Warp Drive - the Problems

[Venusian Broon]

Here's a lovely video on the current thinking on the Albecurrie drive, the <cough> "engineering" issues and the impossiblities....

As he states, and I'll paraphrase, it's great to play with this solution as a way to figurately and literally reach for the stars, and dream a little, but in my own opinion this is going to take completely new physics, rather than engineering what we know now. New physics that I do think will come (eventually, whenever. And assuming civilisation does not come crashing down, never to attain our current heights of scientific knowledge)

Although there is no guarentee either that any new physics will allow FTL travel either....

 

[paranoid marvin]

I am a firm believer that FTL travel will become possible some way, some how. Like many inventions, it will likely come about as a result of a failed experiment or a mistake, and suddenly the answer will be obvious (or at least obvious to scientists) in the same way E=MC2 became.

I'm not sure how or when, but I'm sure that it's a case of 'when' not 'if', and will probably have something to do with the theory of time.

 

[Omits]

It's all very well wishing wormholes and warp stuff but how to navigate to a desired location!?

 

[Serendipity]

Admittedly six issues above the Alcubierre Drive are pointed out in this video. Also that some of these issues could in the long term be amenable to engineering solutions.

What struck me was the radiation problem mentioned in there - where the photons gather at the front of the enclosed space as the spacecraft travels and where the Hawking radiation around 'the shell' enclosing the spaceship causes high unsurvivable temperatures inside.

There was a similar problem with supersonic aircraft (I said similar, not the same). Here the solution included aircraft skin materials to deal with the extra heat and coating materials that would melt and slough off. Could there not be some way of doing something similar for the Alcubierre Drive ship's shell?