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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 6313943" data-attributes="member: 710">The alcubierre drive seems theoretically possible, the biggest requirements were a large amount of negative mass (or energy, whatever?) to create the desired shape of spacetime (eg. contracing space in front, expanding behind you). I believe it was the Nasa scientists that leads the current project that found a solution that required less negative mass (e.g. the orignal was something in the area of Jupiter's mass, the new one around the mass of the Voyager probe). I found a neat analogy for it: The original theory required A million unicorns to propel a sled to FTL, the new one only requires one. That sounds a bit more feasible. Problem of courseis getting that unicorn. The difference would be that unicorns very likely do not exist, for negative mass, we really don't know yet and it could go either way.The current efforts seem to revolve around the Casimir effect that basically creates something that could be considered negative mass/energy. I also remember that negative energy/mass was also a "thing" to do to create wormholes that could be stable. (Beware I am just a layman with an interest, Umbran probably knows more about this than me. I rely on lies for children, students and readers-of-popular-science-books.)But overall, considering how much this story floated on the web this week, I think this is basically advertisement for NASA and its research projects. Maybe to get more people interested in pursuing a science career, maybe to justify funding. I am okay with that. I just hope no one expects he'll be able to book a flight to Eta Eridani in a few years to visit Spock's grand-grand parents or something like that. Funny, I also remember a story about how the Alcubierre drive would also cause huge amounts of radiations due to all the particles collected during the FTL travel. Stopping the engine would release a giant, destructive wavefront. It's interesting how the two basic FTL theories seem to have 2 common elements. - Require negative energy/mass - Cause huge radiation. </blockquote>

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