Serious question. If we are going to discover or invent a "warp drive" or similar, what are we doing currently that will lead us to that knowledge? CERN?
Admittedly it's a big ask. But not as big as bending space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_ac...
Of course, that's not a small assumption...
That may seem like "equivalent to forbidden", but some of the interesting surprises of quantum physics were originally theorized by Einstein and company as a way to disprove quantum physics because they were clearly too weird to be true. Maybe not as weird as "Oh, you thought an event's cause had to precede its effect? LOL.", but bizarre and non-intuitive nonetheless.
The spacecraft doesn't actually move through space it pulls the space where it needs to go towards the spacecraft and pushes away the space behind it.
I'm no rocket surgeon so don't quote me.
After all, clearly Star Trek the series has time traveled from the future and is aware of the Vulkans thereby satisfying the prime directive.
In any case, it would be interesting if someone is seriously working on anything like this. I don't track current research in any related areas.