Warp drive looks more promising than ever in recent NASA studies
The first steps towards interstellar travel have been taken, but
the stars are very far away. Voyager 1 is about 17 light-hours
distant from Earth and is traveling with a velocity of 0.006
percent of light speed, meaning it will take about 17,000 years
to travel one light-year. Fortunately, the elusive "warp drive"
now appears to be evolving past difficulties with new
theoretical advances and a NASA test rig under development to
measure artificially generated warping of space-time.The warp
drive broke away from being a wholly fictional concept in 1994,
when physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested that faster-than-
light (FTL) travel was possible if you remained still on a flat
piece of spacetime inside a warp bubble that was made to move at
superluminal velocity. Rather like a magic carpet. The main idea
here is that, although no material objects can travel faster
than light, there is no known upper speed to the ability of
spacetime itself to expan