For the Sci-Fi/Futurist types: Alcubierre drives that don't require negative energy?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

From this fluff/info piece: Warp drives: Physicists give chances of faster-than-light space travel a boost (microsoftnewskids.com)

 

Quote

 

"Two recent papers – one by Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire and another by Erik Lentz – provide solutions that seem to bring warp drives closer to reality.

Bobrick and Martire realized that by modifying spacetime within the bubble in a certain way, they could remove the need to use negative energy. This solution, though, does not produce a warp drive that can go faster than light.

...

Independently, Lentz also proposed a solution that does not require negative energy. He used a different geometric approach to solve the equations of General Relativity, and by doing so, he found that a warp drive wouldn’t need to use negative energy. Lentz’s solution would allow the bubble to travel faster than the speed of light.

It is essential to point out that these exciting developments are mathematical models. "

 

the links:

 

Introducing physical warp drives - IOPscience

Breaking the warp barrier: hyper-fast solitons in Einstein–Maxwell-plasma theory - IOPscience

 

 

Cool sounding stuff.

That aside, this knuckledragger would appreciate any thoughts by those of you with the maths and inclination to delve into the papers.  

 

[kerbiloid]

Now I'm afraid of switching on the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner.

Who knows, what happens to continuum when these thngs rotate...

[TheSaint]

I'm a knuckledragger when it comes to this sort of stuff as well. But it does make it more likely that my next science fiction RPG campaign will use warp drive.

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Now I'm afraid of switching on the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner.

Who knows, what happens to continuum when these thngs rotate...

Now you know where all those lost socks have been going.

[Nuke]

somewhere on an alien planet, large piles of accumulating socks are causing an environmental crisis for the locals. 

[NFUN]

If you're concerned about them in the real world, they fundamentally require negative energy. It's been proven. Our resident particle physics ABD has some good posts on the topic scattered around if you want to know the logic in more depth than "they work by exploiting local negatively curved spacetime, so of course you need exotic matter to create such a curvature"

[SOXBLOX]

4 hours ago, Nuke said:

somewhere on an alien planet, large piles of accumulating socks are causing an environmental crisis for the locals. 

Right there with all those lost disposable ballpoint pens.

*cough* Adams *cough*