This is where Dilithium crystals, which regulate the matter/antimatter reaction, come in. You may remember from science class, or if not from there, then maybe from YouTube or Wikipedia, that when matter and antimatter collide, they tend to, well, annihilate each other, producing a nuclear explosion. Thus, deuterium is sometimes called “heavy hydrogen.” And naturally, the antimatter component of the reaction is called antideuterium. The matter in this reaction is deuterium, a stable isotope of hydrogen that, in addition to the single proton that characterizes normal hydrogen, contains a single neutron as well. Starfleet warp engines, at least, are fueled by a matter/antimatter reaction.
Real warp drive energy requirements series#
While The Original Series does provide some fundamental details about how warp drives function, more attention is given to the process in The Next Generation era and beyond.
White's 'energy efficient' design (right) - note the "football" in the center of the ring.Before we can explore the prospect of breaking the light barrier in our world, let’s first get a better grasp on how warp drives operate in Star Trek. Credit: Richard Obousy Consulting and Alex Szames Antigravite. So the next time someone tells you that the warp drive is "impossible," just tell them that real science is being applied to warping spacetime, NASA is even trying to replicate some of the warping effects with lasers in the lab and, besides, we never know what breakthroughs are just around the corner. "We just can't predict when some genius is sitting somewhere and a lightbulb goes off over his head and he figures out an innovation which can overcome this problem of producing negative energy in large enough quantities." we could have warp drive within our lifetime," Davis said. "Disruptive innovations are not predictable, they can pop up at any time between now and 200 years from now. "The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab."Īnd as pointed out by Davis in the video below, there's no predicting when the next big physics breakthrough will happen, potentially aiding warp drive studies. "The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told 's Clara Moskowitz at 100YSS. But the biggest news of all is that White and his NASA team are designing laboratory experiments that will, hopefully, form the foundations for a practical solution to building a warp drive. And now, with White's tweak of warpship design, the energy has been reduced by many orders of magnitude. With the help of quantum mechanics, we've seen a massive reduction in the amount of energy needed. The upshot is that the energy requirement for the warp drive is decreasing, albeit theoretically. Referring to White's work, Obousy continued: "The Jupiter calculation was purposefully created as an 'upper bound' to the problem, and I'm glad that the work performed by my colleagues has demonstrated ways to reduce the energy requirements down further."ĪNALYSIS: Warp Drives: Making the 'Impossible' Possible
"Given that extra dimensions have not yet experimentally been shown to exist, and the idea that dark energy is an artifact of these extra dimensions is somehow related to these dimensions is clearly highly theoretical," Obousy told Discovery News, "however it provides us with an interesting perspective from which to examine the problem."Īlthough this method would theoretically allow a Alcubierre-like solution to traveling faster than the speed of light, vast amounts of energy would still be needed - the approximate mass-energy of Jupiter no less - but at least it's an improvement from the "all the energy in the Universe" solution. Obousy's approach is to manipulate dark energy - the mysterious force that appears to permeate the entire Universe, causing it to expand - in such a way that extra dimensions (as predicted by string theory) can facilitate the creation of a bubble of spacetime. Although Alcubierre's calculations showed that unimaginably huge amounts of energy would be needed to create this warp bubble, recently, Richard Obousy, co-founder and president of Icarus Interstellar (a key partner of the 100YSS), used our new understandings of quantum mechanics and applied them to the warp drive.
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