As humans living on this tiny planet we are isolated in a vast cosmic void. But humans have always had a desire to explore the unknown and the last frontier seems to now be Mars and the other planets of our solar system. Yet others have their sights set on farther destinations, the stars.
How could humans travel to the stars given their incredible distances? Is it even possible to do?
Hypothetically if one could travel at light speed one could reach the nearest star in 4 years. That might be an unbearable time to be locked up in a metal tube flying through the void, avoiding all contact with even the tiniest particle of space dust, which would destroy your spacecraft if contact were made. You’d need deflector shields for sure. But assuming that problem was overcome and you had life support for at least 8 years (to include the return journey) how could you travel at light speed? A “warp drive” has been suggested as the solution.
But what is the practical possibility of a “warp drive”, to travel at say a thousand times or a million times the speed of light?
The colloquial term “warp drive” comes from science fiction, most famously Star Trek. The faster-than-light warp drive of the Federation works by colliding matter and antimatter and converting the explosive energy to propulsion. Star Trek suggests that this extraordinary power alone pushes the ship at faster-than-light speeds.
Scientists have been studying and theorizing about faster-than-light space travel for decades. One major reason for our interest is pure pragmatism: without warp drive, we’re probably never making it to a neighboring star system. The closest such trip is still four years long at light speed.
Four light-years may not sound like a great distance to you. That is the distance light would take travelling at nearly 300,000 km/s to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. But is an enormous distance that defies understanding by the human mind.
With known, practical human developed technology at 0.002% the speed of light it would take at least 200,000 years to fly to Proxima Centauri. This is the reason theorists contemplate a “warp drive” spacecraft that can fly much much faster than the speed of light.
The concept has been on the drawing board for 30 years. It is totally theoretical because even though the theory is within the bounds of Einstein’s general relativity theory on gravitation the energy needed to warp space around the putative spacecraft requires negative energy, which is also called exotic matter.
Watch this short video explaining the problem and the idea to overcome it.
Warp drive breakthrough: The real physics that could enable faster-than-light travel | Watch
In theory they might say that we have a design to fold space and that space could be propelled much faster than light speed. But where does the power source come from? Not from Star Trek’s hypothetical Di Lithium crystals, whatever they are.
The modern physics version dates to 1994, when Alcubierre, a theoretical physicist, proposed what became known as the Alcubierre drive. His idea worked inside Einstein’s general relativity by changing the geometry around the craft. Spacetime expands behind the ship and contracts in front of it. To an outside observer, that bubble could appear to move faster than light even though the ship locally stays inside the rules.
For years, the negative-energy requirement was the bugaboo. Alcubierre’s original concept was mathematically allowed, but it demanded the kind of matter and energy budget no one knows how to supply. Earlier this year, Alcubierre told Pop Mech that a roughly 100-meter bubble moving at light speed would require on the order of 100 Jupiter masses converted into negative energy, and he called a practical warp drive “very unlikely.”
Negative energy does not exist.
It is not something found anywhere in this universe. It is not found in antimatter like that fictional stuff used in the scifi Star Trek spacecraft engines. Antimatter is positive energy.
Negative energy means that if you combine it with positive energy (which is all known matter and energy in the universe) you would get zero, absolutely nothing because they would cancel each other out. Negative energy or exotic matter would be like antigravity. It repels! It does not attract like normal matter and energy.
Thus for Alcubierre’s theory to work it requires something that does not exist.
But in 2021 a new theory emerged.
Instead of treating a warp drive as a ship somehow moving through spacetime, treat the bubble itself as the object under study. In that framework, the authors argued that some subluminal warp-drive classes could use positive energy, at least in principle.
It looks like these new theorists have returned to this universe and only use positive, normal energy. But even in theory this one is not faster than light speed.
Then…
In a 2025 peer-reviewed paper, José Rodal described a warp-drive spacetime with predominantly positive invariant energy density and reduced energy-condition deficits. But Rodal still quantified a smaller, non-zero negative-energy burden.
More problems highlighted.
And José Natário, whose own research helped refine the warp-drive problem, told Pop Mech this year that superluminal travel is impossible and pointed to a stubborn practical issue: even if a warp bubble could exist, steering it and stopping it remain unsolved.
That is an honest assessment. But scientists have continued to believe that in the far flung future all problems of a warp drive engine could be theoretically solved. But that is by faith, not science. It is just wishful thinking, dreaming of the impossible. And besides another enormous problem is that no one has any idea how you could construct such a spacecraft, let alone power it with negative energy.
No, we are isolated here on Earth for good reason. The planet is our home in a vast universe void of all other life. This planet was created by the Designer for our existence until He renovates it making a New Earth and New Heaven for all those who put their trust in Him.
Related Reading
- Warp Drive
- Understanding UFOs: Military, Interstellar, and Interdimensional Insights
- The Coming New Heaven and New Earth
- Revelation 21: New Heaven and New Earth
- Understanding Heaven | Biblical and Scientific Perspectives
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