Warp how fast

The crew of Voyager wisely ditched the idea, concerned about the consequences. It's worth noting that warp speeds seem to have been re-calibrated again in the future timeline glimpsed in "All Good Things," where two vessels are said to travel at warp Presumably as technology became more efficient, Starfleet saw the value in creating a new scale with a wider range.

In a technical note, science adviser Andre Bormanis suggested that in this future timeline, warp 15 would be the Threshold limit.

In truth, warp travel is usually little more than a plot device to help the Federation's starships jump across the galaxy at speed. Almost every sci-fi series has its own equivalent, simply because the alternative is to slow your story down for quite a while as the crew jumps from one star-system to another. In Star Wars , for example, ships that break the speed of light are able to access another dimension called hyperspace. This is essentially another plane of reality, one where the laws of physics operate differently.

By accessing hyperspace, a spaceship can move at a phenomenal speed; there are different classes of hyperdrive, which allow different speeds. Then, moving through spacetime at your maximum speed of one meter per second, you would be able to reach point B in about one second. In theory, this approach does not contradict the laws of relativity since you are not moving faster than light in the space around you.

Proxima Centauri here we come, right? The warp drive would require either negative mass — a theorized type of matter — or a ring of negative energy density to work. Physicists have never observed negative mass, so that leaves negative energy as the only option. To create negative energy, a warp drive would use a huge amount of mass to create an imbalance between particles and antiparticles.

For example, if an electron and an antielectron appear near the warp drive, one of the particles would get trapped by the mass and this results in an imbalance. This imbalance results in negative energy density. But for a warp drive to generate enough negative energy, you would need a lot of matter. Alcubierre estimated that a warp drive with a meter bubble would require the mass of the entire visible universe.

In , physicist Chris Van Den Broeck showed that expanding the volume inside the bubble but keeping the surface area constant would reduce the energy requirements significantly , to just about the mass of the sun.

The warp drive experiences the same effect with light waves, meaning there is no way to send a message ahead of you. How do you create the warped space-time geometry around your ship? Agnew is more optimistic. Macdonald, too, is hopeful. She has an MPhys in mathematical physics and loves all things space, dinosaurs and dogs. Home Science news Faster-than-light travel: Is warp drive really possible?

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Dave Mosher. In the sci-fi series "Star Trek," spaceships rapidly travel from one part of the universe to another using warp drives. The speed of light in a vacuum is about , miles per second , kilometers per second. In "Star Trek," a warp factor of 1 is light speed, and a warp factor of 9.

He posted his video on Twitter on Monday.