Will a warp drive be created?

[Johnny Ola]

I gather from news that there is a fair amount of scientists working warp drive technology:

http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/7120/20130527/scientists-refine-warp-drive-concept-using-space-time-distortion.htm

So my question: is there anyone here with a comprehensive enough knowledge of science history to tell whether there was some technology being worked on at some point by x amount of scientists and getting x funding, comparable what is being done in the area of warp drive. I'm asking this cause I want to get a rough estimation of whether they'll be able to build one of these things within my life time. It seems a lot of people think it's possible. So maybe it's just a matter of funding, time and manpower? Quantum computers are almost here too (almost practical that is).

[mathematic]

It sounds to me more like science fiction (like Star Trek) than science.

[robomont]

my guess it already been built but not being released to the public fo national security reasons.a few years back it was hinted at that e,g and g was building it and then it ended.the sister companies were all told to find other contracts.so i researched them and found they almost all were involved with high voltage.this all happened about the sametime that the gov was banning mercury from products.

 

this tech is like jet planes.only going to be released in the event of a major war.my guess they are stockpiled in a mountain or on the dark side of the moon.the ultimate weapon.not to be released unless absolutely necessary.

 

that is my hypothesis.

[swansont]

 

that is my hypothesis.

 

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Moderator Note

Such hypotheses belong in speculations, not here. In the science sections, the answers to questions should be based on mainstream science.

[robomont]

i am offended that the mods do not accept ufo research as a mainstream science.i think townsend brown.if he were alive .would disagree with this viewpoint.

his techpatents and contract military career should be evidence enough of validity.

 

if im banned so be it.its been fun and thankyou for your time.

[ajb]

i am offended that the mods do not accept ufo research as a mainstream science.

Well, most things can be resarched scientifically, and if you do that you will find a lack of real evidence for UFOs. This does not nessisarily mean that they do not exist, but without any strong evidence we cannot conclude that they do exist.

 

Anyway, in reply to the opening post, most people working on warp drive and similar are really looking for theoretical situations to test general relativity and semi-classical gravity. The hope is that pushing what we know about gravity to its limits will point to new physics.

 

The same can be said about time machines, with the exeption of Mallett, who is looking into making an actual time machine!

[EdEarl]

Stephen Hawking thinks time travel to the past is impossible, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUqxzH0652w. Of course, we do travel into the future, and can change the rate at which we do so in several ways (e.g., spending time in space on the ISS).

[swansont]

Stephen Hawking thinks time travel to the past is impossible

 

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Moderator Note

We aren't discussing time travel in this thread, though. The topic is warp drive.

[Delta1212]

The amount of resources directed at discovering something new doesn't provide a good metric for figuring out how long it will take to figure it out. Certainly, more resources can make the work on a particular problem go faster than fewer resources applied to the same problem, but comparing different problems doesn't work as well because the complexity of the solutions may be vastly different, or one problem may have no solution and actually be a dead end entirely.

 

You can say that it will take x days to finish a house on y budget with z number of workers, because people have built lots of houses and can say from experience how long it will take and what the relationship to funds and manpower is. You can't then say that applying y funds and z workers to building a warp drive will have it completed in x days, because no one has ever built a warp drive, so we have no idea how much time and money it will take to get one designed and built, or even whether it's physically possible for us to build one at all.

[ACG52]

The Alcubierre drive, which is the warp drive being discussed, is a totally speculative drive, based on a possible solution to Einstein's field equations. It does however, call for the use of 'exotic matter' with negative mass, which does not exist in our universe. So it is unlikely that it is actually possible.