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Showing posts from April, 2011

Warp Drive Development - Introduction

Everyone familiar with the distances involved in astronomy, space science, and the search for intelligent life in the universe knows that even if we could travel in a conventional spacecraft at the impossible speed of light, significant human exploration of a tiny nearby fraction of our galaxy would not be plausible.  No sensible person, government, business, or other organization would fund it and among enthusiasts impatient for progress, a taboo topic remains unspoken: the voyage would certainly be a suicide mission – a concrete fact which would seem to block any path to realizing one of our oldest, most beautiful dreams: to sail the stars and meet other civilizations which are probably there.  Distance and time are the core constraints on achieving this goal. Einstein’s Relativity, an exemplar of modern scientific genius and revolutionary ideas in physics, mathematically describes space and time as an integrated “continuum”, similar to a stretched rubber sheet that warps up and dow