Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem with the warp drive is topological. His drive relies on expanding space behind you and contracting it in front. OK. But what happens when you turn the drive off? Assuming all this squashing and stretching doesn't involve discontinuities, at best you're back where you're started from. At worst, you're in some kind of weird messed up crappy nook in spacetime where you're a long way from your starting point and your destination.

View on HN

My understanding is that using a substance called "spice gas" you're able to enable this drive through a process called "folding."

HN-as-a-hivemind really should approve of this sort of snark. It's nerd-snark!

I think that's why you still move the ship forward within the warp bubble (to borrow a Star Trek term). So you're compressing space in front of you, while moving forward into the compressed space.

Right. In a sense it operates on the same principle as why the known universe is larger than it is old (as space-time continues to expand and light has further to go)

Except the universe hasn't shrunk.

Not so much. It's more analogous to surfing on a wave.

Any object with mass warps spacetime towards itself. This doesn't cause an infinite buildup of 'spacetime' on the object's surface.

There are concerns with built up energy in front of the spaceship but not being sent back to your origin.

So it's more of an improbability drive?

Yes, of the infinite variety.

Or infinitely ;-)

But, hey, I'd love to be wrong.

> Assuming all this squashing and stretching doesn't involve discontinuities, at best you're back where you're started from.

Are we sure space is perfectly elastic? What if space is infinitely plastic? Then when you turn the drive off, for all observable data you would be sitting in normal space just short of your destination.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com