Can We Warp Space Faster Than C? | IXS Enterprise | NASA

[kolleamm]

I saw a NASA video on Facebook, about a warp drive proof of concept ship, The IXS Enterprise. It's supposed to travel to distant places at faster than light speed by warping the space around it, but that leads me to think if you can warp space faster than the speed of light.
Is it possible? If not, then I don't really see much point in warping space, in comparison to other propulsion methods.

 

[phinds]

I saw a NASA video on Facebook, about a warp drive proof of concept ship, The IXS Enterprise. It's supposed to travel to distant places at faster than light speed by warping the space around it, but that leads me to think if you can warp space faster than the speed of light.
Is it possible? If not, then I don't really see much point in warping space, in comparison to other propulsion methods.

I think either you misunderstood what you saw or the source was unreliable. Please give a SPECIFIC citation and make sure it is an acceptable one, and then we might have something to discuss. "I saw a video" is not a citation at all.

 

[kolleamm]

I'm trying to get the link to the video but it appears to be posted by an unreliable source just to Facebook.
Here is a very similar video discussing faster than light speed and the warp drive



I quote a person in the comments
"No, it is not possible to travel faster than the speed of light but it is possible for spacetime to move faster than the speed of light."

Not sure if he's right though.

 

[Ibix]

Probably a reference to the Alcubierre Drive (I haven't watched the video, but a couple of the slides being presented look rather like the picture on Wikipedia). It's definitely in the category of "if these few impossible things were possible we could travel faster than light". The key requirement is negative mass matter, which we've never seen and have no real reason to believe exists. Sadly.

 

[kolleamm]

Probably a reference to the Alcubierre Drive (I haven't watched the video, but a couple of the slides being presented look rather like the picture on Wikipedia). It's definitely in the category of "if these few impossible things were possible we could travel faster than light". The key requirement is negative mass matter, which we've never seen and have no real reason to believe exists. Sadly.

Alcubierre Drive that's the one! It was mentioned in the video I saw first on Facebook.

 

[phinds]

Alcubierre Drive that's the one! It was mentioned in the video I saw first on Facebook.

The Alcubierre Drive is a sci-fic fan's wet dream, not a reality or anything that is likely to become a reality. Certainly NASA does not have a prototype of such a drive since it requires impossible (as far as we know) physics and the existence of such a drive would be HUGE news.

 

[PeterDonis]

I saw a NASA video on Facebook, about a warp drive proof of concept ship, The IXS Enterprise.

"Proof of concept" is a bit of a misnomer, since NASA neither has built such a ship, nor plans to build one, nor has even shown that building one is physically possible. (According to most physicists, it isn't, as phinds has pointed out.)