Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel

I presently have no time to get into GR, but surely wish I did. Here instead of comment I offer two papers: Erik Lentz (underlying the work in the press release here):

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.07125.pdf

And similar seeming work by another group at something called the “advanced propulsion lab” (who are they?)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.06824.pdf

It’s interesting that they both claim positive energy solutions that, eh hem, do the trick.

Unless some really freaky physics discovery is made (allowing FTL travel), and I don't believe at this point that that'll ever be done (or if it will that it may cause a sudden cataclysmic event), I don't believe we'll ever become interstellar travelers.

More viable at this point is that we'll develop Von Neumann probes. But that depends on whether we manage to develop computers smart enough to fully independently harvest resources and self-reproduce.

Before that, it'll be projects like Voyager, deep space probes that contain fragments of our knowledge and culture. If there's other intelligent species out there, there may be a slim chance that they'll be found, eventually. But the chances are slim. Maybe if there's a lot, they get sent to start orbiting distant stars, and can start broadcasting.

But given that it takes tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest stars, it's unlikely that the probes will be anything but dead chunks of slag by the time they arrive.

I agree but the nearest star is (only?) 4 light years away. If we only managed to travel close to the speed of light, we surely live long enough today. Time dilation will cause our friends to be older by a few years than they should be, but not by that much right?

> Time dilation will cause our friends to be older by a few years than they should be, but not by that much right?

Technically they wouldn’t be older, you’d be younger.

It is early in the morning, so I'm still irritable, but this line is pretty egregious

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The energy savings would need to be drastic, of approximately 30 orders of magnitude to be in range of modern nuclear fission reactors.” He goes on to say: “Fortunately, several energy-saving mechanisms have been proposed in earlier research that can potentially lower the energy required by nearly 60 orders of magnitude.”

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Say the fission reactor they have in mind is a collection of the biggest in human history and is a whole terawatt (1E12 watts). Another 30 orders of magnitude less power brings you down to 1E-18 watts.

For context[1] a typical human cell consumes ~1E-12 watts. You could take a morning coffee poop and put it in a jar with a thermocouple and power your warp drive with the decomposing biomatter if those results are right.

If the energetics are that favorable I would really like an explanation why we haven't encountered space whales, let alone rapidly expanding alien civilizations.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)#Be...