Warp drive update

As a stated objective of this blog, I must dutifully report on any notable updates in the United States' development of warp drive.

While I think there is a not insignificant chance Harold "Sonny" White is playing a long con on whoever is listening to and funding him, there's still a chance he at least believes what he's saying:

Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Harold G “Sonny” White has reported the discovery of an actual, real-world “Warp Bubble.” And, according to White, this first of its kind breakthrough by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team sets a new starting point for those trying to manufacture a full-sized, warp-capable spacecraft.

In an interview, White added that “our detailed numerical analysis of our custom Casimir cavities helped us identify a real and manufacturable nano/microstructure that is predicted to generate a negative vacuum energy density such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble, not an analog, but the real thing.” In other words, a warp bubble structure will manifest under these specific conditions. White cautioned that this does not mean we are near building a fully functioning warp drive, as much more science needs to be done (Updated 08/12/21).

“To be clear, our finding is not a warp bubble analog, it is a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble,” White told The Debrief, “hence the significance.”

Maybe we can send Covid-19 to Proxima Centauri soon.

[Note: I'm experimenting with text size. I don't know if it's my eyes or something on the blog changed, but the text seems to be too small. Now the above text is a little too big!]

A little bit about effective space travel

We can get to the space station, moon, and arguably even Mars in reasonable amounts of time. But if we want to get past what's essentially our front porch and explore the neighborhood, or beyond, we're kind of screwed. Unless you're totally fine with having burning questions you've asked answered several hundreds or thousands of years later.

"Hey doc, this don't look so good. Is it cancer?"

"Let's run some tests. I should have the results back sometime around 3pm, in 2096."

I'm not saying Earth has cancer and we need to jump ship, I'm just saying the sun has cancer and Earth has a ton of other shit going on and we'll need to jump ship within at least the next billion years. But probably a lot sooner because meteors of death and probably other unforeseen calamities. And that's just the stuff we are pretty sure about. The stuff we don't know literally fills a universe.

But also, there's a ton of cool stuff out there we are missing out on, very important questions that could be answered, and a billion other things we didn't even think about.

So here's some videos I thought were interesting/enlightening, and I've wanted to share them for a while.



Another day I might discuss the ideas and ethical concerns the video presented further (like how it uses reproduction strategies from nature--plants and some insects) but for now, this will do.

The next one is much longer and slightly more technical, but still easy enough to follow. It's essentially a kinda-sorta-almost proof of concept Warp Drive presentation by Harold "Sonny" White. According to him, we'll get there soon.

Bending space-time in his garage?

As I understand it, space and time are indivisible. And just by having mass, we are able to bend it, a very, very, insignificantly, virtually unmeasurable, tiny bit. That's not news; that's just what the documentaries and various Wikipedia articles tell me.

What is news, is this guy compressing space in his garage with some kind of motor. I assume, if this is real, the effect is measurable and not insignificant.

[A] strange instrument made up of V-shape panels with fractal arrays on the surfaces. . . is the latest version of what Pares believes is the world’s first low-power warp drive motor.

He turns around and points to the back of his garage door, where a red laser — beamed at the weight and reflected back against the door to demonstrate the movement happening in the case — drifts from its original spot. Slowly, in incremental amounts, the weight is drawn toward the V-shape motor.

I must digress here: unfortunately, those few sentences and one further in are the extent of the 'news' in the article. The other two dozen plus paragraphs are exposition, fluff, filler, and crap.

I really wish journalists would provide a little more detail as to what exactly is happening. If you don't understand it, then please explain what you saw in detail, and if you didn't see it (you shouldn't be writing the article then), try to explain in more than 2 sentences what is occurring with as little technical jargon as possible. Is not that the point of journalism?


If true, this is pretty big news. Compressing space is a key ingredient to any kind of plausible FTL or near light-speed travel. Professor Pares says he should have a "spacecraft" to demonstrate in 6 months.

Again, take this with a cubic light year of salt, because if it's not one thing with Warp Drive scientists, it's another.

Try googling David Pares and you'll run into more than the recommended dose (zero) of UFO idiot sites. This guy has no qualms about being interviewed by quacks. You're not helping reduce the stigma of Warp Drive science by associating with UFO fetishists, Pares.

(I mean come on, at this rate we'll have singularity-level AI robots before we get out of the solar system. They'll be building Warp Drives before we are.)

Then there's NASA's Harold 'Sonny' White, who is apparently working on a Warp Drive, but either smartly, or trollishly, won't say anything useful about it. But hey, at least we got a sweet artist's rendering, so I guess that's something:

Warp Drive Update

Since reporting on any and all notable (if incremental and highly theoretical) advances in Warp drive is one of the explicit goals of this blog, I am duty bound to chronicle the following:

From PopSci.com: Warp Factor: A NASA scientist claims to be on the verge of faster-than-light travel: is he for real?

Not pictured above: NASA Scientist Sonny White

If, like me, you are pretty well-aware of the warp field theory and negative energy then don't bother reading most of the first two pages--it's all background on that (way to bury the lede PopSci). But PopSci reporter Konstantin Kakaes, took a tour with and interviewed NASA's warp-drive (among other things) scientist, Sonny White.

Here is where the good stuff starts:

Negative energy . . . is gravitationally repulsive. Instead of drawing space-time together, negative energy would push it apart. Roughly speaking, for his model to work, Alcubierre needed negative energy to expand the space-time behind a craft.

Though no one has ever measured negative energy, quantum mechanics predicts that it exists, and scientists should be able to create it in a lab. One way to generate it would be through the Casimir effect: Two parallel conducting plates, placed very closely together, should create small amounts of negative energy. Where Alcubierre’s model broke down is that it required a vast amount of negative energy, orders of magnitude more than most scientists estimate could be produced.

White says he’s found a way around that limitation. In a computer simulation, White varied the strength and geometry of a warp field. He determined that, in theory, he could produce a warp bubble using millions of times less negative energy than Alcubierre predicted and perhaps little enough that a space craft could carry the means of producing it. “The findings,” he says, “change it from impractical to plausible.”

"Plausible"

It'll be a good day when we discard the "you don't need to be a rocket scientist" idiom and replace it with "you don't need to be a warp scientist." I digress too much. Anyway, that snippet too, is old news. White's had this idea rolling around in his head for some time. But it looks like he finally got a little project going:

White’s warp experiment is tucked into the back corner of the room [What? Back corner?!? Get your priorities straight! -ed). A helium-neon laser is bolted onto a small table pricked with a lattice of holes, along with a beam splitter and a black-and-white commercial CCD camera. This is a White-Juday warp field interferometer, which White named for himself and Richard Juday, a retired JSC employee who is helping White analyze the data from the CCD. Half of the laser light passes through a ring—White’s test device. The other half does not. If the ring has no effect, White would expect one type of signal at the CCD. If it warps space, he says “the interference pattern will be starkly different.”

Before I quote any more, and blatantly abuse fair use, I should get my cynicism out of the way. Maybe it's just my cynical nature, but I'm not sure this White guy (heh) is on the level. I understand NASA is all government funded and deals with some pretty sensitive stuff, as well as mingling with the Pentagon/Air Force; but, it's also about science. Which is about sharing and showing your work. So upon reading the following, it felt like I was watching a bad sci-fi movie:

"People come in and want to talk about some things"

Yet when I ask how it would create the negative energy necessary to warp space-time he becomes evasive. “That gets into . . . I can tell you what I can tell you. I can’t tell you what I can’t tell you,” he says. He explains that he has signed nondisclosure agreements that prevent him from revealing the particulars. I ask with whom he has the agreements. He says, “People come in and want to talk about some things. I just can’t go into any more detail than that.”

Well, alright then. So, when can we expect to vacation in Alpha Centauri? If you're as optimistic as White sounds, probably in a few decades. I don't know if he's just generating buzz for whatever reason, or if he's that confident, but there it is. He says he's even found a way (at least theoretically--he's not clear on it) to generate a stable warp field. Here's hoping.

Update: From commenter Noel, apparently PopSci made a mistake. "White has not signed any NDAs. The article has it backwards. In order for the Popular Science author to get briefed on the referenced technology, he would need to sign an NDA with the government . . ."