The idea of faster than light warp drives have long been a staple of science fiction. In the early ‘90s, physicists worked out a theoretical method for building such a device, but the energy needed to run it would have been orders of magnitude more than we are able to produce. However, a new calculation from NASA’s Harold White indicates a way to dramatically reduce warp drive energy needs.

As far as our current understanding of physics can tell us, there is no way to exceed the speed of light. A warp drive attempts to get around that by manipulating, or warping, space-time itself. The theorized craft would be small and football shaped. Around the main ship would be a ring of super-dense matter. By expanding space behind it, and shrinking it in front, the ship could cover greater distances without actually going faster than light.

It would be like a person running at top speed, say 20mph. No matter how hard this person tries, they can never go any faster than that. Now, place them on a flatbed truck going down the freeway at 60 MPH and have them run. The person is still only running at 20mph, but the truck is not limited to only driving at 20mph. In absolute terms, the person would be moving at 80mph without breaking their maximum speed.

The previous calculations found that you would need an the equivalent of a Jupiter-size mass converted to pure energy to run the warp drive. That obviously makes the project completely unfeasible. The new estimate by White assumes that the ship’s ring structure is rounded instead of flat. With this change, the energy required, according to the math, is closer to what you’d get from the mass of a space probe like Voyager 1.

Researchers are working on small scale experiments at Johnson Space Center using a so-called White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer. This device uses lasers to attempt to create microscopic versions of the theorized space-time warps. This is all highly speculative and certainly in the early stages. You won’t be boarding that ship to the nearest star system quite yet, but the idea is a little less far fetched than it was last week.

via Yahoo!