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August 11, 2008
Warp Speed Kinda-Sorta Possible, Maybe
The good news: the proposed drive would work pretty much like it does (assumedly) in Star Trek...
... with "warp generators" sealing the ship in a gravity bubble and expanding space behind a ship and collapsing space in front of it. Thereby not actually moving matter faster than the speed of light, but moving space itself faster than the speed of light. Matter can't go faster than the speed of light, but space can, and apparently did before, soon after the Big Bang.
The bad news: Even this is impossible. Because the energy required to warp space like this would be equal to converting the entire mass of Jupiter directly into energy.
So, for now, I'm putting my eggs in the Star Wars "hyperspace" basket. (Where ships slip from "realspace" into "hyperspace" and then drop back out of it when they approach their "realspace" destination.)
Via Hot Air.