A team of scientists believes that alien spacecraft warp drive may be spotted all the way from our planet, as it emits some sort of gravitational waves that are different from anything currently known.
What Is a Warp Drive?
A warp drive refers to a hypothetical device which enables an object to travel faster than light. This device generates an invisible sphere around an object, theoretically known as a "warp bubble," that would contract spacetime in front of it while expanding spacetime behind it.
This mechanism, therefore, draws the universe around the object, allowing it to travel from one point to another in a manner that is faster than the speed of light.
Warp drive was described for the first time in science fiction books during the 1940s and 1950s. The theory took a greater flight with the help of the Star Trek franchise from the 1960s. The first version of a warp drive was really put forward in 1994; it was theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre who gave the idea, and from then it was named as such, the Alcubierre drive.
The physics of Alcubierre's concept requires the use of large amounts of "negative energy". We currently have no idea how to create this kind of energy since it has a value below zero.
Other problems that make the making of warp drive challenging are producing closed loops in time-space against the premise of causality and being able to control the created warp bubble. Yet, it does not mean that humans will not eventually figure it all out.
According to an article by physicist Don Lincoln in 2023, somebody is going to have a new idea, and it is going to be very different from our current understanding of physics. And that's when we might be able to really boldly go where no one else has gone before.
While warp drives are a far cry from the current capabilities of humans, that is not to say that some incredibly advanced alien civilization has not already figured it all out.
Sci-Fi-Inspired Technology
In a recent study, a team of experts argues that the warp drives of super-intelligent alien civilization are likely to have created special ripples in space-time that cannot be detected from Earth. The details of this research are published in the paper "What no one has seen before gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse."
The researchers argue that it is possible to detect warp drives by looking for specific ripples in space-time, called gravitational waves, given off by warp bubbles. Still, the team remains more than a little bit skeptical of faster-than-light technologies.
To detect warp drives, experts would need to spend time scouring the universe for gravitational waves in various wavelengths without knowing whether there is even anything to find. This effort would take a massive amount of time and money.
In actuality, this isn't too far from the truth, considering there are start-of-the-art observatories, such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), which help scientists answer some of the majors questions of the cosmos, including wobbling dark matter and, now for the first time, black hole collisions.
Warp drives, however, would produce many different gravitational waves, so an observatory like LIGO might not be specially tuned to look for them.
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