Warp Drive Technology

I'd like to start of the 1st official science related post (actually 2nd post) with the relatively recent talks about warp travel, more specifically the Alcubierre Drive. http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive

First, I'd like to say that this does seem very unlikely, going from chemical booster rockets to warp travel. Now that that's in our sights, let's take a look at this with some background info.

So, you got a bunch of astrophysicists and whatnot sitting around a table in a room, and one of them pipes up and says "Hey, let's get us moving out of our boring solar system in the next hundred years!" Applause is had, cheers all around and so the 100 Year Starship Project is born...Ok, that's not how it actually happened, but that just about sums it up.

The 100 Year Starship Project (100YSS) was started back in 2011 in a joint venture by DARPA and NASA to work towards achieving interstellar travel. During the 2011 100YSS Symposium, a fellow by the name of Harold White announced that him and his team were in the beginning of developing a faster-than-light (FTL) warp drive. His foundation comes from the work of another fellow by the name of Miguel Alcubierre. In "The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity," Alcubierre suggests a device that, in compliance with Albert Einstein's law of General Relativity, can move a spacecraft faster than light by warping space both in front and behind it.

The Alcubierre Drive model developed by White originally, by the math, required about 1.9x10^27 kilograms of energy in order to function, which is about equal to the mass of Jupiter, or roughly 317 Earths. Now, that's a scary amount of energy, right? Well, White got a little creative right before the 100YSS Symposium. After essentially playing with the geometry of the drive itself by changing the negative vacuum energy ring from circular to an oval-like shape, the amount of energy needed to have the drive function dropped immensely! From the mass of Jupiter to about 1,600 pounds. That's the weight of a Smart Car! If you don't think that's a drastic change, then I don't know what to tell you. This has suddenly made the warp drive seem possible.

Currently, tests are being done in a micro lab by White and his crack-team of physicists. Now we must wait to see if these micro tests are successful. If they are, they will be the "Chicago-Pile Moment" of this grand discovery. We'll see how this is doing and where it is in progress in the coming months.