Alcubierre Driving Me Crazy

I liked “A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel” because it presented faster than light travel as something, which can be accomplished through many means, and each civilization develops its own. I like this way of presenting it because currently there are a lot of hypotheses about how to make a faster than light drive and obviously we can’t really test any of them yet.

In accordance with all the different methods of faster than light travel, I’m going to talk about the one that I personally like the most: The Alcubierre Drive. The Alcubierre Drive as you might have guessed was theorized by a physicist named Alcubierre. The basic idea is that by putting a form of matter with negative mass at the back of your ship and then regular matter with positive mass at the front of your ship, you could create a wave in spacetime that would move your ship faster than the speed of light.

Although your first instinct may be to say that negative mass is just not possible, recently there have been experiments attempting to create a fluid with some properties of a negative mass fluid, and as you can see in this article with a clickbait headline that you should ignore some of them are successful. Sadly this is only the first step towards true negative mass matter.

Even if you can create exotic matter with negative mass, there are still some problems with the Alcubierre Drive. The first is that it’s entirely uncontrollable, once you set a course it can’t be altered because no information can travel from the inside of the drive to the outside of the drive. The second is that anything in front of the drive when it slows down will be hit with the energy equivalent of every particle it hit along the way in the form of gamma rays... probably. Scientists aren’t 100% sure. So basically, it’s a solar system destroying, uncontrollable, death machine, which I think fits quite nicely into “A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel.”