Private Enterprise- To mars

A project, sponsored by NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program, to study ways of influencing the energy density of the quantum vacuum with a view to possible applications in spacecraft propulsion. It is being conducted by a team of scientists from various academic and corporate institutions in the United States and Mexico.


An idea for achieving faster-than-light travel suggested by the Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.1 It starts from the notion, implicit in Einstein's general theory of relativity, that matter causes the surface of spacetime around it to curve. Alcubierre was interested in the possibility of whether Star Trek's fictional "warp drive" could ever be realized. This led him to search for a valid mathematical description of the gravitational field that would allow a kind of spacetime warp to serve as a means of superluminal propulsion. Alcubierre concluded that a warp drive would be feasible if matter could be arranged so as to expand the spacetime behind a starship (thus pushing the departure point many light-years back) and contract the spacetime in front (bringing the destination closer), while leaving the starship itself in a locally flat region of spacetime bounded by a "warp bubble" that lay between the two distortions.  Then again, matter distorted to expand or contract means altering the state of matter. Perhaps "dark matter" which has been suggested as distorted, could be stable in that altered state. The ship would then surf along in its bubble at an arbitrarily high velocity, pushed forward by the expansion of space at its rear and the contraction of space in front. It could travel faster than light without breaking any physical law because, with respect to the spacetime in its warp bubble, it would be at rest. Also, being locally stationary, the starship and its crew would be immune from any devastatingly high accelerations and decelerations (obviating the need for "inertial dampers"), and from relativistic effects such as time dilation (since the passage of time inside the warp bubble would be the same as that outside).


This information descibes an idea I had about time travel back at the old AR forum. The draw back is returning from where you came, unless you reverse the expansion of the universe. The option then is time travel, or reversing time. Thus returning to the point or point before that, to go the other direction.


To sum it all up, you would remain motionless as space and time go on without you. Suddenly you phase back into the physical universe as it is and begin traveling with it again.
 This means being on Mars, at one PM, and returning to Earth by 1:01 PM for a late lunch, and Back to Mars by no later then 1:16 if you managed to make into the outer atmosphere by a quarter after. And that's taking it slow when you think about how fast space is expanding.