it's reality; or more precisely "causality" (that's the meaning of the letter C used as constant for the speed of light). As light has no mass, it is *observed* to propagate at the maximum possible speed, which is the speed of causality. In fact, it's not just light that takes 4 years to propagate from proxima; gravity (i.e. gravity waves) travel at the same speed. For example, if the sun were to vanish, the earth would still be orbiting it for 8 minutes, before the effect of the lack of gravity pull could be perceived. I know that it's hard to wrap your head around this concepts, but fact is, space *IS* time. Distance in space *is* separation in time. Curvature of space (i.e. because of a gravity field) *is* curvature of time. A photon travels at an infinite speed. If you emit a photon here, it immediately reaches proxima -- which is separated from us by 4 years of time. This is hard to grasp because we know that, if you put there a mirror, we'll see the photon coming back after 8 years; but still, the photon has experienced no time. What actually happens is that the position of the "now" of proxima in space-time is located 4 years in the future with respect to us, and same is the position of the earth with respect to proxima when the photon is reflected back. Same thing happens with FTL travel. With FTL, you could be at proxima at an arbitrary point in time before 4 years in the future; breaking causality, you'd be able to look back to earth and see you preparing for the travel; using FTL again, you would be able to get back to earth at any arbitrary point in time before leaving earth -- because you broke causality, the relationship between cause and effect. Notice that a warp drive doesn't necessarily mean FTL travel. It could be used to reach the speed of light, or near, and so, travel between earth and proxima in a few minutes -- for the traveler. For the earth and proxima, time would still pass at 4 year per trip rate. So, basically, I suspect that FTL is impossible, because the speed of light is infinite, relative to causality. With an engine that can push you to the speed of light you can reach any point in the universe in an instant; just, the universe may not be there anymore. To go faster than light you need to push a more-than-infinite speed, and travel back in time. It's not impossible (there is such a mathematical concept as *order of infinities*, or infinities larger than others, which btw, its at the base of the computation of C, plank length and plank time), but it's very hard, even mathematically.

[@gniccolai]

That is not exactly correct: it matches what the formula of time dilation says, but you're applying it at the wrong frame of reference. The quantity of energy you need to accelerate from 10 to 11m/sec 8 Is the same energy you need to accelerate from 1BP/sec to 1BP/sec+1m/sec. Its's only from a stationary frame of reference that it looks like objects can't travel faster than C, and so, that it takes an exponentially larger energy to asymptotically approach that speed. The speed of light is infinite, but each point in space is separated IN TIME from each other. You can visualize it by drawing circles, or spheres, around stars at 1, 2, 3 ly away etc. The "now" of every place in space has also a diff3rent "space" in time. The formula of time dilation, that sets the maximum speed as C reverses this relation, and is made so that we can compute distances and speeds more easily. If you sit somewhere and you see a starship passing by, you will see it moving at maximum at C, because that' how the reality (causality) or an object moving at an infinite speed will reach you through an ever evolving space-time. And of course, due to to that effect, to have you observing them going from C-2m/s to C-1m/s would require an immense amount of power. But for them, that you would perceive as an extra m/s is actually half an infinity of parsec/secs. Said that, it's true that a warp drive would be immensely more efficient that everything we know. By traveling at a constant acceleration (for half the trip, and then deceleration) of 1g from here to proxima, we could get there in some 2.7 years (that'd be 4+2.7 years from earth or proxima POV). But we have nothing that could provide us with such a thrust for so much time right now. Regardless of a warp drive being able to break causality or not, it would be immensely more efficient, not to delve in those pesky details of interstellar dust hitting you hard as a hundred atomic bombs, after 1 year of a constant 1g acceleration. However, adding 1g of acceleration requirs the same energy, no matter your current speed; the relativity formulas are reframing the local acceleration I terms of a stationary observer; it what you'd see if you were sitting on a planet, not what you would experience on board of a starship.

[@chriselson7268]

First of all, room temperature super conductors will have to perfected. Without these, harnessing the extreme energies needed for warp drives will never be realized.

[@logiticalresponse9574]

Im a lil more optimistic. The rate in which technology is evolving is insane . Think about how much we advanced civilization from 4000 years ago untill 1900 then from 1900 - 2000 then from 2000 - 2022 . I would argue we have evolved more since 2000 thean we did from 4000 years ago.

[@mattcorley4622]

Once we master quantum mechanics and finally understand the so called Theory of Everything then we can really speculate on the time frame for warp drive.

[@socipathicgaming5914]

From what I have read that time frame was a couple months ago.

[@jbsmith966]

42

[@Tristan3D]

Define "master quantum mechanics", what exactly is it with quantum mechanics that would solve the problem of causality violations created with every (!) FTL system? There is nothing to "master" - quantum mechanics isn't some kind of game at which you get better if you just play it often enough. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us in any way - it owes us no explanations or answers to our questions. A theory of everything would be "elegant", as the theoretical physicists say, but there is no guarantee that a unified theory is even definable. The understanding of quantum mechanics does exactly nothing to solve the causality violation problem of any FTL system - being "mastered" or not.

[@socipathicgaming5914]

@@Tristan3D The problem with your rant is that they already answered the causality violation with the warp bubble, and yes that is an actual thing that has already been proven. The thing that was holding everything back from creating a working warp drive was the amount of energy that the warp drive would have to produce the create the warp bubble. This was solved by an astrophysicist named Erik Lentz. Now the biggest issue is the actual creation of a warp drive that can create and sustain an actual warp bubble. Than after that would be creating one large enough to fit an actual craft in it. Your going to need to come up with a different argument on why FTL is not possible, sorry.

[@TheMonkeyworks105]

Amazing job explaining it, I'd say I was able to follow 90% of what you were saying. I believe firmly, that there will be several "jumps" in tech and knowledge in the next 100 years that will at least get us to and from Mars in a relative short amount of time if not the nearest solar system. Star Trek and Star Wars have gone a long way to inspire us to explore. Hopefully we don't end up like the Expanse or Firefly (not to dig on them, both great shows, just a bit depressing and real)

[@keirfarnum6811]

That’s assuming we’re not already there. According to Ben Rich, the former head of Lockheed Skunkworks, they not already have the ability to take ET home, they have the contract to do so. Of course it could just be disinformation, but it makes one wonder.

[@sonpopco-op9682]

Get ready to add to your depression. Star Wars and Star Trek are both Space FANTASY shows, with zero basis in actual science. Real progress is slow, as is travel in the vastness between worlds. The expanse is also unrealistic. Fusion engines? We can barely achieve it in a lab. Nope, travel will be slow tedious & dangerous.

[@TheMonkeyworks105]

@@sonpopco-op9682 That's cool and all, but seeing as how a lot of things from those franchises are now at least in some part true (like what this video is about) I'm sure that people in the 1920's would not have believed it possible in a million years to video chat with someone thousands of miles away. I like to be an optimist whenever possible. Feel free to be a Debbie Downer, my resistance is NOT Futile.

[@sonpopco-op9682]

@@TheMonkeyworks105 wait - you think that this fantasy video is real? You believe the over-hyped click-bait science-ignorant media claims that NASA has a warp drive???? EPIC FAIL

[@TheMonkeyworks105]

Ok, pump the brakes there Skippy. I'm trying to be polite and adult, showing that there's room enough for both our opinions. I'm under no delusions that the force is real, or that we will have something exactly like warp drive, I also don't see why you feel the need to shit all over "ideas" how about we agree that I'm right and you are jaded and more angsty than Anakin with sand in his boots.

[@sjTHEfirst]

Even going as fast as the Parker Probe, it will be a long road, you know, getting from there to here. 🤣

[@milokojjones]

I've got faith of the heart, we can do anything. We'll get there eventually.

[@milokojjones]

I've got faith of the heart, we can do anything. We'll get there eventually.

[@gstcomputing65]

Actually, the fastest speed ever traveled was set by me when my girlfriend started talking about marriage.

[@kaitlyn__L]

This turned out even better than I’d hoped 😊 I doubt I’ll live to see it but I do think the elasticity of spacetime is enough that the positive-mass-only designs could prove the key - the mass-energy of another spacecraft isn’t exactly hard (theoretically, for space industry) to harvest from the Van Allen belts or equivalent parts of Jupiter. Much like there were millennia-old steam engine designs built to test a concept, and not applied to large scale for a very long time. Sooner or later I believe we’ll have the engineering capabilities to do it. If we can build a huge fusion fuel or antimatter fuel “refinery” orbiting a star, it would be a huge undertaking, but economies of scale afterwards could indeed enable fairly cheap travel - to nearby stars at least. But a single solar system is so huge, that’s still a massive boon. And indeed, in Star Trek humanity’s first colonies went out slower than warp 2, just barely faster than c, on multi-year or near-decade one-way voyages. The progress in Star Trek is accelerated for dramatic purposes, from millennia to centuries, though indeed in the setting that’s fairly unusually fast, with the others often taking millennia. But to give a really conservative estimate, I’d be surprised if another 10,000 years from now (given that’s roughly how old agriculture is) if we couldn’t do it. Think of all the new ways of probing the universe we’ve uncovered in just the last century alone!

[@BubbaFranks-TheSwordDragon]

Totally cool that you also watch PBS Space Time

[@OrderofthePipe]

Even if we could build a warp drive, we’d better also quickly develop a functional deflector dish, because there’s almost 0% chance of dodging space debris at those speeds. Even impacting flecks of dust would be like being struck by a nuke!

[@flyingfoamtv2169]

or we could invent dune navigators. @orangeriver please do a video on dune navigators (book version)

[@deanlawson6880]

The deflector dish is the easy part. That's known physics. We can easily create magnetic fields, even large ones. There is only the question of the engineering to properly shape and then scale up the fields to far enough in front of the craft to make them fully usable. Once we can harness fusion or antimatter to power a future warp drive we will have all the power we need to run a large safe navigational deflector in front of the ship to keep it safe. The initial problem with the whole thing is harnessing the required power to do all this stuff. Fusion power will help ALOT with getting us well on our way.

[@graeabarth2227]

I thought warping space around a vehicle would warp any materials in that space - such as dust, asteroids etc - around the vehicle. The vehicle is static, only space is moving around the vehicle. Therefore, deflectors only become necessary at sub-light (or impulse speeds in Star Trek parlance) velocity.

[@truerandomchannel]

@@graeabarth2227 that's what i thought too!

[@mikeflightfpv2162]

The ship wouldn't actually move. The space around it does and therefore most if not all would go around the bubble.

[@cozmothemagician7243]

Going faster than sound was once considered rubbish. Travel to the Moon was just fiction. Robots on other planets were just silly. And people living and working in space was only something for cartoons. Welcome to 2022 O_o OTOH, there are people who currently believe (or at least say they do) that the Earth is flat. On the gripping hand... IMO the best answer to the Fermi Paradox is that faster than light travel is simply impossible. This is why we don't have interstellar (insert name of multi level marketing company) sales-aliens knocking on our door telling us about this amazing opportunity they have... Nor do we have aliens showing up in LEO telling us we should accept their 'savior'. Maybe C really is a GOOD thing after all...

[@Theekg101]

Any time anyone tells me how far we have yet to go, I remember that the New York Times estimated it would be 10 million years before man could fly; exactly nine days before our first successful controlled takeoff

[@gatheringparty239]

I was today years old when I found out Deuterium is real.

[@nolongerusingthisaccount]

Me too!!

[@mxk6104]

impulse drives are real, too. :)

[@garrygriggs1888]

As of a few months ago scientists did possibly create a tiny warp bubble, only one at the atomic scale. They are currently reviewing the data to see if they did or not.

[@keirfarnum6811]

Technically, that was a simulation; at least as I understand it. I might be wrong.

[@socipathicgaming5914]

@@keirfarnum6811 - it was not a simulation. It was an accident. The scientist were running an experiment for something else when it happened and than immediately stopped caring about, what is possible the biggest discovery in human history, because it was not what they were getting paid to study. And from my understanding, they already confirmed it was a warp bubble.

[@Majima_Nowhere]

I expect it'll be the same kind of thing that we saw with quantum teleportation about a decade ago. It's nice to confirm that it's possible on an atomic scale, but we're centuries off being able to do anything with that information.

[@georged5420]

JPL reported making a small warp bubble by accident. this was done while studying the casimir effect. they want to transport a small object within said warp bubble. hope it works.

[@reaperofsouls1528]

Personally I think FTL travel is possible but not likely to be "invented" any time soon. In the case of a "Warp Drive" we'd have to fully understand how to manipulate Space Time to even begin to come close to creating a "Warp Field" and from what I understand gravity/mass may play a role. So basically we'd have to understand how to manipulate gravity/mass in order to Warp the Space Time fields. This is way beyond what we currently know about gravity and mass. That said there are more theoretical ways to achieve FTL. My favorite is Teleportation like we see in Battle Star Galactica and Star Trek Discovery (ship and crew teleport in space) and in Star Gate SG1 via the Star Gates (two devices linked together through a wormhole of sorts, where your physical body is scanned, stored in crystal memory, and then reprinted on the other side). All of this teleportation might be theoretically possible by using principals of Quantum Entanglement and Quantum Teleportation (Basically being able to send information from one particle to another regardless of the distances involved, basically kind of like a copy machine). However in the case of a ship or 1 human being this would be sending Trillions if not Quadrillions of particle information to Trillions and Quadrillions of particles at a different location and somehow assembling all of this into a ship and/or person at the other end. Now the amount of computing power to do such a thing is insane (think about the computer on the Enterprise E, that's about how much processing power you'd need and perhaps even more then that!) That's not to mention how you'd be able to send a ship and the whole crew at the same time! Still the idea is sound, since we have been able to send information from one particle to another using these concepts before. In conclusion I personally think Teleportation Technology would be better to invent since it would solve the distance problems (if my understanding of Quantum Entanglement and Quantum Teleportation are correct) but the technology for such is probably thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years from now.

[@john_blues]

I'm working on a warp drive in my garage. I'll let you guys know when it is done. Just need to align the tricyclic phase with bi-spatial tricorders., and test the trilithium transwarp propulsion system and the Lexorian gateways.

[@radtech497]

Aside from consistently confusing General Relativity for Special Relativity, and vice-versa, a pretty decent explainer video for how a warp drive works.

[@danielfarley8344]

I just wanted to give you the "Ol ATA-Boy".....a good old "Pat on the back".....if you know what i mean....lol I've been watching your videos (and loving them) since the Fringe stuff. The growth in your Technical Film production skills along with the more polished presentation and research style have resulted in some great work as of late, and I just wanted to let you know that it's noticed, appreciated, and very much enjoyed.🖖👍

[@OrangeRiver]

Thank you so much! I really appreciate it.

[@refeicul]

my issue is we dont know.we went from phones that where in packs to pocket sized in 30yrs. i think its possible to get there given the current rate of improvement of tech. my grandmother went from in her youth an outdoor toilet and horse power to refrigeration and infrastructure. lets let them play and see what happens

[@christophervanoster]

You and certifiably ingame are my favorite Star Trek lore channels

[@OrangeRiver]

That's a high compliment! Thank you!

[@RobertWilke]

I remember back in the 90's when people would bring up Warp drive. It would be discarded out of hand cause of the power requirements. In less than 30 years it's been proven to be actually possible with not nearly the amount of power needed. How much further will we be in 30 more years? If it's to be believed that we aren't alone out there. For all we know we might be getting help figuring this out much quicker. Heck there's a story about Gene where he met a special society group that clued him in on certain technology. So for all we know we've been shown what it will be just not how to make it yet. Either way this was a good discussion.

[@reedallen4613]

This is just yet ANOTHER example of how Science Fiction has become/or IS becoming Science FACT. Less than two years ago (if I remember the time correctly) scientists had ACTUALLY developed the VERY FIRST primitive prototype of an ACTUAL Warp Drive. Granted, I don't know if it was actually SUCCESSFUL, but IF true then that would simply be the FIRST step in developing an ACTUAL real-life version of a FUNCTIONAL Warp Drive. Just my own personal opinion anyway

[@ToddDesiato]

Read, "The Electromagnetic Quantum Vacuum Warp Drive", JBIS, Nov. 2015. The solution to this and quantum gravity is to look at the reciprocal interpretation of Einstein's equations. G^uv is not the curvature of space-time. G^uv is what we will measure with rulers and clocks constrained by T^uv. Then look at how T^uv affects matter in QM. Easy peasy! Contracting space in front and expanding space behind, is reciprocal to stretching the ship in front and contracting the ship behind.

[@GopherBaroque61]

As always for you, Tyler, an absolutely fantastically informative video. I was going to comment on your pronunciation of Alcubierre, but noticed you already apologized in the comments. I don't think we could build a Star Trek-type warp drive at all or a different type of warp drive anytime soon, especially if it involves anti-matter because it's so difficult to attain in any substantial quantities. But, if improvements knowledge and technology increases exponentially as it has in the last century, we might get something close within the next couple hundred years. If we could somehow hitch a ride on the expansion of spacetime itself, we aren't limited to the speed of light.

[@wawoodsman7170]

I believe it's impossible to foretell what technology we will have and how far off. 170 year's ago scientific communities said man would never fly- December 17th 1903 the Wright brothers flew, the scientific community said the sound barrier would never be broken- October 14th 1947 Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, the scientific community claimed man would never be able to journey beyond the earth's atmosphere- April 12th 1961 Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was the first human being to orbit the earth and the scientific community claimed man would never walk on the moon- July 20th 1969 Commander Neil Armstrong became the first human being to walk on the moon. In just 119 years the human race has gone from the horse and cart to extended space missions within our solar system and even successful free falling from orbit to earth. There's no possible way we can guess what we might achieve in 50 or 150 years.

[@cosmicquestion9184]

Solo "Jumpin into hyperspace ain't like dustin crops boy!" Spock "Fascinating."

[@nameless_alchemist]

Not only do I believe we will become a warp capable species, I think it is a functional necessity. If we do not do so, or at the very least become a multi-planetary species we are unlikely to survive another 1k-10k years. There are simply too few resources on this planet, and too much division between our species for us to survive without a common goal of populating the wider galaxy around us. I have, and continue to see that as the only justifiable goal for existence outside of base survival. Our options might literally be boiled down to either becoming a warp capable species, or looking inwards to a purely digital species. I think in the long term there is really no third direction.

[@brianjohnson5272]

If dilithium was compressed by enough gravitity it would become crystalline at some point. Maybe once the crystallization happens it remain in that form for an extended period not unlike a hunk of coal become a diamond.

[@dr.x4050]

Can someone explain? I thought the warp engines just make the warp bubble which makes it easier to move forward faster by compressing space in front and lengthening behind. To actually move forward still requires positive thrust like the impulse engines. OR do the warp engines also provide thrust and move the ship forward? I don't see a warp bubble simply moving forward without any kind of thrust. If the space inside the bubble simply moves forward without thrust, then the deflector dish is not needed at warp speed.

[@stephenlangsl67]

I believe they have already created a real life Warp bubble the size of a sub-atomic particle in a lab sometime late last year. Or perhaps it was just on paper instead.

[@Erik_Swiger]

Great video! I love this kind of stuff. Here's a few thoughts I've had, based on real-world physics, as I understand it. When electrons and positrons collide, they annihilate and produce gamma rays, which are high-energy photons. Photons, if made to move around in a circle, will warp space-time (this has been done with lasers). So, if you collide a form of matter with a form of anti-matter, and channel the resulting gamma rays into "warp coils" (the only fictitious part of this idea), and force them to spin around in an orbit, this will then warp space and move the ship. The warp coils would have to be a material capable of interacting with gamma rays, without being destroyed by them, and able to reflect or deflect them so that they can form circular orbits.

[@jbsmith966]

Sounds like scientists would need to figure out how to make these fancy materials that do not exist in nature from materials that do exist first. I am not a chemist or mathematics guru but I betcha $1 anyways that all of this is easier said than done. Who knows, perhaps someday all this will come to pass and there really will be a Captain named Kirk. That is if we do not blow ourselves up 1st or get hit by a GRB or something else.. Cool vid, thanks for posting it.

[@clevelandknight1094]

Stephen Hawkins said he was working on warp drive

[@nimblehealer199]

Stephen Hawking not Hawkins

[@BELCAN57]

So...we won't expect to see warp drive by the end of this month. Got it!

[@newshamhouse]

Great video, I have no idea what your talking about but I absolutely love your videos 💚👍👏

[@TechnoMageB5]

Side note: Searching KZbin for "nasa warp drive" yields some interesting results. The mechanics covered here help understand stuff covered over there.

[@johnbastian5965]

This was fascinating but the big question is can we afford to build one?

[@kazeinu0151]

It's a very cool concept of course but from what I've heard it doesn't seem feasible. That the alcubierre drive requires infinite/negative energy. Speed of light might just be a hard speed limit. Nice video all the same!

[@eaglechawks3933]

How about we develop workable fusion power before going on to antimatter and warp drives?