We’ve all heard Jean-Luc Picard command the USS Enterprise to proceed at “warp factor six,” or six times light speed. NASA scientists already have plans for a warp drive that would allow a spaceship to travel faster than light. Of course, it is in the testing stage. When it becomes a reality, some of us might want to volunteer for the expedition.
The April 2013 edition of Popular Science reported on a meeting of the “100 Year Starship” that included a presentation by NASA scientist Harold “Sonny” White on the subject of” Warp Field Mechanics 102.”An agency of the United States Department of Defense, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has the goal of making travel beyond our solar system a reality within the next 100 years. Among the proposed methods of facilitating extra-solar travel, such as chemically propelled rockets, antimatter systems and nuclear engines, there is the possibility of using warp drive as a means of galloping faster than light.
Of course, the theory of relativity decrees that matter cannot accelerate to a light speed or faster, because mass would expand infinitely and require an infinite amount of energy to achieve it.
However, White has not only developed the concept of warp drive but has also commenced physical tests in a NASA laboratory.
White suggests that warp speed would reduce travel time two Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, from 75,000 years to two weeks. A wagon train full of pioneers usually ambled along at about 2 miles per hour, if the mules were sufficiently motivated. A ship moving at the speed of light would get about seven billion miles in that period of time. (We can reach that sum by multiplying 60 seconds by 60 minutes by 186,000 miles per second.) Even a plane moving faster than the speed of sound would not affect the comparison by much.
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