WARP DRIVE - The gateway toward the Inter-galactic picnics
Did you guys ever think of going to the solar system of the Alpha Centauri or the Pole star?
You’d probably call me a “mad”. At times, when we are not even able to reach the mars in an efficient way, I’m talking about the inter-galactic picnics. Whatever you think but I’m a man of high hopes and a believer of our Scientists and Astrophysicists who are very positive about these kinds of voyages. But the question is HOW?
Before going into any details about our inter-galactic picnics, let’s discuss where we are currently standing in the technology of intergalactic journeys. The farthest distance traveled is by the Voyager 1 and 2 set to their projectile in 1977 and they’re just exiting our solar system.
That means they have been able to travel about 7.5 billion km (about 0.000624 light years) in 41 years. This is nowhere close to the distance of 4.35 light years for the Alpha Centauri. So, we cannot rely on the conventional means of space travels to make our dreams or the fictions like the Star Trek and the Star Wars real.
The major challenge with these conventional modes is the energy source. Our rockets use heavy fuels which are both heavy and slow for their propulsion and so it will be extremely childish to dream about the inter-galactic voyages based on these rockets. Let’s say if these energy barriers are conquered too. Then also, it would take at least 4.35 years to reach our nearest star Alpha Centauri and that too at the speed of light. And that would be the maximum speed limit of your spacecraft because as per the Einstein’s general theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than the photons. As you approach the light speed, your equivalent mass keeps rising ultimately demanding more energy to keep you moving and once you achieve the light speed, this energy requirement becomes infinite. So, what is the solution? The answer is – the WARP DRIVE.
There are many other proposed solutions or drives which can make the dream of humans to travel inter-galactically a reality like the Nuclear Propulsion drive or the Ion Propulsion drive. But the Warp Drive will be the best and more convincing, if once practically made. We all are bound by the light speed barrier but not space. It’s a well-known fact that our Universe is continuously expanding right from its inception from a single particle after the Big-Bang. It is about 14 billion years old and let’s suppose if it would have been expanding at the light speed then, it should have been of the order of 14 billion light years. But according to the physicists, it is more than three times the expected size which proposes that the light speed barrier doesn’t exist for Space.
The Warp drive or the Hyper Drive is a Faster than Light (FTL) propulsion system which warps the space instead of traveling through it to cover the infinite distances within moments breaking the light speed barriers.
This concept was first introduced in 1931 by John W. Campbell in his novel “Islands of Space” and became much popular after the Star Trek and the Star Wars series. The Warp Drive forms a bubble space around the spacecraft and then contracts the space ahead of the bubble and expands the space behind it and thereby achieving the goal. As the space in the space bubble remains unaltered, you won’t feel any time-dilation making it possible for you to travel the light years within moments. Now, the question should be how we’d warp the space? That seems practically impossible! Here is a proposed solution for it.
According to Einstein, upon increasing the mass of any object, the space around it contracts but to make any effective contraction for our warp drive, the minimum mass requirement would be of the orders of the mass of the Jupiter. Well, that’s not a real problem though. The real trick is to achieve the expansion of the Space as per our needs. Using the same concept above, we’ll need negative mass to achieve the expansion of the space.
Yes, you heard it right – Negative Mass. Now, what the hell is this negative mass? It’s not something from the Sci-Fi movies but there are no any recorded proves also of their existence. Theoretically, negative masses are the particles which follow the Anti-Gravitational law instead of Newton’s law of Gravitation. Negative masses repel each other instead of attracting each other which makes it impossible to trap any of them or record any of its presence.
There are many researches going around the world on this interesting drive but the closest we have been able to reach is – the Alcubierre drive, which models the ward drive concept. It was a theoretical model proposed by the physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. Further calculations proposed that it would require a very huge amount of negative energy or mass. In 2012, NASA researcher Harold White proposed that the amount of negative mass required can be reduced by changing the shape of the warp drive, though the requirement stays to at least of the order of Voyager 1.
In the Star Trek series, they used a matter-antimatter reactor utilizing a fictional material Dilithium (In the real world, Dilithium is a molecule composed of two covalently bonded lithium atoms) to drive their warp drives. They measure the speeds of their spacecraft in the units of warp speeds or the warp factor. Warp factor is a mean of measuring speeds attained by the Faster than Light spacecrafts. A proposed formula for calculating the actual speed from the warp factor is:
Speed = c*WarpFactor^10/3
In the series, they could achieve a warp factor of about 9.9 but in the reality, we’re still away from even a warp factor of 1. Though NASA has started carrying out preliminary researches about this drive, there are still many challenges to conquer, negative mass being the foremost.
Let’s hope that just like Sir Isaac Newton, any Anti-Newton would soon reveal the mysteries of these negative masses and we’d be able to enjoy few moments in other galaxies without spending our whole life in the journey. Till then, stay updated to get impressed by many more interesting aspects from the technological world.
Image Source: - Google
And YES, don’t forget to follow, share, comment and subscribe us.
Connect with us on: -
Comments
Post a Comment