Warp Speed: Science Fiction and Reality

        Faster than light travel has appeared in multiple Sci-Fi shows and movies, however, it hasn’t been figured out yet. NASA has made plans for FTL-drive starships, but very few of them are within reach because many of them are too expensive, they break the laws of physics, or we don’t have that level of technology yet.
So, the verdict is we either need to figure out how to break the laws of physics or create something that goes near the speed of light (NFTL). My idea for an NFTL system is like a slingshot. Like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, only bigger, this slingshot would accelerate a ship inside its main tube, then it would shoot it very much like a softball pitch across the stars.

On the other side of this field, we could use a theoretical Boson Cloud Exciter, which I heard about on a TV show called Eureka. This BCE would theoretically be used as a catcher’s mitt for a FTL jump. Another idea would be to figure out how to convert an entire ship into photos or some other type of energy that can travel at or faster than the speed of light, shoot it at a target planet, where it would be converted back into the original matter of the ship and its content. The risk with this is if something blocks the some of the particles, then the ship and all of its content would be scattered throughout space.
NASA had an idea of having a starship project a “warp bubble” that has positive particles behind it pulling and negative particles in front pulling. However, physics once again caused problems, because you can’t project something in front of you at the speed of light because it breaks the law of special relativity.

This warp bubble is actually called Alcubierre’s Warp drive and it’s used like a “moving sidewalk”. As an example, imagine you are on one of those moving sidewalks that can be found in some airports. Although there may be a limit to how fast one can walk across the floor (light speed limit), what if you are on a moving section of floor that moves faster than you can walk (moving section of spacetime)? In the case of the Alcubierre warp drive, this moving section of spacetime is created by expanding spacetime behind the ship (coming out of the floor), and by contracting spacetime in front of the ship (back into the floor). This has roots in the Big Bang (inflationary universe), in which the universe inflated faster than the speed of light.
So, to attain NFTL or FTL travel, much more research, attention, and money will need to be pumped into this technology and related technologies.
For more information check out the NASA website: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warpstat_prt.htm

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