Faster than light travel: Pure fantasy to scientific possibility

A scientist at NASA is making the dreams of Sci-Fi loving nerds everywhere come true. We may be able to one day travel faster than the speed of light.

Whether it’s old school Captain Kirk calling desperately for warp speed, or new school Captain Picard pointing and saying “Engage,” faster than light travel is awesome.

Every space epic needs it to move the point along. Nobody is interested in sitting through hours of their heroes in frozen sleep or playing cards for decades before they even find the villain. For the story, we need it.

And I always loved the idea.

I remember it like it was yesterday in my backyard. In my Star Trek uniform shirt (command yellow) at age 10 – getting my heart broken by my 16-year-old brother Dave wearing his slide rule and calculator. “It can’t happen. It’s impossible for any object to travel faster than light. Period. Grow up,” sneered the soon-to-be-physicist.

I did grow up, but I was always a little sad. Until this September.

Scientist Harold White with NASA’s Johnson Space Center submitted his work for his colleagues at the “100 Year Starship Symposium.” He revealed the design of a football shaped ship within a ring of metal that would create a bubble and warp space time.

White said, “The vehicle inside that bubble thinks it’s not moving at all. The space time is moving. Space time is expanding behind it and contracting in front of it and that makes the vehicle move along.”

Or, think about it like this: “Get a tub full of clean water and put a little boat on it, or anything that will float,” explained White. “Now put a drop of detergent behind the boat and the boat will move away. Now that boat doesn’t have a motor or sails, but it moved because you changed the water around it.”

His version of a warp drive engine works the same way. The ship isn’t breaking my brother’s law, it’s manipulating the space time fabric of the universe, whatever that is. It can go up to 10 times the speed of light. An earlier warp drive proposal in 1994 was discounted because it needed too much energy, but White’s new and improved design can be powered by a mass about the size of NASA’s 1977 Voyager I probe.

They still haven’t figured out how to manipulate space time, but they are already experimenting with a mini-warp drive in the lab.

There is another problem with the warp-speed travel, according to White. “You could create a time travel paradox. You might actually arrive back from your trip before you actually left and then you might prevent yourself from taking the trip which would, well, it gets confusing.”

Whatever scientist guy. Now I want it more than ever. Build this thing so I can go “Warp Six,” end up back in 1972 and zap my snotty brother with my phaser. Don’t worry, it’s set on stun.