Sidewalks don't move unless you're in an airport. There's a car that can fly, but it'll run you $279,000 and you'll need access to a private airfield. The Nike Air Mag camer, but can't lace themselves. A good number of the popular science fiction creations we wished would be here by 2012 haven't been fully realized. But a group of scientists and physicists say "there is hope" for one of the most coveted of sci-fi technologies: A warp drive.
A warp drive is a concept that would exploit a loophole in space-time to allow an object to move faster than the speed of light. It's currently impossible to do so because, as Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre discovered in 1994, it would take an obscene amount of energy.
Speaking at the 100 Year Starship Symposium at NASA's Johnson Space Center last week, scientists said there may be a way to achieve warp speed with significantly less energy using something called an Alcubierre warp drive.
Space.com describes the Alcubeierre warp drive as one that would involve "a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind."
Using this method, spaceships would be able to 10 times the speed of light. To find out exactly how this could happen—because, according to NASA's Harold White, these findings "change it from impractical to plausible"—head to Space.com
[via Space]
