When Sabine said achieving warp drive would take a thousand years, Einstein spoke up in my head. "There is not the slightest indication that (nuclear) energy will ever be obtainable," he said. "It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." Six years later, Otto Hahn did it.
Well, this is different, the math to smash an atom was known and the amount of energy needed to do it was achievable even in times when Einstein said it. It was nothing out of scope of what we have been producing at that time. The control of this process was the problem. Here we are talking energies far beyond what we can even imagine to produce in future. I have seen many estimates how much energy you will need to create it and the lowest was that you will need more energy than is contained in planet Jupiter. And that is just for curving the spacetime, we have no idea how to move it, how much energy you need to stop it, to steer it and so on. So yeah 1000 years is very optimistic.
Just because some impossible challenges are resolved, it doesn’t mean all challenges can or will be resolved. Also while splitting atoms were “We don’t know how to do it”, warp drive (and FTL in general) are more like “it is not doable according to our knowledge”.
I like that you present the information genuinely. Yes it would be all exciting but instead of just hypeing things up for the algorithm, you let people know warp drive isn't feasible yet.
“Maybe I’m just getting old and lacking imagination” What a beautiful reality and self aware statement ❤ Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the grind of our own paths and strategies that we forget how enjoyable off-roading can be
I love to understand science, but it takes time to understand, and time is an asset that most people don’t have these days. I still learn as much as I can everyday and you’re facilitating that, thanks!
Wonderful, refreshing presentation of physics. I had to lol about the caterpillar, that already invented the warp drive. About curving spacetime, doesn´t that require extremly strong gravitational fields, like, erm, around tiny BHs?
Well, strictly speaking any type of energy curves space-time. It's just that the strength of the curvature depends on the density. So really you have to ask what kind of curvature do you need to get any noticeable acceleration. And I suspect that if they ever crunch the numbers for that they will find exactly what you say, that unless you take something that's very close to being a black hole, you'll not accelerate much...
@@jonathanlanser1129 if you take a look at the graph shown at 03:15 you'll see the energy required to do the work of warping space. Compare what's shown to the known energy output of the sun, and you''ll realize your "star level of curvature" is quite insufficient for the task. Looks to me like you'd need about 10 to 20 quadrillion times more energy output than the sun..
as movies have taught us, we need to live in a dystopian world after a total collapse with zero funding and minimum resources to be able to build advance tech.
"We are hung up on matter. Only energetic empathy towards The Whole, has the purity to integrate with the Univers so that everywhere is wherever we are." - My Dog
*_"They're not entirely science fiction, they're based on real science."_* - This suggests a (common) misunderstanding of what science fiction *is.* Science fiction doesn't mean "fake" (or fictitious) science. It simply means fiction (i.e., a made-up story) whose plot explores the consequences of scientific or technological innovation. It can (and ideally should) be based on real science. Just like crime fiction can be based on real crimes and horror can be based on being eaten alive by real rats. Stuff like _The Martian_ is still "science fiction" even if it all the science in it is true (which it isn't, in the case of _The Martian,_ but it's close enough, and it _could_ be 100% correct without fundamentally changing the *story* - which is the _fiction_ part)
Before you can warp drive, you need 2 energy sources. Maybe, we can do an experiment of a new warp drive equation. Ok, the first trip in the warp drive tunnel must be by a artificial Intelligence pilot, an (AI) pilot because of that energy, that friction, that heat. In other words, Thermo-radiation, that energy that surrounds the ship's static warp bubble shell. That radiation would (kill) any person. This is the new equation. (Positive infinite energy = +E)+ Dyson Sphere (Magnifier)+(Warp Drive Coils ship)×(AI) Singularity)^((+E🔼(-E))= ( - Negative Energy> Jupiter)× (Thermo-radiation(Temperature))= Warp Drive Engine. Let me explain, Ok exotic matter( - mass matter). Is a waste of time. You must use what's in front of you, in your environment. For example, in the Alaskan frontier, you might have to cut trees to build your home or use snow for drinking water. Or...Or how sailors 300 years ago, sailed the sea useing that energy, that friction, that surrounded the sails called wind. And the ship would move(sail) without an internal power source(engine). Again you must use what's in front of you, your environment. Ok, look at the first part of the equation. The (Sun=+E), is our positive infinite energy source for warp drive travel, Not exotic (negative matter). Most scientists agree we need the power (mass, energy level)= to Jupiter to make warp drive work. Ok the (Sun=+E) is 10 to 100 times greater than Jupiter, that's our power source. We solved our energy problem. You would put many giant solar deflector array dishes around the equator of the sun. Built by a (AI) quantum computer. All the deflector array dishes will redirect the sun=(+E) energy into one highly focused concentrated energy beam and aim it to the dyson sphere (magnifier). For example, how you can start a fire useing a magnifying glass with the sun. The magnifier dyson sphere will be built by a artificial Intelligence (AI) scientist and engineer. The (AI) will figure out how to harness, how to collect, how to magnify (+E) that energy beam to the correct intensity. I think the (AI) won't use glass or mirrors.It will use something else. That beam will be aimed at the warp drive Gravity Coils. You might say what happens next. Just look at the equation. Next is (AI) Singularity)^(+E🔼(-E))= ( -Negative Energy > Jupiter). Ok, so how or who will build this machine. Can it be built by (AGI) or (AI) or (Super Quantum Computer. No,No, None. Only a (AI) Singularity, with infinite processing speed can do this. Look (+E🔼(-E)). The triangle 🔼= (delta)= to change to convert. It's a science term. Only an (AI) Singularity can convert and change +E to -E. And we have more than enough ( -Negative Energy) for the Gravity Coils to work correctly. And now the warp drive ship will go into the space-time tunnel. Ok, you might say it's in the spacetime tunnel without a internal power source(a engine), to maintain power to the warp coils static bubble shell. I know, I know, just look at the equation again. Next is radiation thermo (temperature). Remember, remember, what I said use what's in front of us, our environment. Remember the 2 examples, I gave. The (AI) pilot will use that radiation thermo (temperature), that would (kill) a person, that energy, that friction, that heat, that radiation that surrounds the ship, the radiation that surrounds the warp bubble to maintain the warp coils running (power). You see, you see, we don't need to bring an internal power source(engine) on the ship. No exotic matter required. We need to use that radiation thermo temperature that surrounds the ship and somehow convert use change into energy that the gravity warp coils can use. And the ship will travel in the spacetime tunnel without a internal power source( engine). Similar to how sailors sailed the sea 300 years ago useing that energy that friction that surrounds the sails called Wind to sail the sea without an engine. Exactly, we won't use wind we will sail with Thermo-radiation.
I really appreciate your ability to communicate complex scientific concepts to us layman. Also, the Gernam accent is amazing. Love hearing you say Einstein.
Yes, us Trekkies got a picture of it from Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 Episode 6: "Where no one has gone before." at 7 minutes and 36 seconds into the episode. We basically got the same from Star Trek The Next Generation: Technical Manual some years later. But the insight for us is when Westley and "The Traveler" talk about it; specifically at 8:13 when we see it change. Thus giving insight that they can be 'manipulated' and configured, etc. For me - I wanted to see a caterpillar movement on the outside of the field lol Also - it's noted that more 'nacelles' (earlier Starfleet research) didn't give you more power, but my thoughts where that they would conversely give you more control and more efficiency! And you're showing a caterpillar!!! @ about 3:05 here... Don't you technically want a bubble and no or virtually no movement inside? As this is also noted in Star Trek, but visuals are 'wrong.' Because if you have moment on the inside you'd be pushing the 'ship' forward (from left to right) out of the field... Adding stress to the ship... Because it's the bubble (with the ship inside it) that is actually moving [as is depicted in the show], sure the ship generates the field, but at these speeds... in 'combination with any lag' of field generation meaning that you're pushing the ship out of the bubble into 'normal space' and subjecting it to extreme stresses. Technically I only 'know' the ST world and have little knowledge of GR! :)
Negative energy might not be needed. A paper by Erik Lentz titled 'Hyper-Fast Positive Energy Warp Drives' states that regular energy can be used; all that's needed is to reduce the amount
The problem is that most of the positive mass used isn't in the warp bubble, so you can't actually go anywhere, and that's fairly fundamental to why the warp drives typically proposed require negative energy. The positive mass is used to basically create a local illusion of negative energy in a particular place, but that place is never going to be "surrounding the whole thing" but rather in an area between positive masses. So it probably can't ever be made to work.
A possible solution to the negative mass problem would be the Casimir Effect. Basically, it’s a negative energy pressure caused by the quantum vacuum between two plates. However it’s important that this is a relative to the overall quantum background energy so if it’s removed, it’s not a negative. It remains to be seen if this is a viable solution. There are several other problems with a potential warp drive such as the energy requirement, possible causality violations, the horizon problem where the inside would be flooded with hawking radiation, and anything that gets stuck in front of the bubble while at warp, will immediately convert to energy once you drop out of warp, the energy jump can be so large, it can destroy whole planets. There is a really good video about the Alcubbiere/Warp Drive on the Cool Worlds yt channel if anyone wants to know more. Ive spent a lot of time researching this topic over the years, and I’m optimistic. Maybe we won’t achieve warp this century, but I can see it in a few hundred years.
Kyle Hill calculated the energy required to open a wormhole large enough to fit a human, taking inspiration from the videogame Portal. It would require a *mass* similar to THE WHOLE MOON Every Single Portal (And _second_)
I believe they reduced it from 100 times the mass of the universe to 3kg. So we only need a little bit impossible and with that we can blow it up to maximum impossible.
@@marcoottina654 ok, but a wormhole and warp drive are two different things (as pointed out nicely in this video). That said, the energy to warp spacetime to forma warp bubble is also enormous
5:19 -- "So if you feel like you're destined to be the first to build a warp drive, you might want to check out this paper." **Zefram Cochrane enters the chat**
Best. Channel. Ever! 😂❤ Wait! The drawings, including the ones used in this video, are usually consistent with “must fit to space-time…” There’s a tube down through the middle of “fits with” and the negative space (in terms of your drawing) is then “does not fit” right? So isn’t it painfully apparent that spooky action and quantum gravity are gonna be in the “does not fit” part of the drawing? We hear “Do we even need quantized gravity?” all the time… again, doesn’t that lack of connection imply the “not” part of the drawing? Please discuss. Yes I can see that we can’t “get at” the “not space”… isn’t that consistent with so-called “dark this-n-that”? I’m not trying to explain. I’m trying to ask what seems to be unthinkable… most of what we take for granted was once unthinkable right? I love what you do! Please do some more!!! 🎉
0:38 Wow finaly something that matches what i see in my head. I been trying to say that we ride it but like a bubble. Its like always going down hill. On top of that, imagine this but with lots of room between so the middle is like a hidden dimension between stable blankets or something. We could, hypothetically, use simulations to craft a potential and then use fusion to collapse matter into the potential between the outer fields so they act as a safe environment to construct potentials into reality with qm or fusion technology. Idk but it seems like we could use the area as a safe place or a tunnel and not just for warp driving.
So it's a worm drive 02:44 rather than worm hole! 😅 Btw Sabine. Do we know if there is an upper speed limit to spacetime expansion? Would such a limit explain why the observed speed is in fact finite? (And get tid of dark energy)
Honestly, FTL being impossible would be the best news we can get for the future. Coupled with Fermi's paradox it might make our solar system and galaxy such a rare precious safehaven in a life-averse universe that a slow a methodical space exploration in the next millennia will allow us to slowly transition and evolve to be more space-faring without the fear of being suddenly found and sniped by some advanced civilization. The universe becomes then a very vast sea made of space and resources to build with to our heart's content, but with huge gulfs of space we cannot ever easily cross or simply expand exponentially into. Perhaps in 1000 years vast space colonies will begin slow, centuries-long treks towards nearby stars. For the people aboard life not changing significantly from their daily habits. Perhaps we'll have developed cryogenics and automated seed ships, which, having reached their destination, will find out that in the long time since old civilizations have gone quiet, and new ones have arisen, their messages still too far to significantly impact them in any physical way. It is a comfortable view in my opinion, knowing that we have all the time, space and resources to find a healthy way to exist with each other and progress, rather than eternally growing and running away from ourselves towards new tech, resources, and places before we learned to appreciate the ones we already got.
The biggest fear actually is the theory that technology may one day just stagnate, like a vital resource for making the next step was already used up and we cannot progress any further or humans are not smart enough to make the next step like, WE cannot make FTL drives because in lets say circa 2057 all unobtainum metal was exhausted naturally from the Earth and most of our solar system because it was not stable enough to last for too long so until we found out its uses at 2113 when we were searching of ways to scale up colonisation further in a FTL drive and we're like, ''Yeah we're screwed'' until we find somehow a way to artificially reproduce such material
Traveling faster than light would allow for some nasty things, including maybe time paradoxes to occur, but it wouldn't all be bad. Light travel or faster isn't all dangers, it gives greatly added exploration, travel, attack and defense capabilities too especially if a potential enemy is vastly more powerful but for whatever reason has not developed light/faster than light travel. For example, if we encountered a civilization with vastly superior weapons, numbers and colonization technologies and light travel did not exist to allow us to first strike them before they notice us (which may be unethical or at least logistically impossible if they're spread far enough) and light travel did not exist to allow us to run away when they inevitably come to destroy us or 'civilize and guide' us (since we probably do not wish to first strike them for ethical, moral, or strategic reasons, there could be 3rd parties or they could have backup after all), then we would be just out of luck if we could not learn to both communicate with them and persuade them that we're more beneficial to them alive and mostly left alone (something we might have to convince our AI creations soon here as well). So, in short, while I mostly agree with your comment, I just wanted to add that just in case faster than light travel or near light travel is possible we shouldn't hope it is impossible but rather hope that we develop it first and that we use it responsibly so that we become the vastly superior civilization. And, this would be to gloat or dominate but simply to keep ourselves and the galaxy/universe safe in general even safe from ourselves hopefully.
Being trapped in our solar system (or just neighboring systems) would mean a very finite amount of resources available to our civilization, giving us a hard limit on what we can do with all of it. Of course you could say if we could only ever colonize the entire galaxy, that would be finite too, even if massive. But having that boundary known, would put a damper on things. We'd for example, know that we could never become a type 3 civilization, or beyond that, and maybe not even a type 2, because even if we wanted build a dyson sphere to harvest all of our sun's energy, we wouldn't even have enough resources to do it, not enough resources to even make use of all that energy....which would give us a finite limit on how far our civilization could progress. There are other factors, such a spreading out over time, but that's not reliable, because even if we did, we'd also have to ensure there wasn't some greater systematic collapse of our expansion at some point for one reason or another, which the likelihood of increases the slower our expansion is. Or in other words, by the time our expansion reaches X number of lightyears, the inner core of our expansion could already be collapsing, and then start dotting out here and there over time for this or that reason. Like if you left earth to go 10 light years away, and by the time you got there, earth is barren. That's not expansion, that's just changing locations, and with less population, which is actually reduction rather than expansion. Let that creep on long enough with colonies, and you effectively end up with the same problem: Human civilization is wiped out. Now imagine if you didn't try to expand, and instead devoted resources to focusing on keeping your main solar system flourishing. Civilization might actually last longer by not having an extra solar colonization mindset.
It struck me as Sabine described how GR is a non-linear theory with enormous complexity and chaotic in nature, that is relevant to the discussion a few weeks ago about dark matter perhaps not being a particle (or similar) but instead being some potentially chaotic non-linearity that isn't yet understood.
I know that you were talking about wormholes, and then warp drives. But in each case showing an X-Wing while talking about warp drives is a big no no. It's likely to rupture the fabric of the Star-Trek Fandom. LOL.😂😂 Love you Sabine. A shout out to the Editor, it's a tough job to please all the nerds out there!
Controlled faster than light travel means that we tell a pocket of space to transport us by warping as we want. Fine. To tell space to warp as we want that message has to reach space from where we are with a speed faster than light before space can respond to warp as we ask. Since unwarped space doesn't support faster than light message transfer the whole concept collapses.
Before we start to design the passenger capsule: 1.) Can the start and boundary conditions for the solution of that simulation be achieved with the differential manifold which describes our universe? (Nobody knows …. ) 2.) How does time go by. In the passenger capsule and outside the warp-bubble? (First answer question one.)
I think your question 1 is missing a word? Also, I think you might be invoking the term “differentiable manifold” without much reason. Yes, in GR we do model spacetime as a differentiable (pseudo-Riemannian) manifold . But I don’t think mentioning that makes your comment any clearer. You can just talk about initial conditions? I get the impression that your question is about “even if GR permits such solutions, using only matter of the sort which we know exists, does it allow for the *creation* of such a drive, given initial conditions like those we find ourselves with?”. Now, I suspect the answer may be “GR does not permit warp drives using the materials we know to exist, period, not even mentioning the construction”? But, at the same time, I don’t see why answering the “assuming the materials needed are available, can one be created?” should need to be answered before people work on the “could the passenger area be habitable?”. They are independent questions which can be pursued in parallel.
@@drdca8263 Thanks a lot. There was really one word missing. Regarding the notion of “Differentiale Manifolds” I did not bother to go into too much detail. Of course, the manifold needs not only to be differentiale. If wormholes etc can be „produced“ , it must be possible, that the topological type of the manifold can change dynamically. And I wonder, whether there are solutions, where orientability can change dynamically, too. That might have some consequences with regard to the direction of time, but that wasn’t the point here. And, of course, if all the physical questions can be answered, it still remains unclear, whether we ever will be able to answer the technical ones, too. Anyhow, before we start building warp drives, we most probably have built a collider of the size of the Milky Way before, I guess.
Hi Dr. Hossenfelder. Thank you so much for all your care, and all you share. You are a living, compassionate, caring, maternal, technically expert who translates and communicates ideas from clearly expert, detailed and precise considerations of details of our world, so even the dullest of minds in your web audience may respect, consider, and possibly grow, aspire, improve our lives and our world. You're great! On more practical forms of feedback, please be aware that your videos are excellent diaries, journals, records of text for fantastic educational content, products, and mind nourishing, world benefiting enhancements.
Is General Relativity actually "weird," or does it just posit that "flatness" is emergent (if real at all), and our reductionist sensitivities rely on relative flatness (centers of mass/gravity, force vectors etc) that are locally sufficient thanks to the pseudoaxis of gravitational north/south?
The real problem, for lay people, with relativity formulas is to make real calculations with them. Whenever you see them, they're just highly abstract symbols and constants, for which we don't know units. Who did ever do an actual calculation with E=mc²? That's where this code becomes interesting, so that I may check it out on Github, not for preparing real warp drives.
@@SabineHossenfelderWe need flat space-time, without it we would not know when energy is conserved, warp deforms space-time plastically as it is a solution that violates several energy conditions and that is why it can produce that movement
@@BBirke1337 E=mc² gives us the energy produced by a chemical or nuclear reaction. The reaction products have less mass than the reactants, with the difference in mass being released as energy according to that formula.
Great video: Based on factual research, it was very well explained and presented. I use your knowledge to debunk current outlandish claims in the media, such as this recent title for a story from ecoticias(EcoNews) posted in late July stating: "Einstein predicted an engine that would travel faster than light: It has been built for the first time, and it works like this." I smile at the fact that they state it has been, "built".
Thank you for making these videos. I am enamored with how you present information and how you seem to have a calm and level-headed approach to theoretical possibilities without entertaining the fantastical.
We would still be using steam power if we didn't have hypotheses based on dreams. It's not only reasonable, but critical for science to move forward. That's how science works, you construct hypotheses based on observations and theory, and test them. Science isn't saying, "It sounds silly and impossible even if it's theoretically possible so no one should ever even try." That's how you stay primitive. Construct a hypothesis, test it, gather as much data as possible over time, and stick to what the data indicate. That's literally the scientific method. Even if you fail you'll gain new information.
"Most plausible" is still incredibly generous. It seems that all of these warp drive concepts still have issues with requiring obscene amounts of energy or have inconvenient side effects like vaporizing everything inside the warp bubble with "absolute hot" temperatures.
Question, can you generate that envelope from outside the passenger area? Or does the field form from the center? And if it does, can it be established weak enough to not spaghettify said passengers as it expands through them?
I find it hard to swallow that Sabine can learn anything from Brilliant. She is an expert theoretical physicist, a master mathematician, and a science educator. What can someone of her genius-level intellect learn from a Janet and Jane internet application ?
I can respect her getting a good paycheque out of doing the promo. I agree though, not something I plan to use. I assume most people following this channel are undergrad+ in STEM so it is strange.
@@FractaLL2103 I'm not STEM and there must be more people like me, people who just want a general exposure to developments in Science, and find Sabine's delivery the most understandable, non-hypey, and funny.
enjoy watching your video’s. Very educational, fun, interesting and thankful observation for many reasons. Love the responsibility about thinking about our planet, and the human search for answers. 👍😀
What about a warp drive that goes slower than the speed of light. Even a drive that allowed travel at a small fraction of c would be very useful for interplanetary travel. What would a warp drive that went only 10mph look like?
Yes, making one that goes slower than the speed of light would definitely be easier. But I haven't seen a calculation for what type of energy density this would need. I've been asking about this for years and, you know, maybe I should just do the calculation myself and write a paper... In any case, I suspect that if you want to get to any noticeable acceleration, you'll need very high energy densities, so high that we can't create them. It's a curious fact about nature that fapp we can only squeeze matter together until nuclear density and that's pretty much it. And you might not want to sit next to something that's entirely made of nuclear matter as that tends to radiate off lots of nasty stuff.
The thing I have always wondered about warp drives is how much space actually needs to be warped in order for it to happen. Most of the stuff one sees has a pretty large bubble, but is that absolutely necessary? For instance, if a sphere has the space in front of it contract by like 1 micron, and the space behind expands by the same amount or slightly more, would this both work and require less energy?
I love your material! Ever since Dr. Alcubierre showed this was possible, I’ve been thinking Star Trek got it right and the warp drive is the way to go. This is just a hunch on my part, but I think it’ll be less than 1K years before we figure it out from an engineering perspective. Far too many people want this to happen and are working it.
This reminded me to public presentation about gravitational waves organized by my university's ALUMNI. I asked physics professor who was presenting if speed of gravitational waves being speed of light also implies that any space disturbance is limited to this speed, meaning that warp drive would not be possible even if we knew how to make such disturbance. Professor cut me off, sounding almost insulted, with "I'm not here to speak about SF physics". Other professor, who's class I took on university, intervened and said that question is interesting, and while warp is in SF area, considering limitations of space disturbance is surely in area of physics and that while he didn't study it deeper, he thinks that such disturbance could be limited to speed of light.
That's awesome. I just started this rental stuff and I would love to get to the point where I have to stand in the cold getting trained on a stage setup.
Erik Lentz. Others debated whether it could be faster than light without it. He still maintains it can, I’ve talked to him. But even if it can’t there are now a few formulas from different people for positive energy warp drives that can get at least close to light speed.
@@bradysmith4405 hmm... curious you say that, since Sabine (further up in comments) says she's not aware of an estimate of the amount of energy required for sub-light speed warp drives.
Okay steampunk version of this: Imagine a line of extending seesaws hinged end to end, weighted at each end, with each hinge and focal point mounted to a pneumatic cylinder. Now take several of these long seesaw-snakes and wrap them around a cylinder so they form a barrel. Next, spin the outside of the barrel such that the fully extruded, weighted ends on each seesaw-snake joint go as fast as the material itself can physically allow. What you have is a spinning barrel of latitudinally placed weights with adjustable momentum. This could allow you to “swallow” through space by producing a halo of space time curvature that occurs at one end and travels to the other. If friction was zero, the material could maintain its integrity, the spinning didn’t rip the ship apart, and the interior could be counter spun to the same amount, then you’d be able to control curvature without energy loss and at any speed. The energy because maintaining spin doesn’t require energy in a vacuum and because radial changes to one ring of weights would be balanced against the adjacent ring, meaning no net gain or loss of momentum. And no limit to speed because the halo of curvature “moves” along the ship according to the synchronized adjustments of the pneumatic cylinders, not any traveling object or signal. The energy cost itself would come from adjusting to pneumatics. Is this a good idea? No. One piece of space debris would turn the ship into a lethal wash machine, and any friction would either fry the inhabitants or burn out the components and send everyone in random trajectories out into space. Death would be a constant, likely scenario, and happen too fast to prevent. But it would make for a good fiction vessel…
I am not a physicist, but recently I've been pondering about this stuff for a short story. I ended up with the following assumption: that warp drives could work, but only under the speed of light, thus not violating causality, and that the ship inside would experience the effects of acceleration, time and spatial dilation, like any other propulsion system. The whole thing would warp space-time around it with coils of architecture similar to those used in MRI (being the closest thing I know of that can manipulate fields in space) creating a gradient field that could, in theory, move and roll the ship in all directions. It's just speculation, I know. Does any one have a thought?
the idea that I found interesting was a machine that generated a spherical field. When engaged, the object maintained its motion, but stepped out of time for a short amount of time. When in popped back into time, it had the exact x,y,z location and dx, dy, dz velocity (and axial rotations). The great bit was things like earth continued to rotate on its axis and rotate around the sun and the sun continued around the centre of the milky way,etc. So when it popped back into 'now' it was several hundred thousand kilometers away. By timing the blink properly, it could be used to put very large masses and volumes into orbit around the earth very easily. The downside was the timing is just too fine to be able to get to a spot out in space that you could pop from and then end up on earth at the exact right location, with the right velocity and spin. So you could not use the technology to land.
@@KnugLidi You would use the time blink to stay in place while the universe moves past you, but conventional propulsion of some sort to move accurately after the time blink. The trick is to not end up in the middle of a moon or asteroid when you come out of the blink.
@@stevengordon3271 indeed, but to get all the coordinates exactly (to an insane degree) to pop in and out to land on a planet surface is always the problem
The issue isn't whether things get around causality or not, the issue is what materials/physics would allow one to manipulate space in such a way. Ironically, we kind of know that even gravity makes it impossible, because otherwise blackholes would be zipping around the galaxy under their own mass, and faster the bigger they got. Technically a pull is a push in a way, so you sort of don't need negative energy, but at the same time you do, because otherwise we would already see odd behaviors between any two celestial masses. What this all means is we won't find the answer with anything above quantum levels, and probably only with physics at scales beyond the planck length and quarks.
Element 115 has gravity properties. If a private company has made a stable version of it, that would be all that's needed to create an envelope effectively removing it from our current physics laws. It would also likely bend light around the object as well giving it a cloaked effect.
Regarding getting wormholes that go somewhere useful: the general sci-fi solution is to make both ends of the wormhole close to home, then ship one end to the intended destination at slower-than-light speeds. Takes a while to set up (not accounting for time dilation making it seem faster at the hub of the network), but once you've got the wormhole in place you've got a really convenient way to get around.
Erik lentz proposed a method that doesn't require negative energy or negaitve mass. Even though it would require the mass to be extremely dense, it is a step in the right direction, since it only requires positive mass
Would love to see Sabine analyze the warp drive documents that you can find on the cia data archive website. For example the universal toroid and cassimir effect
Before figuring out how to build a warp drive, we need to solve the problem of achieving safe artificial gravity for space ships and space stations. Thanks.
Warp drive doesn't need a propoulsion system based on the third law, it works by compressing the space in front of your ship and letting it expand back again behind your ship. Think of a half-sphere around your ship, the front half is compressed space, the rear half is relaxed and expanded space. Momentum is gained by continually compressing this space and relaxing it, the faster you can do this the faster you move. Like wrinkling up a carpet under an object. The real problem is that spacetime is incredibly stiff and even an object the mass of the Earth only deforms it slightly, you don't have to go far above the Earth to be free of it's gravitational attraction. So instead of mass to deform spacetime we can substitute energy, and of course we are not deforming spacetime over an area as large as the Earth, a few tens of metres is enough, but even then the energy requirement is so vast as to b unimaginable, and we don't have any idea how to do it. Fire a powerful laser in an arc around your ship maybe, who knows. I think it's possible, and not in 1000 years, I'd say around 100-200 years if it is indeed possible. however another consideration is the CPC (Chronology protection Conjecture) suggested by Hawking, although it feels somewhat contrived one does have to think in terms of causality when arriving at a destination before you set off.
@@mreconomics1125 The vacuum of space is merely a measurement of what's in it, not what it is. E.g. a balloon can be empty but there is still a balloon. Think about gravitational waves, what is it that is waving? It is the fabric of spacetime. To answer your question fully would be very difficult and beyond my level of training, but I suggest you look up stiffness of spacetime or spacetime rigidity but be warned the content includes very high level maths.
Disagree with "you don't have to go far above the Earth to be free of it's gravitational attraction". Depends what "far" means I guess. But even then, gravity decays inverse-square, never reaching zero. Navigating to Mars would need to take it into account. Maybe you already appreciate, maybe some don't, but the Moon is held in (a quarter million miles high) Earth orbit by virtue of our planet's gravity (more precisely, both holding on to each other, orbiting around a common centre of mass). Objects in low Earth orbit experience hardly less gravity than on Earth surface. They are weightless only because the inward pull (towards Earth) on them by that gravity is being exactly counteracted by the outward "pull of centrifugal force" (loosely speaking) on them, itself resulting from their orbital path (e.g. considering roughly circular ones, for sake of simplicity).
@@DavidEsp1 to establish a warp bubble then what I said was correct, however, if you want to be exact then the gravitational effect of any object in space extends to infinity, it's just really really small and to all intents and purposes can be ignored, especially as I was illustrating the point about mass deforming spacetime and how that distortion if you could see it, is very close to the mass in question. I did wonder if I should invoke the inverse square law but I wanted to keep it relatively simple.
Glad to see a physicist saying this because while I never did anything beyond undergrad engineering physics, everything I've read on the topic makes it seem either theoretically impossible or practically infeasible to the point where it's nothing but flights of fancy. Always a bummer since I grew up on "Good Trek", but I don't like getting my hopes up for no reason. Problem is, whenever I tell my buddies that the majority of physicists think it's probably not something we can do, they seem to think I'm lying to them.
I downloaded the artice and although the math is above me, I realise that due to space-time curvature, the math might be all around me... which just makes the problem more difficult! Great video, thank you Sabine!
Warp drive may be possible by surrounding a craft with a field that prevents it from contracting. If we accept the universe or space is contracting through time, instead of expanding. Both provide the same illusion and difficult to tell apart. Exposing a section of the craft to space will cause the universe to move toward it at the speed of light. But the craft doesn't actually move, negating issues with momentum. More within the title of this post.
I realize I only have a very rudimentary lay person's understanding of spacetime that is pretty much entirely just the "bowling ball on a trampoline" analogy, but what I don't understand about these warp bubbles is: how do they "pull away" from the local bit of spacetime they previously occupied? Can we think of it as having fluid-like properties? Would there be any consequence to the local area when the warp bubble departs?
Great explanation. I personally do not understand the "hype" around warp drives. The common sense approach to covering vast distances in space is the boring option, acceleration, solar sail, cryogenics or generations of life cycles onboard maintaining the ship until it arrives. It's not pretty but it's something we could actually do.
In a way like, we really REALLY don't need a warp drive if like it takes a million years to colonise our galaxy then thats still VERY fast, but if we find a way to move faster we could also for example leave our local group without getting stuck in the middle of the universe's expansion without being able to for example go from group Earth to the next local group, like even travelling at near C its impossible, the universe expands faster than you can move making it impossible leaving our local group, but realistically speaking like all we have acess to on the local group is already WAY more than enough for untold ammount of eons
@SabineHossenfelder, I´m going to sound a bit confused but please bear with me: there seems to be a lot of focus on expanding or contracting space around an object to achieve FTL. But shouldn´t we be using the word "space-time" instead? If so, this begs the question (in layman´s terms) how does the clock tick in a volume to space that is contacted vs elongated? And what bearing does the inclusion of "time" into the equation have for warp drives? The current pop culture understanding of warp drives is: I warp an area behind and in front of the ship to circumvent General Relativity and achieve FTL. So I could be in Mars in about 20 minutes, from the view point of (say) mission control in Houston and the passenger would observe the same passage of time. But I get the feeling that that's now how it would work in reality, if we even could pull off the engineering of this device. Any comments?
the actual implications of warp drives, if they were ever achievable, would involve complex relativistic effects on time and space, which is actually a huge problem in physics in regards to things like time dilation and causality. Not to mention there isnt a single person alive who would even have the slightest idea on how to build a "warp drive"
I don't see 1000 years away. I work in IT. I've seen the impact of it. How it's connected the world brought people together. I'm watching you now. We can put 8 billion brains on this, more than we can run millions of GPUs to create AI to assist or tell us how to do it from patterns were are not capable of recognizing.
Why can't we use a warp bubble that warps space the whole distance between points A & B? That's probably how entangled particles react to each other. Some photons are entangled by turning one photon into two so they're probably the very same photon in two places at once. It might be that alien civilizations use this method to hide themselves in a higher spatial dimension/warp bubbles, in relation to an observer. What if dark matter is normal matter hidden in higher spacial dimensions? What if the expansion of space & it's acceleration is just an illusion, relative to an observer (in this case, us)?
Entangled particles *don't* react to each other. Imagine a heads-up coin and a tails-up coin welded together at the edge with a fragile weld. Before flipping such a pair, I can guarantee that they will come up on opposite sides, so if I flip the pair and tell you the state of one coin, you can accurately tell me the state of the other. But, if I try to manipulate one of the coins, the weld will break, and their states will no longer be related. This is like how entangled particles work. They don't communicate. What's special is that we know something about how the pair behaves, even if we don't know how either individual behaves.
Did you leave out the c^4 term in the denominator of the right side of Einsteins equation on purpose, or was it a mistake? Or did you simply set it to a value of 1 ?
There are different ways of writing it. For instance Sean Carroll has the same version in an old blog post called "Einstein and Pi" at preposterous universe.
4:11 I thought this was excluded by several papers from the early 2000s (IIRC). They prove that any such warp drive would have to use matter in which the speed of sound exceeds locally the speed of light which is impossible.
Great video. As much as I love science fiction, and the ideas we find in it are often the inspiration for real technologies, it's important not to get carried away (pun intended). If we ever want to become a truly spacefaring civilisation, we need to be realistic about what avenues of enquiry are actually worth pursuing. Whatever the hell negative energy even means, we appear to need it for any kind of non-spherical or non-wave solutions to the EFE's. In an intuitive sense, it seems like the principle of least action rules, and if you want spacetime to do anything that isn't a very natural shape, you need to introduce anti-gravitational effects. Maybe this exists, maybe it doesn't. But there certainly doesn't seem to be any indication of it in nature so far.
In some ways, the expanding universe itself can be thought of as a warp drive. It is expected that there is stuff in the universe that we will never see because it is moving away from us faster than light. It is able to do this because the space between us and it is expanding faster than light. Creating this effect on a person scale does seem amazingly difficult. In some ways you can liken it to the challenges of creating useable fusion. The sun already creates useful fusion on a solar scale, but adapting that to be useful on a human level is technically very hard. A similar argument can be made about warp drive, though the difference in scales is so huge that it is hard to imagine a time that we could make use of warp drive.
@@StabilisingGlobalTemperature Space can expand faster than light. The father objects are away from us, the faster they are moving away due to the expansion of space. If the object is far enough away, we can't observe it since its light will never reach us because the space between is expanding faster than the light is getting closer to us. At some point in the distant future, we won't even be able to see other galaxies due to this effect
@@StabilisingGlobalTemperatureIn A recent video about a year ago about FTL, Sabine explained that the problem is just to break the limit. SR does not forbid FTL
When I look at the visualization, I imagine a vessel in water that is able to chill the water in front of it (compress) and heat the water behind it (expansion) as a means of propulsion. In the context of warp drives however, it's the fabric of space-time (nothing, essentially, a lack of anything, or mass/energy) instead of the water. How do you condense or expand the fabric of "nothing?" I wonder if one could make the idea of space-time become more tangible by shifting gravity to being a force exerted by space-time on an object as it is displaced and becomes denser around any given mass, sort of like water initially after you put an object in it, displacing the water. The further away from a mass floating in space-time, the less dense the displaced space-time would become, the less influence the density would have in accelerating another mass towards and through it. I wonder if you placed a stick in pure space-time, where no external gravitational forces were impacting it, and fastened a giant lead orb to one end, and a calcium orb at the other, if this would create motion towards the increased gravity (spacetime density) of the lead orb due to its mass?
That was a really interesting point about what's needed to move a ship forward using warp field propulsion. Is creating a warp field enough on its own? Does the ship need to be displaced within the warp bubble in order for the effects of the field to be useful? One would think intuitively, not, as space time being warped should be sufficient on its own. But maybe the energy requirements of the warp field can be drastically reduced by displacing the ship within the bubble anyhow?
I accidentally built a warp drive into my couch. Whenever I lay down fully on it, I immediately warp forward 1h in time.
that's a time machine, silly.
@@brianyoung8999 That explains the laser raptors...
That was with , or without cannabis? I have heard of couchlock.
The dose of realism Sabine adds to her videos is something YT science related channels usually lack.
I know plenty down-to-earth channels, they're just not mainstream because they go way over the average person's head.
What about traveling as fare back in time as time is moving forward
yay, science, however!
Because everything is content.
List them please@@paulmichaelfreedman8334
"For all we know it doesn't exist" is a breath of fresh air compared to all the popular physics hype out there.
What about that Quantum vortex made in a jar
Tasty jar full of Vortex?
Everything is hogwash, hogwash i say!
@@SoulDelSolhave you washed your hog?
Everything is content.
The number of solutions to General Relativity seems to be directly proportional to the number of science fiction plots.
You are victim to the fallacy the expertise in one area means you are a genius at everything else.
parallelism in the computational universe hypothesis would replace GR in a heart beat!
When Sabine said achieving warp drive would take a thousand years, Einstein spoke up in my head. "There is not the slightest indication that (nuclear) energy will ever be obtainable," he said. "It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." Six years later, Otto Hahn did it.
I know people forget that just cause someone is an expert doesn't mean they are right.
Well, this is different, the math to smash an atom was known and the amount of energy needed to do it was achievable even in times when Einstein said it. It was nothing out of scope of what we have been producing at that time. The control of this process was the problem. Here we are talking energies far beyond what we can even imagine to produce in future. I have seen many estimates how much energy you will need to create it and the lowest was that you will need more energy than is contained in planet Jupiter. And that is just for curving the spacetime, we have no idea how to move it, how much energy you need to stop it, to steer it and so on. So yeah 1000 years is very optimistic.
I'm surprised she is so optimistic as to think humanity will exist as a technological people in a thousand years
@@flakcannon722 that's hardly optimistic
Just because some impossible challenges are resolved, it doesn’t mean all challenges can or will be resolved.
Also while splitting atoms were “We don’t know how to do it”, warp drive (and FTL in general) are more like “it is not doable according to our knowledge”.
I mostly ignore topics like cold fusion or warp drives, but when it's Sabine....
LENR is actually what cold fusion is. Reccomend looking into it.
Sabine cannot be denied!
I trust her bc she says einshtein so she must be smart or German or something
@@TheIgnoramus The closest thing to cold fusion in the real world is Gazpacho.🤣
@@TheIgnoramusLENR stands for Low Energy Nuclear Reaction. Cold fusion described by different words. Finding different words is not progress.
This is one of the best explanations of warp drives Ive seen.
What about the Quantum vortex made in ta jar
I like that you present the information genuinely. Yes it would be all exciting but instead of just hypeing things up for the algorithm, you let people know warp drive isn't feasible yet.
She does not even address the feasibility of it. She states the fact that we just have no idea how to do it.
Uncle Roger volunteers Jamie Oliver to test the first warp drive spaceship.
Sounds reasonable
I don't want his cooking to represent Earth if he finds aliens
Why not use Traditional propulsion while warping the space 🌌 around you why and travelling as far back in time as time is moving forward
@@singleflow On the other hand, if the aliens think all our food is like this, then do they maybe think that we are not worth invading. :-)
Which species of Monkey is he?
“Maybe I’m just getting old and lacking imagination”
What a beautiful reality and self aware statement ❤ Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the grind of our own paths and strategies that we forget how enjoyable off-roading can be
I love to understand science, but it takes time to understand, and time is an asset that most people don’t have these days. I still learn as much as I can everyday and you’re facilitating that, thanks!
I once had a physics teacher tell me "no matter can go faster than the speed of light, but space can do what ever the hell it wants."
Wonderful, refreshing presentation of physics. I had to lol about the caterpillar, that already invented the warp drive. About curving spacetime, doesn´t that require extremly strong gravitational fields, like, erm, around tiny BHs?
Well, strictly speaking any type of energy curves space-time. It's just that the strength of the curvature depends on the density. So really you have to ask what kind of curvature do you need to get any noticeable acceleration. And I suspect that if they ever crunch the numbers for that they will find exactly what you say, that unless you take something that's very close to being a black hole, you'll not accelerate much...
@@SabineHossenfelder Thanks for your explanation!
@@SabineHossenfelder I feel like we would really only need star level of curvature
@@jonathanlanser1129 if you take a look at the graph shown at 03:15 you'll see the energy required to do the work of warping space. Compare what's shown to the known energy output of the sun, and you''ll realize your "star level of curvature" is quite insufficient for the task. Looks to me like you'd need about 10 to 20 quadrillion times more energy output than the sun..
We would have to find another way to curve space time essentially, with gravity and anti gravity
Some people developed a warp drive. But I cannot find them anymore.
Lol
I have plans for one but they're too complex to fit in this yt comment
I believe that was a SIMULATION, not a real drive.
Must have been a damn good simulation for them to dissappear
People are going to build a statue for them ten centuries ago.
Zefram Cochrane has joined the chat.
Captain Picard has joined the chat.
Yeah man. For real. I wanted to name a kid after Zephram . Now that I'm 60+ I'm beginning to feel like his movie character : )
as movies have taught us, we need to live in a dystopian world after a total collapse with zero funding and minimum resources to be able to build advance tech.
@@brianyoung8999 Looks we're on the right path then.
The father of Archer joined the chat
We're only 39 years away from Zefram Cochrane's flight
The eugenics wars didn't happen though?
Daaamn you mean if I survive the third world war I’ll be alive to see a Vulcan, and the Borg possibly?
@@KutluMizrak That's sort of happening now with the ethno-genocides taking place and reproductive restrictions being reintroduced in the US.
I usually avoid these types of videos but I'll listen to you
I love how Isaac Arthur released a video today on Stargates!!!
Jaffa, kree!
Jaffa, Kwee!
Stargate is an incredibly underrated universe; I esp loved the movie.
@@chriswhite3692 indeed!
"We are hung up on matter. Only energetic empathy towards The Whole, has the purity to integrate with the Univers so that everywhere is wherever we are." - My Dog
*_"They're not entirely science fiction, they're based on real science."_* - This suggests a (common) misunderstanding of what science fiction *is.*
Science fiction doesn't mean "fake" (or fictitious) science. It simply means fiction (i.e., a made-up story) whose plot explores the consequences of scientific or technological innovation. It can (and ideally should) be based on real science. Just like crime fiction can be based on real crimes and horror can be based on being eaten alive by real rats.
Stuff like _The Martian_ is still "science fiction" even if it all the science in it is true (which it isn't, in the case of _The Martian,_ but it's close enough, and it _could_ be 100% correct without fundamentally changing the *story* - which is the _fiction_ part)
Nice nod to Miguel Alcubierre at 2:53 in for warp drive.
Before you can warp drive, you need 2 energy sources. Maybe, we can do an experiment of a new warp drive equation. Ok, the first trip in the warp drive tunnel must be by a artificial Intelligence pilot, an (AI) pilot because of that energy, that friction, that heat. In other words, Thermo-radiation, that energy that surrounds the ship's static warp bubble shell. That radiation would (kill) any person. This is the new equation. (Positive infinite energy = +E)+ Dyson Sphere (Magnifier)+(Warp Drive Coils ship)×(AI) Singularity)^((+E🔼(-E))= ( - Negative Energy> Jupiter)× (Thermo-radiation(Temperature))= Warp Drive Engine. Let me explain, Ok exotic matter( - mass matter). Is a waste of time. You must use what's in front of you, in your environment. For example, in the Alaskan frontier, you might have to cut trees to build your home or use snow for drinking water. Or...Or how sailors 300 years ago, sailed the sea useing that energy, that friction, that surrounded the sails called wind. And the ship would move(sail) without an internal power source(engine). Again you must use what's in front of you, your environment. Ok, look at the first part of the equation. The (Sun=+E), is our positive infinite energy source for warp drive travel, Not exotic (negative matter). Most scientists agree we need the power (mass, energy level)= to Jupiter to make warp drive work. Ok the (Sun=+E) is 10 to 100 times greater than Jupiter, that's our power source. We solved our energy problem. You would put many giant solar deflector array dishes around the equator of the sun. Built by a (AI) quantum computer. All the deflector array dishes will redirect the sun=(+E) energy into one highly focused concentrated energy beam and aim it to the dyson sphere (magnifier). For example, how you can start a fire useing a magnifying glass with the sun. The magnifier dyson sphere will be built by a artificial Intelligence (AI) scientist and engineer. The (AI) will figure out how to harness, how to collect, how to magnify (+E) that energy beam to the correct intensity. I think the (AI) won't use glass or mirrors.It will use something else. That beam will be aimed at the warp drive Gravity Coils. You might say what happens next. Just look at the equation. Next is (AI) Singularity)^(+E🔼(-E))= ( -Negative Energy > Jupiter). Ok, so how or who will build this machine. Can it be built by (AGI) or (AI) or (Super Quantum Computer. No,No, None. Only a (AI) Singularity, with infinite processing speed can do this. Look (+E🔼(-E)). The triangle 🔼= (delta)= to change to convert. It's a science term. Only an (AI) Singularity can convert and change +E to -E. And we have more than enough ( -Negative Energy) for the Gravity Coils to work correctly. And now the warp drive ship will go into the space-time tunnel. Ok, you might say it's in the spacetime tunnel without a internal power source(a engine), to maintain power to the warp coils static bubble shell. I know, I know, just look at the equation again. Next is radiation thermo (temperature). Remember, remember, what I said use what's in front of us, our environment. Remember the 2 examples, I gave. The (AI) pilot will use that radiation thermo (temperature), that would (kill) a person, that energy, that friction, that heat, that radiation that surrounds the ship, the radiation that surrounds the warp bubble to maintain the warp coils running (power). You see, you see, we don't need to bring an internal power source(engine) on the ship. No exotic matter required. We need to use that radiation thermo temperature that surrounds the ship and somehow convert use change into energy that the gravity warp coils can use. And the ship will travel in the spacetime tunnel without a internal power source( engine). Similar to how sailors sailed the sea 300 years ago useing that energy that friction that surrounds the sails called Wind to sail the sea without an engine. Exactly, we won't use wind we will sail with Thermo-radiation.
I really appreciate your ability to communicate complex scientific concepts to us layman. Also, the Gernam accent is amazing. Love hearing you say Einstein.
Just don’t ever, ever go to warp 10.
Yeah, things can get slimy.
Exactly. You'll abandon your lizard kids. 😮
Mine goes to 11.
Well, my console reads _WARP X._ So, I think our ship will be okay.
@@Daniel-jm8we Is the input limited to 280 characters?
Yes, us Trekkies got a picture of it from Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 Episode 6: "Where no one has gone before." at 7 minutes and 36 seconds into the episode. We basically got the same from Star Trek The Next Generation: Technical Manual some years later. But the insight for us is when Westley and "The Traveler" talk about it; specifically at 8:13 when we see it change. Thus giving insight that they can be 'manipulated' and configured, etc. For me - I wanted to see a caterpillar movement on the outside of the field lol Also - it's noted that more 'nacelles' (earlier Starfleet research) didn't give you more power, but my thoughts where that they would conversely give you more control and more efficiency! And you're showing a caterpillar!!! @ about 3:05 here... Don't you technically want a bubble and no or virtually no movement inside? As this is also noted in Star Trek, but visuals are 'wrong.' Because if you have moment on the inside you'd be pushing the 'ship' forward (from left to right) out of the field... Adding stress to the ship... Because it's the bubble (with the ship inside it) that is actually moving [as is depicted in the show], sure the ship generates the field, but at these speeds... in 'combination with any lag' of field generation meaning that you're pushing the ship out of the bubble into 'normal space' and subjecting it to extreme stresses. Technically I only 'know' the ST world and have little knowledge of GR! :)
Negative energy might not be needed. A paper by Erik Lentz titled 'Hyper-Fast Positive Energy Warp Drives' states that regular energy can be used; all that's needed is to reduce the amount
The problem is that most of the positive mass used isn't in the warp bubble, so you can't actually go anywhere, and that's fairly fundamental to why the warp drives typically proposed require negative energy. The positive mass is used to basically create a local illusion of negative energy in a particular place, but that place is never going to be "surrounding the whole thing" but rather in an area between positive masses. So it probably can't ever be made to work.
A possible solution to the negative mass problem would be the Casimir Effect. Basically, it’s a negative energy pressure caused by the quantum vacuum between two plates. However it’s important that this is a relative to the overall quantum background energy so if it’s removed, it’s not a negative. It remains to be seen if this is a viable solution.
There are several other problems with a potential warp drive such as the energy requirement, possible causality violations, the horizon problem where the inside would be flooded with hawking radiation, and anything that gets stuck in front of the bubble while at warp, will immediately convert to energy once you drop out of warp, the energy jump can be so large, it can destroy whole planets. There is a really good video about the Alcubbiere/Warp Drive on the Cool Worlds yt channel if anyone wants to know more.
Ive spent a lot of time researching this topic over the years, and I’m optimistic. Maybe we won’t achieve warp this century, but I can see it in a few hundred years.
The amount of energy and mass it would take to warp space is insane not to mention the affects on the solar system it would be used in
Kyle Hill calculated the energy required to open a wormhole large enough to fit a human, taking inspiration from the videogame Portal. It would require a *mass* similar to THE WHOLE MOON
Every
Single
Portal
(And _second_)
I believe they reduced it from 100 times the mass of the universe to 3kg. So we only need a little bit impossible and with that we can blow it up to maximum impossible.
yeah but you coud also say that it wouldnt affect it because the regular mass is counteracted by the negative mass.
@@marcoottina654 ok, but a wormhole and warp drive are two different things (as pointed out nicely in this video). That said, the energy to warp spacetime to forma warp bubble is also enormous
Simple control of probability is the way. It's just space. No energy required.
5:19 -- "So if you feel like you're destined to be the first to build a warp drive, you might want to check out this paper."
**Zefram Cochrane enters the chat**
Best. Channel. Ever!
😂❤
Wait! The drawings, including the ones used in this video, are usually consistent with “must fit to space-time…” There’s a tube down through the middle of “fits with” and the negative space (in terms of your drawing) is then “does not fit” right?
So isn’t it painfully apparent that spooky action and quantum gravity are gonna be in the “does not fit” part of the drawing? We hear “Do we even need quantized gravity?” all the time… again, doesn’t that lack of connection imply the “not” part of the drawing?
Please discuss. Yes I can see that we can’t “get at” the “not space”… isn’t that consistent with so-called “dark this-n-that”? I’m not trying to explain. I’m trying to ask what seems to be unthinkable… most of what we take for granted was once unthinkable right?
I love what you do! Please do some more!!! 🎉
Why not Travel with conventional propulsion while warping the space 🌌 around you
0:38 Wow finaly something that matches what i see in my head. I been trying to say that we ride it but like a bubble. Its like always going down hill. On top of that, imagine this but with lots of room between so the middle is like a hidden dimension between stable blankets or something. We could, hypothetically, use simulations to craft a potential and then use fusion to collapse matter into the potential between the outer fields so they act as a safe environment to construct potentials into reality with qm or fusion technology. Idk but it seems like we could use the area as a safe place or a tunnel and not just for warp driving.
It must work because nobody ever finds the worms, just the little holes in furniture. Those worms are gone! 🤔
So it's a worm drive 02:44 rather than worm hole! 😅
Btw Sabine. Do we know if there is an upper speed limit to spacetime expansion? Would such a limit explain why the observed speed is in fact finite? (And get tid of dark energy)
Honestly, FTL being impossible would be the best news we can get for the future. Coupled with Fermi's paradox it might make our solar system and galaxy such a rare precious safehaven in a life-averse universe that a slow a methodical space exploration in the next millennia will allow us to slowly transition and evolve to be more space-faring without the fear of being suddenly found and sniped by some advanced civilization. The universe becomes then a very vast sea made of space and resources to build with to our heart's content, but with huge gulfs of space we cannot ever easily cross or simply expand exponentially into. Perhaps in 1000 years vast space colonies will begin slow, centuries-long treks towards nearby stars. For the people aboard life not changing significantly from their daily habits. Perhaps we'll have developed cryogenics and automated seed ships, which, having reached their destination, will find out that in the long time since old civilizations have gone quiet, and new ones have arisen, their messages still too far to significantly impact them in any physical way. It is a comfortable view in my opinion, knowing that we have all the time, space and resources to find a healthy way to exist with each other and progress, rather than eternally growing and running away from ourselves towards new tech, resources, and places before we learned to appreciate the ones we already got.
The biggest fear actually is the theory that technology may one day just stagnate, like a vital resource for making the next step was already used up and we cannot progress any further or humans are not smart enough to make the next step like, WE cannot make FTL drives because in lets say circa 2057 all unobtainum metal was exhausted naturally from the Earth and most of our solar system because it was not stable enough to last for too long so until we found out its uses at 2113 when we were searching of ways to scale up colonisation further in a FTL drive and we're like, ''Yeah we're screwed'' until we find somehow a way to artificially reproduce such material
Traveling faster than light would allow for some nasty things, including maybe time paradoxes to occur, but it wouldn't all be bad. Light travel or faster isn't all dangers, it gives greatly added exploration, travel, attack and defense capabilities too especially if a potential enemy is vastly more powerful but for whatever reason has not developed light/faster than light travel. For example, if we encountered a civilization with vastly superior weapons, numbers and colonization technologies and light travel did not exist to allow us to first strike them before they notice us (which may be unethical or at least logistically impossible if they're spread far enough) and light travel did not exist to allow us to run away when they inevitably come to destroy us or 'civilize and guide' us (since we probably do not wish to first strike them for ethical, moral, or strategic reasons, there could be 3rd parties or they could have backup after all), then we would be just out of luck if we could not learn to both communicate with them and persuade them that we're more beneficial to them alive and mostly left alone (something we might have to convince our AI creations soon here as well).
So, in short, while I mostly agree with your comment, I just wanted to add that just in case faster than light travel or near light travel is possible we shouldn't hope it is impossible but rather hope that we develop it first and that we use it responsibly so that we become the vastly superior civilization. And, this would be to gloat or dominate but simply to keep ourselves and the galaxy/universe safe in general even safe from ourselves hopefully.
Being trapped in our solar system (or just neighboring systems) would mean a very finite amount of resources available to our civilization, giving us a hard limit on what we can do with all of it. Of course you could say if we could only ever colonize the entire galaxy, that would be finite too, even if massive. But having that boundary known, would put a damper on things. We'd for example, know that we could never become a type 3 civilization, or beyond that, and maybe not even a type 2, because even if we wanted build a dyson sphere to harvest all of our sun's energy, we wouldn't even have enough resources to do it, not enough resources to even make use of all that energy....which would give us a finite limit on how far our civilization could progress. There are other factors, such a spreading out over time, but that's not reliable, because even if we did, we'd also have to ensure there wasn't some greater systematic collapse of our expansion at some point for one reason or another, which the likelihood of increases the slower our expansion is. Or in other words, by the time our expansion reaches X number of lightyears, the inner core of our expansion could already be collapsing, and then start dotting out here and there over time for this or that reason. Like if you left earth to go 10 light years away, and by the time you got there, earth is barren. That's not expansion, that's just changing locations, and with less population, which is actually reduction rather than expansion. Let that creep on long enough with colonies, and you effectively end up with the same problem: Human civilization is wiped out. Now imagine if you didn't try to expand, and instead devoted resources to focusing on keeping your main solar system flourishing. Civilization might actually last longer by not having an extra solar colonization mindset.
It struck me as Sabine described how GR is a non-linear theory with enormous complexity and chaotic in nature, that is relevant to the discussion a few weeks ago about dark matter perhaps not being a particle (or similar) but instead being some potentially chaotic non-linearity that isn't yet understood.
I know that you were talking about wormholes, and then warp drives. But in each case showing an X-Wing while talking about warp drives is a big no no. It's likely to rupture the fabric of the Star-Trek Fandom. LOL.😂😂 Love you Sabine. A shout out to the Editor, it's a tough job to please all the nerds out there!
Due to copyright ©️ laws, that's a multiplication ✖️ wing, not an X wing. 😂
Admiral Ackbar will beam down to give a verbal warning
Controlled faster than light travel means that we tell a pocket of space to transport us by warping as we want. Fine. To tell space to warp as we want that message has to reach space from where we are with a speed faster than light before space can respond to warp as we ask. Since unwarped space doesn't support faster than light message transfer the whole concept collapses.
From what I understand you wouldn't be able to transmit or receive messages while in the warp bubble.
Before we start to design the passenger capsule:
1.) Can the start and boundary conditions for the solution of that simulation be achieved with the differential manifold which describes our universe? (Nobody knows …. )
2.) How does time go by. In the passenger capsule and outside the warp-bubble?
(First answer question one.)
I think your question 1 is missing a word?
Also, I think you might be invoking the term “differentiable manifold” without much reason. Yes, in GR we do model spacetime as a differentiable (pseudo-Riemannian) manifold . But I don’t think mentioning that makes your comment any clearer.
You can just talk about initial conditions?
I get the impression that your question is about “even if GR permits such solutions, using only matter of the sort which we know exists, does it allow for the *creation* of such a drive, given initial conditions like those we find ourselves with?”.
Now, I suspect the answer may be “GR does not permit warp drives using the materials we know to exist, period, not even mentioning the construction”?
But, at the same time, I don’t see why answering the “assuming the materials needed are available, can one be created?” should need to be answered before people work on the “could the passenger area be habitable?”.
They are independent questions which can be pursued in parallel.
@@drdca8263 Thanks a lot. There was really one word missing.
Regarding the notion of “Differentiale Manifolds” I did not bother to go into too much detail. Of course, the manifold needs not only to be differentiale. If wormholes etc can be „produced“ , it must be possible, that the topological type of the manifold can change dynamically. And I wonder, whether there are solutions, where orientability can change dynamically, too. That might have some consequences with regard to the direction of time, but that wasn’t the point here.
And, of course, if all the physical questions can be answered, it still remains unclear, whether we ever will be able to answer the technical ones, too. Anyhow, before we start building warp drives, we most probably have built a collider of the size of the Milky Way before, I guess.
Hi Dr. Hossenfelder. Thank you so much for all your care, and all you share. You are a living, compassionate, caring, maternal, technically expert who translates and communicates ideas from clearly expert, detailed and precise considerations of details of our world, so even the dullest of minds in your web audience may respect, consider, and possibly grow, aspire, improve our lives and our world. You're great!
On more practical forms of feedback, please be aware that your videos are excellent diaries, journals, records of text for fantastic educational content, products, and mind nourishing, world benefiting enhancements.
Is General Relativity actually "weird," or does it just posit that "flatness" is emergent (if real at all), and our reductionist sensitivities rely on relative flatness (centers of mass/gravity, force vectors etc) that are locally sufficient thanks to the pseudoaxis of gravitational north/south?
I'd say that flat space exists only in as much as perfect circles -- it's a maths thing that we don't find in reality.
The real problem, for lay people, with relativity formulas is to make real calculations with them. Whenever you see them, they're just highly abstract symbols and constants, for which we don't know units. Who did ever do an actual calculation with E=mc²? That's where this code becomes interesting, so that I may check it out on Github, not for preparing real warp drives.
@@SabineHossenfelder any chance we can get some formula breakdown videos? what @BBirke1337 is saying has some merit
@@SabineHossenfelderWe need flat space-time, without it we would not know when energy is conserved, warp deforms space-time plastically as it is a solution that violates several energy conditions and that is why it can produce that movement
@@BBirke1337 E=mc² gives us the energy produced by a chemical or nuclear reaction. The reaction products have less mass than the reactants, with the difference in mass being released as energy according to that formula.
Great video: Based on factual research, it was very well explained and presented. I use your knowledge to debunk current outlandish claims in the media, such as this recent title for a story from ecoticias(EcoNews) posted in late July stating:
"Einstein predicted an engine that would travel faster than light: It has been built for the first time, and it works like this."
I smile at the fact that they state it has been, "built".
Thank you for making these videos.
I am enamored with how you present information and how you seem to have a calm and level-headed approach to theoretical possibilities without entertaining the fantastical.
Lets be honest, sometimes just 1 discovery can gain us a thousand years. We gonna see what happens in physics.
Sabine is constantly throwing cold water on all sorts of "scientific" hypotheses, predictions and dreams. It's one of her best qualities.
We would still be using steam power if we didn't have hypotheses based on dreams. It's not only reasonable, but critical for science to move forward. That's how science works, you construct hypotheses based on observations and theory, and test them. Science isn't saying, "It sounds silly and impossible even if it's theoretically possible so no one should ever even try." That's how you stay primitive.
Construct a hypothesis, test it, gather as much data as possible over time, and stick to what the data indicate. That's literally the scientific method. Even if you fail you'll gain new information.
But you first have to discover "but there is a little problem" so that you can fix it.
"Most plausible" is still incredibly generous. It seems that all of these warp drive concepts still have issues with requiring obscene amounts of energy or have inconvenient side effects like vaporizing everything inside the warp bubble with "absolute hot" temperatures.
Question, can you generate that envelope from outside the passenger area? Or does the field form from the center? And if it does, can it be established weak enough to not spaghettify said passengers as it expands through them?
When Sabine changes her hairstyle in the middle of the video, it always look to me like she just jumped out of the warp :)
Her stuff is difficult for me to understand, so I focus on her hairstyle ;P
Now you are talking my science :) I use scalar knotting technology for field momentum :)
I find it hard to swallow that Sabine can learn anything from Brilliant. She is an expert theoretical physicist, a master mathematician, and a science educator. What can someone of her genius-level intellect learn from a Janet and Jane internet application ?
I can respect her getting a good paycheque out of doing the promo. I agree though, not something I plan to use. I assume most people following this channel are undergrad+ in STEM so it is strange.
@@FractaLL2103 I'm not STEM and there must be more people like me, people who just want a general exposure to developments in Science, and find Sabine's delivery the most understandable, non-hypey, and funny.
reviewing the things you know is important no matter how smart you are.
brilliant courses could be used to reinforce what you know and not forget.
Brilliant doesn't only have courses related to her field. It has computer science courses, data analysis, and engineering as well.
@@nahoj.2569 agreed, but have you seen the costs of using that platform? its super expensive...
enjoy watching your video’s. Very educational, fun, interesting and thankful observation for many reasons. Love the responsibility about thinking about our planet, and the human search for answers. 👍😀
Fascinating, but very problematic. That's what I love about Sabina's reporting. No. hype allowed.
Thanks so much for creating and sharing this informative video. Great job. Keep it up.
What about a warp drive that goes slower than the speed of light. Even a drive that allowed travel at a small fraction of c would be very useful for interplanetary travel. What would a warp drive that went only 10mph look like?
I suspect it would still require some unobtainium, negative energy in other words.
Yes, making one that goes slower than the speed of light would definitely be easier. But I haven't seen a calculation for what type of energy density this would need. I've been asking about this for years and, you know, maybe I should just do the calculation myself and write a paper...
In any case, I suspect that if you want to get to any noticeable acceleration, you'll need very high energy densities, so high that we can't create them.
It's a curious fact about nature that fapp we can only squeeze matter together until nuclear density and that's pretty much it. And you might not want to sit next to something that's entirely made of nuclear matter as that tends to radiate off lots of nasty stuff.
Reminds me of an old American movie The Explorers. Kids get a dream and build a seeming warp bubble and manipulate with an 80s computer.
I wanna break the speed of light, otherwise its soo sad to think we would never roam the universe freely🥲
@@TheSplendidVids Gotta crawl before you can run!
The thing I have always wondered about warp drives is how much space actually needs to be warped in order for it to happen. Most of the stuff one sees has a pretty large bubble, but is that absolutely necessary? For instance, if a sphere has the space in front of it contract by like 1 micron, and the space behind expands by the same amount or slightly more, would this both work and require less energy?
I love your material! Ever since Dr. Alcubierre showed this was possible, I’ve been thinking Star Trek got it right and the warp drive is the way to go. This is just a hunch on my part, but I think it’ll be less than 1K years before we figure it out from an engineering perspective. Far too many people want this to happen and are working it.
This reminded me to public presentation about gravitational waves organized by my university's ALUMNI. I asked physics professor who was presenting if speed of gravitational waves being speed of light also implies that any space disturbance is limited to this speed, meaning that warp drive would not be possible even if we knew how to make such disturbance. Professor cut me off, sounding almost insulted, with "I'm not here to speak about SF physics". Other professor, who's class I took on university, intervened and said that question is interesting, and while warp is in SF area, considering limitations of space disturbance is surely in area of physics and that while he didn't study it deeper, he thinks that such disturbance could be limited to speed of light.
What I am interested in is if we can create AI that could start sorting stuff like this out.... much faster than we ever could.
Very interesting dialogue. Love the depth of understanding. Do wish for the reconciliation. Question What about recreation. Question
To be honest, if we find a wormhole, I’m quite sure it’s connected to a place I’d want to go
It'll take you to your future... inevitably 😅
Here's hoping it comes together for you Sabine. You're creative, if dreaming more helps I highly recommend it.
When the student is ready the teacher will appear.
That's awesome. I just started this rental stuff and I would love to get to the point where I have to stand in the cold getting trained on a stage setup.
I thought some scientist managed to make the energy requierment non negative and the equivelant of the mass of jupiter or something like that
Erik Lentz. Others debated whether it could be faster than light without it. He still maintains it can, I’ve talked to him. But even if it can’t there are now a few formulas from different people for positive energy warp drives that can get at least close to light speed.
@@bradysmith4405 hmm... curious you say that, since Sabine (further up in comments) says she's not aware of an estimate of the amount of energy required for sub-light speed warp drives.
@@FredPlanatia she might not know that but she did do an episode on positive energy warp drives once
This seems to be more fun than inventing new particles!
Sound travels through air, slow down air and voilá mach speed.
Okay steampunk version of this:
Imagine a line of extending seesaws hinged end to end, weighted at each end, with each hinge and focal point mounted to a pneumatic cylinder. Now take several of these long seesaw-snakes and wrap them around a cylinder so they form a barrel. Next, spin the outside of the barrel such that the fully extruded, weighted ends on each seesaw-snake joint go as fast as the material itself can physically allow. What you have is a spinning barrel of latitudinally placed weights with adjustable momentum. This could allow you to “swallow” through space by producing a halo of space time curvature that occurs at one end and travels to the other.
If friction was zero, the material could maintain its integrity, the spinning didn’t rip the ship apart, and the interior could be counter spun to the same amount, then you’d be able to control curvature without energy loss and at any speed. The energy because maintaining spin doesn’t require energy in a vacuum and because radial changes to one ring of weights would be balanced against the adjacent ring, meaning no net gain or loss of momentum. And no limit to speed because the halo of curvature “moves” along the ship according to the synchronized adjustments of the pneumatic cylinders, not any traveling object or signal. The energy cost itself would come from adjusting to pneumatics.
Is this a good idea? No. One piece of space debris would turn the ship into a lethal wash machine, and any friction would either fry the inhabitants or burn out the components and send everyone in random trajectories out into space. Death would be a constant, likely scenario, and happen too fast to prevent.
But it would make for a good fiction vessel…
I am not a physicist, but recently I've been pondering about this stuff for a short story. I ended up with the following assumption: that warp drives could work, but only under the speed of light, thus not violating causality, and that the ship inside would experience the effects of acceleration, time and spatial dilation, like any other propulsion system. The whole thing would warp space-time around it with coils of architecture similar to those used in MRI (being the closest thing I know of that can manipulate fields in space) creating a gradient field that could, in theory, move and roll the ship in all directions.
It's just speculation, I know. Does any one have a thought?
the idea that I found interesting was a machine that generated a spherical field. When engaged, the object maintained its motion, but stepped out of time for a short amount of time. When in popped back into time, it had the exact x,y,z location and dx, dy, dz velocity (and axial rotations). The great bit was things like earth continued to rotate on its axis and rotate around the sun and the sun continued around the centre of the milky way,etc. So when it popped back into 'now' it was several hundred thousand kilometers away. By timing the blink properly, it could be used to put very large masses and volumes into orbit around the earth very easily. The downside was the timing is just too fine to be able to get to a spot out in space that you could pop from and then end up on earth at the exact right location, with the right velocity and spin. So you could not use the technology to land.
@@KnugLidi You would use the time blink to stay in place while the universe moves past you, but conventional propulsion of some sort to move accurately after the time blink. The trick is to not end up in the middle of a moon or asteroid when you come out of the blink.
@@stevengordon3271 indeed, but to get all the coordinates exactly (to an insane degree) to pop in and out to land on a planet surface is always the problem
The issue isn't whether things get around causality or not, the issue is what materials/physics would allow one to manipulate space in such a way. Ironically, we kind of know that even gravity makes it impossible, because otherwise blackholes would be zipping around the galaxy under their own mass, and faster the bigger they got. Technically a pull is a push in a way, so you sort of don't need negative energy, but at the same time you do, because otherwise we would already see odd behaviors between any two celestial masses. What this all means is we won't find the answer with anything above quantum levels, and probably only with physics at scales beyond the planck length and quarks.
@@KnugLidi Makes more sense to just avoid that problem altogether and only use that technology to get off of planets into open space.
Element 115 has gravity properties. If a private company has made a stable version of it, that would be all that's needed to create an envelope effectively removing it from our current physics laws. It would also likely bend light around the object as well giving it a cloaked effect.
I love the way Ms Hossenfelder pronounces "Einstein" - using the REAL German-language pronunciation.
Well ... she is German.
Love the way she says phithithithz. Sorry Sabine.
I wonder if she reads that in her language as One Cup (einstein). 🤔
Regarding getting wormholes that go somewhere useful: the general sci-fi solution is to make both ends of the wormhole close to home, then ship one end to the intended destination at slower-than-light speeds. Takes a while to set up (not accounting for time dilation making it seem faster at the hub of the network), but once you've got the wormhole in place you've got a really convenient way to get around.
"Hyperjumps, wormholes and warp drive," OH MY!
"Hyperjumps, wormholes and warp drive," OH MY!
Flying Monkeys!!!
Erik lentz proposed a method that doesn't require negative energy or negaitve mass. Even though it would require the mass to be extremely dense, it is a step in the right direction, since it only requires positive mass
I would love to see a video about the Soliton drive, though.
Would love to see Sabine analyze the warp drive documents that you can find on the cia data archive website. For example the universal toroid and cassimir effect
I aprove of the X-wing anim! :D Thanks as always Sabine!
Before figuring out how to build a warp drive, we need to solve the problem of achieving safe artificial gravity for space ships and space stations. Thanks.
Warp drive doesn't need a propoulsion system based on the third law, it works by compressing the space in front of your ship and letting it expand back again behind your ship. Think of a half-sphere around your ship, the front half is compressed space, the rear half is relaxed and expanded space. Momentum is gained by continually compressing this space and relaxing it, the faster you can do this the faster you move. Like wrinkling up a carpet under an object. The real problem is that spacetime is incredibly stiff and even an object the mass of the Earth only deforms it slightly, you don't have to go far above the Earth to be free of it's gravitational attraction. So instead of mass to deform spacetime we can substitute energy, and of course we are not deforming spacetime over an area as large as the Earth, a few tens of metres is enough, but even then the energy requirement is so vast as to b unimaginable, and we don't have any idea how to do it. Fire a powerful laser in an arc around your ship maybe, who knows. I think it's possible, and not in 1000 years, I'd say around 100-200 years if it is indeed possible. however another consideration is the CPC (Chronology protection Conjecture) suggested by Hawking, although it feels somewhat contrived one does have to think in terms of causality when arriving at a destination before you set off.
To talk about compressing space seems strange. Space is a vacuum. So what is being compressed?
@@mreconomics1125 The vacuum of space is merely a measurement of what's in it, not what it is. E.g. a balloon can be empty but there is still a balloon. Think about gravitational waves, what is it that is waving? It is the fabric of spacetime. To answer your question fully would be very difficult and beyond my level of training, but I suggest you look up stiffness of spacetime or spacetime rigidity but be warned the content includes very high level maths.
Disagree with "you don't have to go far above the Earth to be free of it's gravitational attraction". Depends what "far" means I guess. But even then, gravity decays inverse-square, never reaching zero. Navigating to Mars would need to take it into account.
Maybe you already appreciate, maybe some don't, but the Moon is held in (a quarter million miles high) Earth orbit by virtue of our planet's gravity (more precisely, both holding on to each other, orbiting around a common centre of mass). Objects in low Earth orbit experience hardly less gravity than on Earth surface. They are weightless only because the inward pull (towards Earth) on them by that gravity is being exactly counteracted by the outward "pull of centrifugal force" (loosely speaking) on them, itself resulting from their orbital path (e.g. considering roughly circular ones, for sake of simplicity).
@@DavidEsp1 to establish a warp bubble then what I said was correct, however, if you want to be exact then the gravitational effect of any object in space extends to infinity, it's just really really small and to all intents and purposes can be ignored, especially as I was illustrating the point about mass deforming spacetime and how that distortion if you could see it, is very close to the mass in question. I did wonder if I should invoke the inverse square law but I wanted to keep it relatively simple.
0:48 That 100% MATLAB just gave me a heart attack
Glad to see a physicist saying this because while I never did anything beyond undergrad engineering physics, everything I've read on the topic makes it seem either theoretically impossible or practically infeasible to the point where it's nothing but flights of fancy. Always a bummer since I grew up on "Good Trek", but I don't like getting my hopes up for no reason. Problem is, whenever I tell my buddies that the majority of physicists think it's probably not something we can do, they seem to think I'm lying to them.
It would be interesting to see a video about the weirdness of Relativity
Have you thought about using wave guides to guide space around the vehicle
Thanks for the info, Sabine! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
I downloaded the artice and although the math is above me, I realise that due to space-time curvature, the math might be all around me... which just makes the problem more difficult!
Great video, thank you Sabine!
Warp drive may be possible by surrounding a craft with a field that prevents it from contracting.
If we accept the universe or space is contracting through time, instead of expanding. Both provide the same illusion and difficult to tell apart. Exposing a section of the craft to space will cause the universe to move toward it at the speed of light. But the craft doesn't actually move, negating issues with momentum. More within the title of this post.
I realize I only have a very rudimentary lay person's understanding of spacetime that is pretty much entirely just the "bowling ball on a trampoline" analogy, but what I don't understand about these warp bubbles is: how do they "pull away" from the local bit of spacetime they previously occupied? Can we think of it as having fluid-like properties? Would there be any consequence to the local area when the warp bubble departs?
Great explanation. I personally do not understand the "hype" around warp drives. The common sense approach to covering vast distances in space is the boring option, acceleration, solar sail, cryogenics or generations of life cycles onboard maintaining the ship until it arrives.
It's not pretty but it's something we could actually do.
In a way like, we really REALLY don't need a warp drive if like it takes a million years to colonise our galaxy then thats still VERY fast, but if we find a way to move faster we could also for example leave our local group without getting stuck in the middle of the universe's expansion without being able to for example go from group Earth to the next local group, like even travelling at near C its impossible, the universe expands faster than you can move making it impossible leaving our local group, but realistically speaking like all we have acess to on the local group is already WAY more than enough for untold ammount of eons
@SabineHossenfelder, I´m going to sound a bit confused but please bear with me: there seems to be a lot of focus on expanding or contracting space around an object to achieve FTL. But shouldn´t we be using the word "space-time" instead? If so, this begs the question (in layman´s terms) how does the clock tick in a volume to space that is contacted vs elongated? And what bearing does the inclusion of "time" into the equation have for warp drives?
The current pop culture understanding of warp drives is: I warp an area behind and in front of the ship to circumvent General Relativity and achieve FTL. So I could be in Mars in about 20 minutes, from the view point of (say) mission control in Houston and the passenger would observe the same passage of time.
But I get the feeling that that's now how it would work in reality, if we even could pull off the engineering of this device.
Any comments?
the actual implications of warp drives, if they were ever achievable, would involve complex relativistic effects on time and space, which is actually a huge problem in physics in regards to things like time dilation and causality. Not to mention there isnt a single person alive who would even have the slightest idea on how to build a "warp drive"
This is very fascinating stuff and I love the video
They are indeed entirely science fiction, though they are not only fiction or fantasy because there is science heavily involved in the idea.
I don't see 1000 years away. I work in IT. I've seen the impact of it. How it's connected the world brought people together. I'm watching you now. We can put 8 billion brains on this, more than we can run millions of GPUs to create AI to assist or tell us how to do it from patterns were are not capable of recognizing.
Definitely something fun to look into. 😊
I do believe it is not W.A.R.P. Drive => I think it is W.O.P. drive. That means With Out Papers drive or you could refer to it as an Illegal Drive.
Do we need Inertial dampers?
This all makes me happy!!! It's practical.
Why can't we use a warp bubble that warps space the whole distance between points A & B? That's probably how entangled particles react to each other. Some photons are entangled by turning one photon into two so they're probably the very same photon in two places at once.
It might be that alien civilizations use this method to hide themselves in a higher spatial dimension/warp bubbles, in relation to an observer.
What if dark matter is normal matter hidden in higher spacial dimensions?
What if the expansion of space & it's acceleration is just an illusion, relative to an observer (in this case, us)?
Entangled particles *don't* react to each other.
Imagine a heads-up coin and a tails-up coin welded together at the edge with a fragile weld. Before flipping such a pair, I can guarantee that they will come up on opposite sides, so if I flip the pair and tell you the state of one coin, you can accurately tell me the state of the other. But, if I try to manipulate one of the coins, the weld will break, and their states will no longer be related.
This is like how entangled particles work. They don't communicate. What's special is that we know something about how the pair behaves, even if we don't know how either individual behaves.
Did you leave out the c^4 term in the denominator of the right side of Einsteins equation on purpose, or was it a mistake? Or did you simply set it to a value of 1 ?
There are different ways of writing it. For instance Sean Carroll has the same version in an old blog post called "Einstein and Pi" at preposterous universe.
4:11 I thought this was excluded by several papers from the early 2000s (IIRC). They prove that any such warp drive would have to use matter in which the speed of sound exceeds locally the speed of light which is impossible.
In QM, there is Entanglement that has no speed limit. Could there be a deeper link between QM and GR to make this so?
Great video. As much as I love science fiction, and the ideas we find in it are often the inspiration for real technologies, it's important not to get carried away (pun intended). If we ever want to become a truly spacefaring civilisation, we need to be realistic about what avenues of enquiry are actually worth pursuing. Whatever the hell negative energy even means, we appear to need it for any kind of non-spherical or non-wave solutions to the EFE's. In an intuitive sense, it seems like the principle of least action rules, and if you want spacetime to do anything that isn't a very natural shape, you need to introduce anti-gravitational effects. Maybe this exists, maybe it doesn't. But there certainly doesn't seem to be any indication of it in nature so far.
In some ways, the expanding universe itself can be thought of as a warp drive. It is expected that there is stuff in the universe that we will never see because it is moving away from us faster than light. It is able to do this because the space between us and it is expanding faster than light. Creating this effect on a person scale does seem amazingly difficult. In some ways you can liken it to the challenges of creating useable fusion. The sun already creates useful fusion on a solar scale, but adapting that to be useful on a human level is technically very hard. A similar argument can be made about warp drive, though the difference in scales is so huge that it is hard to imagine a time that we could make use of warp drive.
But nothing can travel faster than light.
@@StabilisingGlobalTemperature Space can expand faster than light. The father objects are away from us, the faster they are moving away due to the expansion of space. If the object is far enough away, we can't observe it since its light will never reach us because the space between is expanding faster than the light is getting closer to us. At some point in the distant future, we won't even be able to see other galaxies due to this effect
@@StabilisingGlobalTemperatureIn A recent video about a year ago about FTL, Sabine explained that the problem is just to break the limit. SR does not forbid FTL
When I look at the visualization, I imagine a vessel in water that is able to chill the water in front of it (compress) and heat the water behind it (expansion) as a means of propulsion. In the context of warp drives however, it's the fabric of space-time (nothing, essentially, a lack of anything, or mass/energy) instead of the water. How do you condense or expand the fabric of "nothing?" I wonder if one could make the idea of space-time become more tangible by shifting gravity to being a force exerted by space-time on an object as it is displaced and becomes denser around any given mass, sort of like water initially after you put an object in it, displacing the water. The further away from a mass floating in space-time, the less dense the displaced space-time would become, the less influence the density would have in accelerating another mass towards and through it. I wonder if you placed a stick in pure space-time, where no external gravitational forces were impacting it, and fastened a giant lead orb to one end, and a calcium orb at the other, if this would create motion towards the increased gravity (spacetime density) of the lead orb due to its mass?
That was a really interesting point about what's needed to move a ship forward using warp field propulsion.
Is creating a warp field enough on its own? Does the ship need to be displaced within the warp bubble in order for the effects of the field to be useful? One would think intuitively, not, as space time being warped should be sufficient on its own.
But maybe the energy requirements of the warp field can be drastically reduced by displacing the ship within the bubble anyhow?