I don't think so. We're currently wrestling with the problem of finding the particle that imparts mass and transmits gravity, and it'll be understood one day. There's a likelihood that we could find something that is capable of bending space in the way Alcubierre described. It's certainly a more noble pursuit to try…

Eh. Still technically beats the speed of light in terms of effective travel. That's huge. Everything else is just an engineering problem. Make it so the hawking decay is what sets the length of the jump—when it degrades the field enough, you come back to flat space and the trip's over. Tune the amount of initial…

True, but once that first cave man carved a round thing that rolled, he set up the incentives and the journey towards somebody building an internal combustion engine and a little pine tree that hangs from your rear-view mirror. The idea that the warp drive will happen any time soon is pretty cracksmoking, though. I…

Where is everybody? Out there. We haven't really looked for them in any meaningful way. The radio telescopes that SETI uses are actually pretty silly—they hope for either a chance alignment of directional communications with an astounding level of accuracy and timing, or for some race out there to be idiotically…

If you're traveling in a warp bubble, the outside of the bubble acts like an event horizon and no space debris can interact with the inside during transit. Of course, it would be a pretty shitty deal if you exited the warp bubble inside of some floating hunk of matter, but since space is so overwhelmingly empty that's…

Unfortunately, that whole dealie doesn't work. Quantum entanglement has a no communication clause.

Dude, I think the scientists at NASA who study relativistic physics and are working on a possible way to break the light speed barrier on a technicality use their brains more than you might. We aren't talking about conventional travel, like jumping. Energy use is going to be much different—that's the whole point.…

Boned unless you can squeeze into a space suit, grab a spanner, get out there and fix it! Of course, you're equally boned whether you're stuck without propulsion out between galaxies or just at the end of the driveway in earth orbit. Both are fatal situations.

But to play the devil's advocate, they also thought that about, oh, I dunno... Everything we do now.

You dump all the higgs bosons you can catch hold of into a vise and twist the lever reaaal hard!

You're right, it is an Alcubierre drive. I wasn't aware that we had figured out how to bend space time at all, beyond the usual method of just piling up a shitload of energy/mass in a small area and letting the universe do its thing. Is that what 'exotic matter' entails? ...Any game plan on figuring out how to make…

Some of the people working on space colonization are certainly concerned about the future habitability of earth. However, the vast majority of the motivation comes from the same thing that makes people want to climb up that awful, god-forsaken mountain. Because it's there.

It's a long trip. Better bring a socket wrench and a spare warp coil.

You could observe yourself leaving, but you could not interfere with past events since you'd have to break the conventional speed of light to do so. I don't think that violates causality then?

Not necessarily; it's perfectly possible to create a spacetime warp from inside the warp field. After all, that's how every gravity well of every planet and star works. I'm actually at a loss as to how you'd create one remotely, but I'd wager it could happen.

The real problem arises when you try to unmake the warp. If…

There's a million things that could cause the Fermi paradox; the universe being devoid of spacefaring life is about the least likely of all of them. Aliens could have come by earlier when the earth was just a seething mass of cyanobacteria, marked it as an uninteresting backwater in some hugely tedious database of…

Interesting idea.. Using it subluminally would probably have all sorts of advantages. Since it's a reactionless drive, it could transport a really heavy ship without needing exponentially (or is it even logarithmically?) more reaction mass in the form of fuel. Small ships would probably save mass with conventional…

Even if it wasn't the owner! You never know. I once banged in a random person's car. It was terrible in so many unexpected ways. That's my entry, by the way. I'm not proud of it.

Yeah, like are you single?