![]() To that end, this coming July in Montreal, Johnson and colleagues are taking part in The 8th Interstellar Symposium, an interdisciplinary, global meeting of researchers working to one day make interstellar travel possible. But to meet the challenges of interstellar travel, we will need many big, new ideas and approaches, he says. It’s possible that the big new idea that brings interstellar travel closer to reality has already been envisioned by someone, somewhere in the world, says Johnson. That does not mean we will not take such voyages it does mean that we will likely need to not only learn how to travel to distant stars, but also how to terraform distant planets to make them truly habitable, Johnson says.ĭoes technology that could take us to the stars already exist in someone’s lab here on Earth? Gabriel Abellán, Nelson Bolívar, Ivaylo Vasilev. However, the chances of finding it relatively close to Earth are so small as to be rounded to zero, he says. Warp drive solutions in spherical coordinates with anisotropic matter configurations. The likelihood of finding an Earth 2.0 anywhere in the galaxy is very small, but probably not zero, says Johnson. So, when can we expect human astronauts to touch down on an Earth 2.0? And until we find some, the Alcubierre Drive will remain speculative physics, says Johnson.Ī Traveler's Guide to the Stars Princeton University Press No one has ever detected negative mass and there is no evidence that it exists, he says. The mathematics is “elegant,” but to achieve the energies necessary to make the Alcubierre Drive a reality would require the existence of negative mass (where 1 kg would be -1kg), says Johnson. “After the ship crosses the contracted space-time, it expands back to normal size behind the ship, leaving nature beautifully intact and space-time undisturbed, with the ship appearing to move much faster than light,” Johnson notes in his book. The Alcubierre Drive postulates that a spaceship might appear to move faster-than-light by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, thereby riding spacetime like a surfer rides a wave, says Johnson. In a now-famous 1994 refereed paper, Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre describes a warp drive that “works mathematically and would allow a starship to appear to be traveling faster than light, while not really doing so,” Johnson notes in his book. As Johnson explains in “A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars,” Warp drive “uses tremendous energies to change the shape of space-time, allowing the ship to cross normal, albeit warped/compressed/expanded space very quickly.” Some form of warp drive is likely the most feasible way to enable realistic Star Trek-styled travel since each warp factor is a multiple of the speed of light cubed. “We need to bring back funding for basic research and development and run away from the notion that all R&D must have a near-term return on investment,” said Johnson. What should we be doing to make interstellar travel possible?
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