Space travel has always been the dream of many people, and ninety percent of people on Earth hope to one day truly run above that blue sky, to those glittering points of light. But reality tells us that there is a huge insurmountable gap between Earth and the nearest star, and that is distance, and unless we can find a way to travel quickly, then humanity's dream of interstellar travel may one day come true. However, there is news that this day may soon come, that is, the warp starship just revealed by elon Musk, the world's richest man! Today we will talk about what Musk said about the warp speed spacecraft. How fast can it run? The key is whether it can really be achieved?
We know that the tiny dots of light we see in the night sky are actually very large stars, just because they are so far away. But since they are very bright, we can see them. Of these stars, the three closest to Earth are located in the Alpha Centauri tristellar system, about 4.37 light-years from Earth, while the centaurus's immediate neighbor is about 4.24 light-years away, or about 9.46 trillion kilometers a light-year. In addition to this is Barnard's star, which is a red dwarf star, about six light-years away.
The farthest star visible on Earth is a star called Ellendel, which is 12.9 billion light-years away, but the star has only survived in the universe for 1 million years, and that's a momentary thing on the cosmic scale. The light has been spreading to us since its birth, and now we see its light, but it died a long time ago. That's the distance to space, and that's a huge challenge. Exploration anywhere is so far away that even a location in our solar system is very far away, such as Mars.
Elon Musk's dream is to open up Mars, but that means he must find a way to complete a 55 million kilometers of travel in a short period of time to reach the red planet, and this is only the shortest distance between Earth and Mars, if you want to complete the spacecraft at any time to complete the two-stop journey between Earth and Mars, you must be able to complete the journey up to 400 million kilometers.
In terms of the closest distance, Musk's space machine explorers will also take about five months to reach Mars, and unless Musk can find a faster way to travel in space, we will still be limited by the distance we can explore, in addition to distance, fuel is also a huge problem.
For example, for current starships, it's nearly impossible to carry enough fuel to reach any one star, not even the nearest one. But what if we could travel at a faster pace? Like the speed of light, then everything becomes easier. Light travels the fastest in space, at 300,000 kilometers per second and can run 9.46 trillion kilometers a year. So long interstellar distances are measured in light-years. This means that we can reach our centaur neighbor in about 4.24 years, but for humans, even 4 years is still too long.
To put it another way, our goal would save a lot of time as long as it was in the solar system. For example, the moon only takes more than a second, and Mars only needs 3 minutes to reach. So is traveling at the speed of light really possible? That brings us to what Musk calls a warp-driven engine, but until they understand the concept, many people don't know what the consequences of traveling at the speed of light will be.
The first thing is that your perception of time will change, for example you may take three years to reach the planet of your choice, and for you who are traveling at the speed of light, time on Earth will move a little faster. This time difference is called time dilation, and it's a fact of space travel that's part of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. If you leave your twins on Earth, they will age faster than you do. However, this time difference will depend on the speed of the spacecraft, including its acceleration and deceleration, while the time expansion will also depend on gravity and the distance from the planet's gravity.
In addition to that, space isn't completely empty, and you need some sort of protection to prevent free-moving particles from harming you and your spacecraft, as they can also fly at the speed of light. In addition to this, your field of vision will also change dramatically, the world will appear on your ship through the tunnel-shaped window in front of you, the stars in front of you will appear blue, and the stars in the back will appear red, this is because the light waves emitted by the stars in front of you will gather together to make the object appear blue, or the light waves emitted by the stars behind you will disperse and appear red, and after a certain speed, you will only see black, because if you have traveled at the speed of light, then the wavelength of light entering your eyes will be beyond the visible spectrum.
So how is Musk's warp starship going to happen? We know that physicists' current understanding of space-time comes from Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which holds that space and time are interrelated, and that general relativity also describes how mass and energy distort space-time, such as stars and black holes, that curve around space-time. This curvature is the gravity you feel. Physicists have shown that, according to the laws of general relativity, it is mathematically possible to compress the space-time in front of the spaceship while expanding the space-time behind the spaceship.
Many people may not understand this concept, I give you an example, you can imagine that the distance between two points is 10 meters, if you stand at point a and can move 1 meter per second, then it takes 10 seconds to reach point b. But suppose you can somehow compress the space between points a and b so that the interval is now only 1 meter, and then move through space-time at a maximum speed of 1 meter per second. Theoretically, you can reach point b in about 1 second. This method does not violate the laws of relativity, because you are moving no faster than the speed of light in the space around you. Warp Starship, on the other hand, can shorten the distance by creating a flat bubble of time air around the spaceship and bending space-time around the bubble, thereby generating the negative energy required for the twist drive.
But the premise is to use a lot of mass to create an imbalance between particles and antiparticles, so that you can use this negative energy to create space-time bubbles, but for the twist drive to produce enough negative energy, you need a lot of matter. Scientists estimate that a twisted drive with a 100-meter bubble requires the mass of the entire visible universe, which is clearly impractical. Other scientists have proposed some way to modify space-time inside the bubble to eliminate the need to use negative energy, but such a solution would not produce a curvature engine faster than the speed of light. Obviously, the curvature engine that reaches or even exceeds the speed of light is a bit reluctant even in theory, not to mention that in reality, Musk's plan is difficult to see in human lifetime, but in the universe, everything is possible, do you think humans can build such an engine? Feel free to leave your thoughts!