Alcubierre Drive - History

History

In 1994, Alcubierre proposed a method for changing the geometry of space by creating a wave which would cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand. The ship would then ride this wave inside a region of flat space known as a warp bubble, and would not move within this bubble, but instead be carried along as the region itself moves as a consequence of the actions of the drive. If this is so, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation would not apply as they would in the case of conventional near-c motion. This method of propulsion would not involve objects in motion at speeds faster than light with respect to the contents of the warp-bubble; that is, a light beam within the warp bubble would still always move faster than the ship. Thus, the mathematical formulation of the Alcubierre metric does not contradict the conventional claim that the laws of relativity do not allow a slower-than-light object to attain speeds greater than that of light. The Alcubierre drive, however, remains a hypothetical concept with seemingly insuperable problems: though the amount of energy required is no longer thought to be unobtainably large, there is no method to create a warp bubble in a region that does not already contain one, and no method has been found to exit the warp-bubble after reaching a destination.