The Alcubierre Drive is theoretically possible, but I did not find out until yesterday that NASA is actually doing research along those lines (at this stage, they’re just trying to find out if it is possible to create “warp bubbles” on a much smaller scale than a starship would require). See the video-clips on this page, and this page from NASA itself. If they can get this thing to work (and note that their projected date is no earlier than 2100) it could go 10 times faster than light – which would still mean a 6-month trip to the nearest star, but, any planet within the Solar System could be reached in minutes.
I sincerely hope that estimate includes the Scotty Factor.
I don’t know if I’d call this “research.” More like an admission that humanity’s dreams of space travel are dead & buried if we can’t figure out a way to do something like this. Because no government or entity is ever going fund a space mission that will take 20,000 years to reach its destination.
I dunno. If they ever figure out a way to shift the cost onto descendants 20,000 years in the future, a whole lot of crap might get funded. 
To boldly split infinitives no one has split before!
But it is research, into the basic physics of the drive, to determine whether it might be possible.
Heh. Let me ask you this: Do you give a crap if your caveman anscestor promised to pay 4 clams to someone else’s caveman anscestor, but never did so? 
According to the Wiki writeup, this is an area of research where the laws between Relativity and Quantum Physics, which we haven’t properly determined yet, are liable to pop up their head. So if nothing else, any research they are able to do might lead to some illuminating results in the search for the unifying theory.
That’s serendipity for you: Well-designed scientific research might or might not find what you were looking for, but it is bound to find something.
I’m curious as to how much effort and cost really goes into something as far-fetched as this at NASA.
According to recent news reports (which you’ve probably seen), the IRS cares.
Yes, they were all over me this year about some relative with undeclared clams.
It would only make sense for NASA to dedicate *some *attention to Miguel Alcubierre’s mathematical propositions. Being mostly pure theoretical physics for the short term it’s not like it should cost *that *much near-term (different story if it progresses to actually experimenting with applications, if that turns out to be even possible).
For those playing the home game, that would be about Warp 2.15 per the scale they claimed for 1960s Star Trek (apparent “speed” = c * [factor cubed]); the writers, not having bothered to look up the real distances between some of the actual stars they mentioned by name in the scripts, grossly underestimated how “fast” you’d need to go to make those trips.
Dunno. I mean all CERN was trying to do was to shoot a really small particle fast and that ended up in the construction of a huge multi-billion dollar structure.
Does anyone here know how big/complex the sort of machinery would be to try and even get a measurable result?
Too bad we can’t turn the Manhattan Project loose on this.
Every few years the pop-science community picks up on some ‘blue sky’ research that NASA, DARPA, the Department of Energy, or the US Navy is doing on advanced propulsion, fusion energy, or some other science fictional system and blows it out of proportion. Yes, government organizations sometimes fund or conduct research in speculative (at best) areas either because someone has a budget with few constraints and a lot of creativity, or because there is a mandate to go out and explore the fringes of science for some not-ready-for-prime-time technology, or whathaveyou. The fact that these programs exist does not inherently validate the alleged phenomenon that they are investigating, and in fact the vast majority of these programs end up being nothing more than a bucket of warm spit in terms of return. However, from an investment standpoint it makes a certain amount of sense to take a tiny amount of budget (and to NASA, a few million dollars is “tiny”) in the hopes of uncovering some phenomenon which was previously uninvestigated and outside the mainstream of physics in the hopes of finding the next big revolution in physics or novel applications to propiulsion.
However, even setting aside whether this reserach isn’t or isn’t viable (and it is worth nothing that the PI, Harold White, is a recipient of both a Silver Snoopy and the Exceptional Achievement Medal, so if he’s a flake he is at least a well-accomplished one), even if NASA came up with a functional ‘warp drive’ today, there would still be a vast number of problems to solve before interplanetary or interstellar flight would be viable, starting with just having enough capability to carry and assemble a large habitable spacecraft in orbit, much less keeping it functional, protecting the crew against space hazards, providing enough energy to power the drive system while rejecting heat fast enough to prevent the vessel from rapidly overheating, et cetera. There is no magic technology that allows us to go from “barely able to put people in Low Earth Orbit” to “Guardians of the Galaxy” in three simple steps. And not only developing all of that technology but building the infrastructure to support it is a vast, complex, technically challenging project.
Stranger
No one is suggesting that, but, see post #9.
All true.
So what?
You could have made similar objections to deep-ocean sailing or the Interstate Highway System or the Internet back in their respective days.
you had me at “warp bubble”
Most cites for the Alcubierre Drive say it requires exotic matter—negative energy or mass—which I understand to be only highly theoretical at this point.
The NASA team must have some other plausible substitute to carry forth with experimentation, but what?