Surprised nobody has brought this up on the Dope yet. Long story short, the amount of energy required turns out to be a number of orders of magnitude less than thought. Still an issue however is that said energy might still need to be negative.
Feel free to speculate, eviscerate, and pontificate as only Doper science geeks can…
Apparently this guy does work at NASA.
It sounds very much like the ‘explanation’ given for a Cochrane warp bubble in the Star Trek universe. Truly fascinating.
Interesting.
I think in just a few more years Obama or Romney can rename our budget surplus “energy” and we should be good to go 
Ad aspera per badus bugetis.
The operative question being how one creates the field.
Er, um, not really supposed to drag politics into GQ…
Screw space. It would mean the end of roads on Earth — if no one tells the oil companies.
If this is possible, where are the aliens that should have visited us by now? I remain a skeptic. Which is the correct scientific attitude since it is refutable claim.
Until someone explains what the hell a White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer is and what it’s measuring this is could simply be “proof” through computer models staring at each other.
Seems like over hyped theory without a lot of experimental data so far.
Given that this would require several tons of a type of matter that exists only theoretically, I’m not getting my hopes up. If they can produce a microgram of this stuff and hold it stably for a few seconds, then I’ll start getting interested.
Yeah, the only reference I can find to this White-Juday thing is a NASA “What I did over the last fiscal year” report and all the useless “reporting” going on.
If a warp bubble is created, does that mean that the object contained inside the bubble does not exist in space and can pass through normal matter without interaction?
What makes you think they would be willing to show themselves to us?
Perhaps the ‘prime directive’ is a basic concept for a advanced civilization.
From the OP’s link:
Sounds amazingly simular to theories dismissed as ‘woo’ here on the dope.
Just sayin’
Or the astonishingly complex set of circumstances which permit the development of sentient life renders its very existence exceeding rare—an intuitively likely scenario. Has it ever occurred to you that we’re very likely alone in the galaxy? Probably not the universe as a whole—that would seem an intuitively unlikely scenario. But the galaxy and maybe even the local supergroup? I can easily entertain that possibility.
On the one hand it would be terribly disappointing to be alone.
On the other, if this warp bubble thing works, we’ll have all the living space we could desire.
If it’s so amazingly similar to theories that have been dismissed as woo, can you name just one that you think is the most similar?
I… don’t think so. Do you have any specific examples in mind?
I mean, I can give you ‘woo’ that uses a lot of terminology from quantum mechanics–in which case quantum mechanics will sound like my ‘woo’ but absolutely no significance can be drawn from that.
But I don’t even know what ‘woo’ talks about stiffness in spacetime etc. The only thing I can think of that you may be thinking about is “oscillations”–but again, just because I can use that word in ‘woo’ doesn’t mean it’s even half-interesting that a scientific statement “sounds like woo.” Having the same words in has very little relation to having the same meaning overall.
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936_2011016932.pdf paper describing some of what is being discussed - especially a description of the Warp Field Interferometer.
This isn’t warp drive - this is how to test for evidence of intentional space-time expansion/contraction.