How to Build a Warp Drive

Panta Re, “Everything moves”, the wisdom of Heraclitus (5th century BCE), proven 2500 years later by Einstein & Co. Everything that is moves in space or time or both. A photon in a vacuum, for example, moves in space but not in time. It transverses 186,000 miles in one second. 

A couch potato, on the other hand, moves in time but not in space. He traverses Normal Life Expectance (85 years) without going even once to the kitchen for a beer. We call that ‘aging’. 

Photons don’t age. They have found the fountain of youth. It’s called perpetual motion. But unfortunately, the motion you generate on your treadmill won’t do the trick…unless you can jog at the speed of light (like Usain ‘Bolt’).

Proposed: Age is a measure of our inactivity.

To the uninitiated, space seems vast and time interminable, but in fact the fabric known as spacetime is constricting; it imposes severe limitations on our Wanderlust. 

My friends ridicule me, with reason, because I’ve never been to Asia. I could have done but I didn’t and now I can’t; oh well! I have the last laugh: they’ve never visited Proxima Centauri (PC), the closest star to Earth (besides our sun). Poor them! (Not that I’ve been there…yet; but I know how to get there which most of them don’t: it’s ‘second (star) on the right and straight on till morning’, right?)  

A photon travels from PC to Earth in ‘just’ 4 years (the time between one US Presidential election and the next) but it will take Voyager One almost 75,000 years to reach our nearest neighbor. Talk about Little House on the Prairie! Even today’s most energetic space probe would take 7,500 years to reach PC. If my fellow Earthlings are ever to have the thrill of visiting this nearby star, they will need to start shredding the fabric of spacetime.

And don’t despair: we have the technology! Well, to rephrase: we know what we need the technology to do. We don’t quite know how to build it…yet, but the principles are clear enough. 

We need to ‘fix’ the ludicrous disproportion that exists between spatial distances and temporal intervals in our frame of reference. The ‘cosmic ratio’, as we experience it, is 186,000:1 (miles per second). By comparison, most of us will never travel faster than 0.2 miles per second. 

We imagine that we live in a 4 dimensional spacetime. The 3 spatial dimensions appear to be interchangeable; a common metric applies. By comparison, from our perspective, the temporal metric seems wildly distorted. One second in time equivalent to 186,000 miles in space. Even the world’s most traveled human is still more than 99.99% potato and less than 0.01% photon. 

Fortunately, there is a simple way to make our experiences of time and space congruent. In Yellow Submarine, an icon of 20th century mythology, John Lennon adjusts the onboard clocks (metrics) to slow the flow, and even reverse the direction, of time. 

IRL, we estimate that the edge of the non-visible universe is receding from us at about 1,000 times the speed of light. So superluminal speed is no problem; we just need to change the metric, i.e. shrink space.

For space travel to be routine, we’d probably need to be able to zip across our home galaxy in about the time it currently takes to circumnavigate our globe (about 40 hours). This gives whole new meaning to the term, Road Warrior. 

The problem is that it would take a photon about 80,000 years to make the trip. So even light is a slow poke by these standards. To achieve an acceptable galactic navigational speed we would need to compress space by a factor of 10^9 (vs. 10^3, above).

Easy! We just need to create a soliton (a wave that travels through space with virtually zero environmental interference and nearly zero dissipation) and invest it with enough energy to carry us at a speed 10 billion times light. Surfing the cosmos? Hang10! 

So where do we find these magic beans? Right under your nose. All you need to do to create a Star Fleet worthy warp drive is to subject conducting plasma to ‘stress’ and allow it to interact with the electromagnetic fields surrounding it. An ordinary plasma wave packet becomes a soliton when nonlinear effects in the plasma exactly balance out the natural tendency of waves to disperse.

Importantly, once this balance of amplifying and dispersing forces is achieved, it naturally tends to self-perpetuate. It forms a sort of ‘energy sink’; only an outside force (like interaction with the environment) can disrupt the balance.

Actually, several different types of solitons occur in plasma:

1. Acoustic solitons: These act like sound waves: the ions move together with the electrons to maintain charge neutrality. The plasma pressure and electric fields balance each other perfectly.

2. Electronic solitons: These involve oscillations of the electrons while the heavier ions remain relatively stationary. The envelope of these high-frequency electron oscillations can form a stable packet.

3. Magnetic solitons: In magnetized plasmas, you can create stable structures in the magnetic field that propagate as solitons. 

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“Ok, this is all very interesting, but why do I feel like I’m still in the realm of science fiction? I’d feel better if the mathematics was fully developed and if there was empirical evidence to support the concept.”

Feel better! The math is fully developed; it’s called the KdV equation: 

∂u/∂t + u∂u/∂x + α∂³u/∂x³ = 0

Where - ∂u/∂t is the term for evolution in time, u∂u/∂x is the term for nonlinear (u∂u) amplification and α∂³u/∂x³ is the term for dispersion. The zero testifies to the fact that these variables are in perfect balance. Calculus buffs (not me) will note that these terms represent first, second, and third order derivatives

Feel better, again! Satellite observations have detected solitary waves that maintain their structure while traveling through the Earth’s plasma core. So buckle up! While your friends are lining up for a trip to Mars, you’re headed for Alpha Centauri…and beyond!

Image: "Allegory of the Planets and Continents," Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1752, oil on canvas, 73 x 54 7/8 in. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 1977.

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