How NASA seeks to travel the galaxy in 80 days

It’s fall and that means it’s time for the latest thing in NASA thinking: Warp drive. For the general informed reader, you know that warp drive is mostly magic. It is a Star Trek technology that allows Federation ships to cross the galaxy relatively quickly and allows the show to tell a story that would be different from one that hewed to science fact.

However for the more well-read reader, two words make up NASA’s more recent thinking on the subject: Alcubierre drive.

This idea took off yet again during a recent NASA outing. The problems have been that the Alcubierre drive requires Jupiter size mass and exotic particles. Or maybe not. According to one scientist, all that may be required is a tweaking of the geometry and an oscillation of the space warp to reduce the mass requirement to less than two tons.

Scientists are preparing to make a small scale model to test the idea using lasers. With luck, successful trials could scale up to a feasible working prototype. The issue that remains unresolved is the “exotic particles” problem.

Even if the problem proves insurmountable, it is still quite likely something interesting or even useful could come out of the research. Given the perils of global warming, we could very well find ourselves needing to colonize a new home. We ought to just hope the Alcubierre drive doesn't deliver us to a world with blue aliens.