Could a warp drive escape a black hole?

Lots of things have been theorized on paper before being found (e.g. black holes).

I would not hold my breath on this one though.

Lots of methods for effectively exceeding the speed of light have been proposed which are consistent with general relativity. The one that most closely resembles a fictional “warp drive” is the Alcubierre one, but all of them involve the use of negative mass. Which not only has never been observed, but if it were possible, it would have all sorts of other extremely unsubtle effects, such that we would expect to have observed those effects already.

Also, in relativity, anything that can get you from point A to point B faster than light could get there in a vacuum can also be used to time travel into the past, and vice-versa.

I’m not actually sure this one works… I think that if you did have a wormhole, and fed one end into a black hole, the result would just be a horizon forming around both ends of the wormhole. I guess you could change which black hole you were stuck in, but you’d still be stuck in a black hole.

That was a joke???

Get a better sense of humor.

At least you are easily amused so I guess that’s good.

I disagree.
Warp drives create a bubble in space-time, with the ship traveling like a surfer on a wave, at the leading edge.

Moderating:

Both, stop with the personal attacks. You know better.

I’m mildly surprised this hasn’t become a “no true Scotsman” discussion. We all know that a TRUE warp drive could escape a black hole. If it can’t, it’s not a warp drive.

It’s right there in the Federation of Planets Handbook.

True; if we were to build a spaceship that could travel at nearly the speed of light, we could travel towards the edge of the known universe and eventually reach a region where expansion would carry us away from Earth at faster than c. No additional negative energy required; just the natural ‘dark energy’ that seems to be a fundamental feature of the universe.

Eventually expansion/dark energy would carry us to a location where we could never return to Earth, but we would be so far away at that point in time and space that this would be a minor consideration.

I have heard this described as a Cauchy horizon; a barrier that forms around two regions of space-time that must be kept apart at all costs. You might be right.

  1. Alcubierre drive.
  2. Kerr black hole, since those are the ones we can expect to realistically encounter.

I do not think an Alcubierre Drive creates a “bubble.” It just shrinks space in front of it…if it was a real thing.

Star Trek has “warp bubbles” but I think that sci-fi is mostly an Alcubierre Drive.

The Alcubierre drive does have a bubble. That is, there is a spherical shell with a small thickness, such that all of the considerable curvature is confined to that shell, with space inside and outside of that shell both flat or nearly so.

There was this paper
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.04495
which purports to describe that a warp bubble can intersect a black-hole horizon

I think it could work. But you would probably need to route power through the deflector dish and initiate an inverse tachyon pulse. And maybe reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.

Kirk: OK, Scotty, when can you do that?
Scott: I’m workin’ as fast as I can, Captain!
Spock: The ship will be crushed by the black hole in 4.37 minutes
Kirk: Work faster or you’re fired