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Paul Titze, who somehow finds time to write the excellent Captain InterStellar blog when not preoccupied with his maritime duties in Sydney, passed along a 2009 paper on warp drives yesterday that I want to be sure to consider before the year is over. Warp drives as in Miguel Alcubierre’s notion of a method of reaching speeds that are faster than light. The Star Trek echo in the choice of names was playful and intentional on Alcubierre’s part, and the physicist kicked off a cottage industry in exotic spacetimes and their geometries when he used it in a 1994 paper on superluminal flight.
Specifically, Alcubierre noted that although nothing can move faster than the speed of light through spacetime, spacetime itself has no such restriction. That notion is more or less built into the theory of inflation, which demands a vast expansion of the infant cosmos that would have far outstripped any lightspeed restriction. And Alcubierre saw that if spacetime could be made to contract in front of a vehicle while being expanded behind it, the craft would remain within a conventional spacetime ‘bubble’ while being carried to its destination at speeds that would allow fast human transport among the stars.
My idea for avoiding the hawking radiating problem would be to limit the time at warp and use an ablative shield to carry away the energy from the hawking radiation by vaporizing. An ablative shield does not necessarily need to be a solid replaced after every flight but could be a liquid with a high heat capacity secreted over the surface and held there by surface tension. Since the time at warp would be very brief given the temperature mentioned, it would resemble a jump drive more than a Star Trek style continuous drive.
No ideas for the instability problems with the warp bubble itself though. When writing sci-fi, it would be better to just say that they solved that problem lol.
A warp-ship would likely have a lot of mass to shield the crew from the more penetrating radiation and be mostly made of the equipment to manufacture exotic matter and focus it in ways to warp the space time. Which means it would have little or no newtonian drive. If it is armed, it would likely have relativistic missiles propelled by miniaturized sub-luminal warp bubbles, and maybe they would go super-luminal at the last second to exploit the burst of hawking radiation for destructive effects.
This kind of technology would result in warfare where de-population of planets would be as normal as carpet bombing in WWII.
One further implication of space-time manipulation could be the deliberate creation of a black hole by warping into a star, and then shutting off the flow of exotic matter, causing normal matter to fall into the space-time distortion to collapse into a singularity. As matter gets pulled in, it heats up to the point that it radiates x-rays which would be absorbed by surrounding matter (planets for example) and re-radiated as heat. The planets in a system would not fall into the black hole since it would not have any more gravity than the star that formed it, but their atmospheres would be burned off and their surfaces slagged.
Some constructive uses of space-time manipulation.
Artificial gravity, though the gravity field would effect all directions, not just one. This means space ships with artificial gravity would have upside-down decks below the center line, assuming the ships have a mostly planar layout like most ships seen in movies and television. Spheres would be a more efficient use of artificial gravity. Starwars's depiction of the Death Star having mostly concentric decks (except at the equator) was actually one of the few things plausible in that franchise.
Tractor beams. Assuming your space-time warp could be focused into a cone, you could attract something, though the 'towing' ship would need additional thrust to avoid being pulled toward the object it is trying to tow.
Perfect lenses. Gravity itself is a warping of space-time. Gravity can bend light. Gravity fields could refract light better than even the highest grade polished glass and does not deform due to temperature changes.
Of course anti-gravity is out of the question. Gravity is an acceleration and exotic matter would be 'thrown' toward the source of the gravity rather than 'pulled down' like normal matter.
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