Warp speed

We finally found insects and 'Becca swore that she saw a rodent of some sort. It would take years and teams of scientists to catalog all of the species of life there. We were physicists and engineers, not botanists, entomologists, and exobiologists. We would have to bring some next time. Two days passed quickly, and no creatures tried to eat us, not even the insects, if there were any insects.

Margie and Annie were docking the ships back to the habitat cylinders. Tabitha and I stood on the beach with the crystal clear water frothing at our feet. Even our treks to the bottom of the oceans of this world didn't reveal any underwater cities, although we had seen some big fish.

I was watching the alien red sunset. Tabitha, of course, was watching the docking procedures and muttering to herself about 'teaching Annie how to fly better than that.' I laughed at her and nudged her.

'Hey General, you got time to look at this really cool alien sunset?'

Tabitha turned away from the spacecraft and looked out over the ocean. 'Yeah. It is pretty. You seem sort of solemn tonight. What's bothering you?'

'Nothing really. I just wanted to find more, you know?' I held my hands out as if to encompass the planet. Then I shrugged my shoulders.

'Yeah, I know. You wanted to find aliens. You did, just not the kind you can talk to.'

'Maybe someday we . . .' I shook my head. 'There are just so many stars out there. And it appears the potential alien homeworlds are farther away than we might have imagined. I keep telling myself that it is statistics. They are out there and we're bound to find somebody somewhere someday. One of the things that burns me up is that the people of Earth will never know we have been here. They'll never know what we, the human race, have accomplished.'

'We will find aliens, one day, Anson. And some people on Earth know what you did. You saved the world from itself and have ushered in a new era of technology.'

'Yeah a technology that they will never know exists. And I had a lot of help, Tabitha. And the world isn't out of the woods yet. Eternal vigilance and all.'

'I know you had help, sweetheart. But you did it nonetheless. You, did it. And I have come to know you enough that I think you'll continue to do it. As long as it takes.'

'I guess,' I said.

'We will find intelligent aliens out there and we will get to tell the Earth, some day. But in the meantime, I miss my little girl and I'm sure she misses her mommy and daddy. What do you say we go home?' Tabitha held my hand and pulled me to her.

'Sounds great to me.' I kissed her. 'You know this is what I always dreamed of. I've always fantasized about inventing the warp drive and flying off to new and alien worlds with my beautiful wife and having wonderful adventures and saving the world. It's a childhood dream come true; I guess I can't think of anything that could make me happier.'

She held me a little while longer and looked into my eyes. 'I'm pregnant again,' she said.

'Well, except for that.' I laughed.

We went home.

APPENDIX

The Current Status of Warp Drive

In 1994 a scientific paper was written by Miguel Alcubierre entitled 'The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity.' It was a short 'Letter to the Editor' and was published in the scientific journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. In that paper Alcubierre showed that within the confines of the currently understood theory of General Relativity that:

 . . . without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the 'warp drive' of science fiction.

Alcubierre went on to show that there was no reason to believe that such a warp drive would be impossible. That point has been the topic of debate at many conferences since then. The contraction of space required in front of the spaceship is nothing more than a gravity well. On the other hand, the expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship is an inverted gravity well, which to date has not been observed anywhere in the universe as far as we understand it. The problem with the expansion in spacetime can be explained simply. What causes a contraction in spacetime or in other words what causes a gravity well? The answer is matter. Massive objects cause gravity wells. Okay, we understand how that part works. Then what could cause an inverted gravity well? The answer could be negative matter? What the hell is negative matter? There in lies the rub! Then is it over with for warp drive?

No. Matter is also energy and vice versa. Energy can be portrayed in many forms: matter, electricity, magnetism, and possibly other more strange quantum phenomena. The equation Anson talks about in this story that I like to call the Warp Equation describes this very well. That equation in laymen's terms is written as:

Curvature or Warp of Spacetime = Energy per Volume

This equation is actually known as the Einstein equation and each side of it represents a God-awful set of matrices (tensors) and some things to account or discount for the expansion of spacetime, but this is basically how to think of it. The point here is that it might be possible to create some form of energy per volume that would cause an expansion in spacetime rather than a contraction. Many of the world's theoretical physicists are trying to figure this out. Oh and by the way, the amount of energy per volume required on the right hand side of the equation is enormous with a very big E, much larger than all of the energy the human race has ever generated. This brings us to the Casimir Effect.

The Casimir Effect is a phenomena that has been shown theoretically to exist in which two very closely spaced parallel plane conductors are actually pushed toward each other by the vacuum energy of spacetime itself! It turns out that the spacetime between these two very closely spaced plates should theoretically expand!! The theory predicts that the speed of light between the plates is slightly higher than that in a vacuum due to the expansion, in other words light travels faster than light due to the Casimir Effect.

Also, the Casimir Effect expansion between the plates will cause the plates to attract toward each other or be pushed together by the spacetime outside them depending on your point of view. If a clever scientist were to arrange several of these parallel plates in the right configuration and connect them with springs of some sort it might be possible that as one set of plates pull together another set gets pulled apart. Then the set that gets pulled