FUELLING THE FUTURE
How to make a spaceship move faster than the speed of light
One of the most iconic abilities of the USS Enterprise is its ability to zip from one end of the galaxy to the other in mere moments using its fictitious warp drive. Human technology is currently nowhere near advanced enough to replicate the Enterprise’s warp drive. However, the theory behind building one has been around since the early 1990s. To achieve speeds faster than the speed of light, physics’ natural speed limit, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed that we you know? must bend the fabric of space-time.
Space-time can be imagined as a sheet of rubber on which all matter sits, creating dips in the rubber relative to their masses. Alcubierre proposed that if space-time could be folded in front of a spaceship and then expanded behind it, the ship could travel much faster than the speed of light, achieving ‘warp speed’. This bending of space-time would theoretically continue to move in a wave and act as a conveyor belt, carrying the spaceship along it.