Author: Kirsten Beyer Publisher: Pocket Books Published: 31 March 2009
When the U.S.S. Voyager is dispatched on an mission to the planet Kerovi, Captain Chakotay must choose between following their orders and saving the lives of two of those dearest to them. B'elanna Torres and her daughter, Miral, are both missing in the wake of a brutal attack on the Klingon world of Boreth.
This book's science is based around the idea of space transportation and WARP DRIVES!
Warp Drives?
What can they be used for: A spacecraft that travels at faster-than-light speeds by distorting, or "warping," the fabric of spacetime. Instead of trying to move through space, the warp drive moves space itself. The ship sits inside a bubble of spacetime bound by a negative energy field that races across the cosmos.
Why we need them: Chemical and nuclear propulsion, solar sails and ion thrusters all are too slow to reach the nearest star systems within a human life span. At faster-than-light speed (more than 186,000 miles per second), a warp-drive ship would travel 4.5 light-years to Alpha Centauri, the closest sun to our own, in about four years.
Who created the idea: This warp-bubble model is based on thought experiments conducted by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, theoretical physicist Chris Van Den Broeck of Cardiff University in Wales and, most recently, by mathematician Jos Natrio of the Higher Institute of Technology in Lisbon, Portugal.
When it could be possible: Figure on some point between the distant future and never. Theoretical research continues to advance, but there´s no launch date in sight.
The Warp-Drive Construct
Alcubierre drive or Warp Drive
The Alcubierre drive, also known as the Alcubierre metric, is a speculative mathematical model of a spacetime exhibiting features reminiscent of the fictional "warp drive" from Star Trek, which can travel "faster than light", although not in a local sense.
In 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a method of stretching space in a wave which would in theory cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand. The ship would ride this wave inside a region known as a warp bubble of flat space. Since the ship is not moving within this bubble, but carried along as the region itself moves, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation do not apply in the way they would in the case of a ship moving at high velocity through flat spacetime relative to other objects. Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move faster than the ship; it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a light beam restricted to travelling outside the warp bubble. Thus, the Alcubierre drive does not contradict the conventional claim that relativity forbids a slower-than-light object to accelerate to faster-than-light speeds. However, there are no known methods to create such a warp bubble in a region that does not already contain one, or to leave the bubble once inside it, so the Alcubierre drive remains a hypothetical concept at this time.
Author: Kirsten Beyer Publisher: Pocket Books Published: 31 March 2009
When the U.S.S. Voyager is dispatched on an mission to the planet Kerovi, Captain Chakotay must choose between following their orders and saving the lives of two of those dearest to them. B'elanna Torres and her daughter, Miral, are both missing in the wake of a brutal attack on the Klingon world of Boreth.
This book's science is based around the idea of space transportation and
WARP DRIVES!
Warp Drives?
What can they be used for: A spacecraft that travels at faster-than-light speeds by distorting, or "warping," the fabric of spacetime. Instead of trying to move through space, the warp drive moves space itself. The ship sits inside a bubble of spacetime bound by a negative energy field that races across the cosmos.
Why we need them: Chemical and nuclear propulsion, solar sails and ion thrusters all are too slow to reach the nearest star systems within a human life span. At faster-than-light speed (more than 186,000 miles per second), a warp-drive ship would travel 4.5 light-years to Alpha Centauri, the closest sun to our own, in about four years.
Who created the idea: This warp-bubble model is based on thought experiments conducted by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, theoretical physicist Chris Van Den Broeck of Cardiff University in Wales and, most recently, by mathematician Jos Natrio of the Higher Institute of Technology in Lisbon, Portugal.
When it could be possible: Figure on some point between the distant future and never. Theoretical research continues to advance, but there´s no launch date in sight.
Alcubierre drive or Warp Drive
The Alcubierre drive, also known as the Alcubierre metric, is a speculative mathematical model of a spacetime exhibiting features reminiscent of the fictional "warp drive" from Star Trek, which can travel "faster than light", although not in a local sense.
In 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a method of stretching space in a wave which would in theory cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand. The ship would ride this wave inside a region known as a warp bubble of flat space. Since the ship is not moving within this bubble, but carried along as the region itself moves, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation do not apply in the way they would in the case of a ship moving at high velocity through flat spacetime relative to other objects. Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move faster than the ship; it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a light beam restricted to travelling outside the warp bubble. Thus, the Alcubierre drive does not contradict the conventional claim that relativity forbids a slower-than-light object to accelerate to faster-than-light speeds. However, there are no known methods to create such a warp bubble in a region that does not already contain one, or to leave the bubble once inside it, so the Alcubierre drive remains a hypothetical concept at this time.
Links:
Alcubierre Warp Drive
The Warp Drive
Warp Drive? Is is possible?
HowStuffWorks "How Warp Drives Work"
Warp Drive, When? NASA
Faster than light?