Article content continued

Of course this process would take a tremendous amount of energy. The reason scientists didn’t start building Alcubierre warp engines back in 1994 was that the theory also figured that huge amounts of energy would be needed to power up the drive. Like the total mass energy of the planet of Jupiter massive. So the Alccubierre drive was shelved as one of those things that would remain theoretical.

However, a few months ago, physicist Harold White announced that his team at NASA was working on an Alcubierre drive and that it would use just a infinitesimal fraction of the energy earlier theorized. So what changed? io9 interviewed White to explain the change.

“My early results suggested I had discovered something that was in the math all along,” he told io9. “I suddenly realized that if you made the thickness of the negative vacuum energy ring larger — like shifting from a belt shape to a donut shape — and oscillate the warp bubble, you can greatly reduce the energy required — perhaps making the idea plausible.”

Essentially, White simply proposed shifting the shape of the rings around the spheroid. This little change, White says, reduced the amount of energy needed from the mass of Jupiter, to that of a traditional rocket. Quite a feat.

Now, all of this is still theoretical at this point, so it might not work exactly how NASA thinks it will or at all. And even if it does work, the human race probably won’t be zipping around like the James T. Kirk quite yet. There is the little detail that the Alcubierre drive will probably destroy or at least irradiate anything at its target destination. Universe Today explains: