# How can warp drive not violate relativity?

**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-warp-drive-not-violate-relativity/642186
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [November 26, 2012, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-warp-drive-not-violate-relativity/642186 "2012-11-26T19:13:57Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 43

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)
#### Post date: [December 3, 2012, 2:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-warp-drive-not-violate-relativity/642186/43 "2012-12-03T02:24:52Z")

</div>

> [@Undo "Clear Fields", can it be done?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/undo-clear-fields-can-it-be-done/5170/2):
>
> There could very well be a specific configuration of black holes, damned souls, and immersion blenders…

😃 Be sure to cool it with baboon’s blood.

> [@cmyk](#):
>
> A pure Doppler Shift is caused by the compression of waves between the discrete motions of objects relative to another in flat (or close/everyday) space.
> 
> But, since spacetime is also expanding, there’s also a red-shift that is, for lack of a better word, accumulative. The farther away we observe something, the stronger the shift, even if the galaxies weren’t moving through space relative to each other.
> 
> This would be like a train’s whistle changing pitch, because the earth and its atmosphere is expanding in size, despite the fact the train, nor you, are in motion relative to each other (imagining that all things situated on the planet would remain in their respective positions, like the dots on an inflating balloon analogy; as impossible as the planet doing this actually is, but hey… it’s an analogy)…

Thanks. I’ve seen this explained here many times, and I can never hear enough about the middle graf, the money graf.

But, as someone holding on to analogies with the skin of my teeth, in my 3-D physically perceived world, two objects on an expanding balloon _do_ have greater distances between them at t+_n_. Their addresses on the map stay the same and their distances are always proportionally the same relative to t_n_-1, but separate they do.

Fucking analogies.  
ETA: “…their distances are always proportionally the same relative to t_n_-1” is a pretty loaded, and wrong, sentence, I think. Is it? Spacetime can change non-homogenously, right?

---

_[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-warp-drive-not-violate-relativity/642186)._