Warp drive may actually be possible, NASA scientist says

&#62; "A trip to Alpha Centauri would take about two weeks. Traveling as fast as we are now currently able, it would take tens of thousands of years."<p>This isn't true. Nuclear pulse drives built with currently available technology could achieve .05C [1], meaning a 4 light year trip would take ~80 years.<p>[1]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi...</a>

Previous discussion: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534359" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534359</a>

One issue about warp drives that I never see mentioned is one has to be careful one is not creating a perpetual motion device.<p>Consider a warp drive that transports you from, say, earth's orbit to pluto's orbit. Now, you fall back towards earth's orbit. This means that the warp drive, in order to not violate conservation of energy, must require at least as much energy as the potential energy difference between the two positions.

Can someone explain what happens to <i>time</i> while you travel this way?<p>Is your family at home going to be older when you come back from one of those trips?

I don't see how this will work considering the contraction of space-time right in front of the spaceship within this warp-bubble, will also in-turn cause a natural dilution of space-time right in front of the warp-bubble.<p>Even if that was not true, how will the warp-drive propagate the warp-bubble <i>field</i> itself faster than C to grab onto space-time in a timely manner?<p>It would seem to me this would cause the space-ship to feel that it's traveling faster than C, but to an outside observer it would only be traveling at C or less.

I am not a physicist - My understanding is that it is information that is limited to the speed of light. So the technology for sending people to a nearby star tends to be analogous to the to that between Clarke's hominids and the obelisk rather than that between Captain Kirk and Star Fleet.<p>Warp drive will allow humans to pollenize, not colonize, other planets.

If we can't move the spaceship fast enough, we'll move the space around it! No wonder all the sci-fi movies show the area around warp speed ships distorting. They must have been onto something. I don't want to know how a human could ever survive that though.

The article doesn't mention exotic matter. Did they find a way to build an engine without exotic matter?