@CyanLightning
@SirBumpaous
In its earliest incarnations, the Alcubierre Drive did require such absurdly vast amounts of energy, and negative energy.
But later work on that drive has shown that by diffusing the stress-energy concentration the sum total of it can be reduced to an arbitrarily small amount, and some of Dr. White’s work even suggests that the negative energy density is a result of a positive energy density of a certain geometry, thus is not necessary as one of the ingredients to make the drive work.
It’s a fascinating and open area of research. It could be 10 years off, or it could just be actually
impossible. There’s a lot of educated guesses going different ways, but at the end of the day, nobody really knows for sure.
Personally, I follow
Clarke’s First Law on this one.
As for wormholes, they’re super weird. There’s also good theoretical models where they don’t need
any mass-energy to exist, though in most models and in “classical” General Relativity (GR) they need negative mass-energy to remain “stable” - ie, traversable. The biggest issue is you need to change the fundamental geometry of spacetime, which isn’t possible in classical GR, but some attempts at combining GR with Quantum Mechanics suggest that at tiny quantum scales, spacetime may be warped into breaking into all kinds of chaotic, crazy shapes, and
maybe you could grab one of these quantum wormholes that pop in and out of existence all the time in the “quantum foam” and use negative energy density to blow it up to a size that a person or a ship could go through.
So wormholes are considerably more speculative than warp drives, but both are actually based off of a solid, known and time-proven theory (GR) - the question is just how far we can take GR. But so far we’ve never observed GR being anything other than immaculate, but it probably has some limits(?), and we know it doesn’t get along well with Quantum.
We know two things for absolute certain as two of the most solidly proven theories to ever exist (GR and the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics), but these two theories somewhat conflict each other. If you can even make a tiny step at helping them get along you’ll get a Nobel Prize for it.
