Curvature engine FTL-IXS Enterprise HD concept map released

In 2012, physicist Harod White (Harold White) revealed an earthshaking message: He and his team are working on the FTL engine for NASA. It only takes a few weeks to drive a spaceship equipped with this engine and fly from Earth to Pandora, the movie "Avatar" (Avatar) ...

Recently he and artist Mark Redmark (Mark Rademaker) announced the latest design of the project. But to be fair, they are just announcing what a more realistic design should look like.

Speaking of "Ultra Light Speed", the scientific youth should first think of Einstein. According to his general theory of relativity, a mass object has a speed limit that can never be matched: the velocity of light in a vacuum. This casts a shadow over all romantic fantasies about interstellar flight.

White's design, however, looks like a glimmer of hope, because he intends to draw on the idea of Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Arcouviere. In a paper published in 1994, Arcouviere suggested that an engine capable of shrinking the front space and expanding the rear space would be able to propel the spacecraft forward with space "deformations". Because there is no limit to the speed at which the space expands, the passengers of the spacecraft can perceive that they are faster than the speed of light. Arcouviere proposed that the engine that can make the front space shrink and make the rear space expand, with space "deformation" to propel the spacecraft forward.

If it can be achieved, the spacecraft will be trapped by a "curvature bubble", it will not have any acceleration in the local reference system, it will not be subject to the speed of general relativity, and there will be no time to slow the relativistic effects. If one of these ships flew to Pandora at a two-week pace, the crew would have grown four weeks longer than before, without fear of the so-called "twins paradox".

In addition, they can bring back only two weeks ago information, and through telescopes, people on earth can only see the planet Pandora more than 4 years ago. By playing with the curvature of space, a ship can bypass Einstein's speed limit

However, the Arcouviere driver has a small problem: too much energy. The earliest estimates suggest that the energy required to reach a star destination within a reasonable amount of time is about the equivalent of converting the entire Jupiter's mass to pure energy according to the mass-energy equation. This is clearly unacceptable because we need to keep Jupiter as the Earth to block asteroids.

But Mr White believes that by changing the shape of the engine, he can reduce the energy requirement substantially, which is equivalent to reducing the mass of energy from Jupiter to 1600 lbs (about 725.7 kg). As a result, the engine's viability has been greatly enhanced, and it has attracted NASA's attention. In the recently released IXs Enterprise concept, the spacecraft itself was wrapped in two huge rings, the curvature engine that Wright designed. By this design, the energy required for FTL is greatly reduced.

Now White is trying to verify his theory in the lab. According to his own account, the achievement of the final goal is still a long distance. The good news is that space opera enthusiasts will not have to worry about their fanciful fantasies being destroyed by "real guys" in the short term. But we still hope that White's future for us will be no longer just a few concept maps.