The galaxy—not to mention the universe—is an amazingly huge place. The Milky Way Galaxy, which contains between 100,000 and 400,000 million stars (and thus trillions of planets), extends 100,000 light-years away. This means that the transgalactic photon that has just left the Milky Way today may have begun its journey when Homo sapiens had not yet migrated from Africa, and was traveling at a speed of about 670 million kilometers per hour. Given the limited speed of our rockets, it takes about half a human's lifetime to leave our solar system.
Simply put, if humans want to go into space, we'll need something better than chemical, or even nuclear, rockets, and for decades, science fiction has been the answer. The most famous example is Star Trek, which relies on the power of its warp drive to traverse the galaxy in a fraction of the time. Hungarian journeys that previously took centuries can now be completed in a few hours.
Scientists have longed for some kind of technology that could propel humans faster than physics says is possible, and now a new online tool is helping engineers make warp drive Starfleet's proprietary property. Last week, Applied Physics, an international group of scientists and engineers, announced that it had created an online toolkit for “warp batch spacetime analysis” called Warp Factory.
This only happens for a few years After a torrent of articles He reported that building warp engines – based on the idea of warp bubbles folding in spacetime – may be theoretically possible. Warp Factory provides researchers with an online playground to test their warp drive ideas.
“Physicists can now create and optimize a series of factorial engine designs with just a few clicks, allowing us to advance science at breakneck speed,” Gianni Martier, CEO of Applied Physics, said in a statement. press release. The Warp Factory acts as a virtual wind tunnel that allows us to test and evaluate different warp designs. “Science fiction is getting closer and closer to scientific reality.”
As a public facility, Applied Physics offers $500,000 in potential grants to aspiring warp car theorists. However, these grants come with some caveats, mainly that the idea is to produce a physical warp drive based on classical relativity, meaning not relying on “negative energy or superluminous matter” to make the time warp drive work.
Christopher Helmreich of the Associated Press in an interview with debriefingHe also likened the Warp Factory to a “reality check” for warp engines, where concepts can be thoroughly analyzed and ideas that have no chance of working in the real world can hopefully be weeded out.
Although twisted motors still have many hurdles to overcome, they are a technology worth taking seriously. Because if humans have any hope of one day exploring distant stars, they'll need the help of the space-warping technology that the newly established Warp Factory hopes to power.
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about science fiction and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
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