To infinity and beyond
Still no flying car, but Star Trek warp speed is possible, according to NASA
Let me tell you my No. 1 complaint about science fiction: Nothing from the future ever materializes.
I have no hoverboard, no flying car, no three-hour workday a la George Jetson (unless you count time on Pinterest as not working, which, you know, whatever), and while I do have a robot that cleans my house, it's not sassy. Lame.
Luckily scientists in Houston are finally focusing on ways to make science fiction a science reality. Physicists at this month's 100 Year Starship Symposium, sponsored by NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said that warp-speed travel created by bending the space-time continuum (you know, like they did in Star Trek) could be possible.
As described in Space.com,
A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre; however, subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.
Previously proposed warp drives resembled "a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it," with the ring causing space-time to warp around the ship, allowing a craft to move up to 10 times the speed of light — that's 6.7 billion miles per hour.
But Harold "Sonny" White of the Johnson Space Center said that if the ring is shaped more like a "rounded donut" then a mass the size of the Voyager 1 probe could potentially power it.
"The findings I presented . . . change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told Space.com.
Now if only someone could get to work on making teleportation possible so I could avoid the traffic on 610 . . .
