Hyperdrive in Real Life

Ever since Einstein taught us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light through a vacuum, there’s been a long line of people trying to prove him wrong. Hyperdrives have been a staple of science-fiction for years, as far-flung devices which enable characters to conquer the laws of physics. But, are we about to see them in the real world, too?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re uncovering the extraordinary reality of hyperdrive technology in real life.

In fiction, hyperdrives are needed because the distances in outer space are too vast to travel without one. It would take existing tech like the Voyager space probes, for example, at least 18,000 years to travel just one lightyear… but most of everything interesting is much further away than that. So, we need something faster, much faster.

Because science tells us that the speeds we require aren’t possible, enter the hyperdrive; a term which dates back to the mid-twentieth century sci-fi boom. Nowadays, a hyperdrive is such a common trope, such a necessary requirement for any space-based story, that almost everybody understands what it does - that it gets people to places really quickly. What we don’t so often think about, though, is how it does what it does. In actuality, hyperdrives aren’t devices which accelerate a craft to incredible speeds; not quite. Instead, they serve as a necessary piece of equipment to enter “hyperspace”, which is a sub-region of regular space where it’s possible to accelerate to incredible speeds; to exceed the speed of light.

The hyperspace idea dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, but now it’s a useful construct in science-fiction because it solves most of those pesky problems encountered when trying to show faster-than-light travel; problems like how you’d go about braking at these incredible speeds without hugely overshooting your destination… or how you’d avoid oncoming stars, planets or asteroids on your trip. Moving at FTL speeds in regular space would be just supremely dangerous. In hyperspace, though, a “super-space” realm which allows you to instantly decelerate just by jumping in or out of it, your superluminal highway is suddenly a much safer prospect.

And so, the closest thing we have in the real world to a hyperdrive is the Alcubierre Drive, a device first proposed by the physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. Appropriately enough, he’s said to have come up with the idea while watching “Star Trek”. The Alcubierre Drive is still yet to be built, but in theory it would be a device capable of “warping” the spacetime surrounding a craft by expanding it behind, and contracting it in front. A vehicle equipped with an Alcubierre Drive would then move in an “Alcubierre bubble” with distorted spacetime all around, giving the illusion to passengers on board that it was accelerating at fantastic speeds, despite really moving at a slower rate. The concept is sometimes likened to how a wave moves a surfer without the surfer themselves accelerating – the surfboard is the ship; the wave is spacetime. What’s crucial is that, relatively speaking, a craft with an Alcubierre Drive wouldn’t at all be exceeding the speed of light within its “bubble”… so it amounts to a way to technically travel faster than light without violating the laws of physics. What’s even better, though, is that the calculations behind the Alcubierre Drive are sound; increasing numbers of scientists and engineers agree that it is technically possible to build one.

Why, then, if we’ve known how to build something like this since the ‘90s, haven’t we built it yet? Ultimately, it comes down to one factor: energy. According to the Baylor University physicist Gerald Cleaver, for an Alcubierre Drive to get us to our next-closest star after the sun (Proxima Centauri - around 4.24 lightyears away), it would require the energy equivalent to the total mass-energy of Jupiter. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, we don’t currently have any means to generate anything like this. There is a suggested solution, though, and that’s dark or exotic matter. For a pop culture example, it’s dark matter which powers the Planet Express ship in “Futurama”, which itself functions by remaining stationary and moving spacetime around it – along Alcubierre’s line of thinking, then! Unfortunately, in the real world, we don’t yet know what dark matter is or how to even properly detect it, let alone how to use it as a fuel source. So, the Alcubierre Drive is, as it stands, a little like inventing the car without having any gasoline to make it work; a fantastic idea, but practically impossible for now.

With exotic matter out, then, one alternative is to tweak the calculations and modify the design to reduce fuel demands. When the energy requirements for the drive are already so high, it might seem impossible to lower them to an even close to practical amount… but, perhaps not. In 2011, the physicist Harold White first proposed a modified version of the Alcubierre Drive, reducing the energy requirements so much that, to work, it could potentially require only the mass-energy equivalent of Voyager 1 - a considerably less energetic demand than Jupiter. The results of White’s experiments - which are ongoing and carried out at NASA, using something called a White-Juday warp-field interferometer - have so far been deemed inconclusive … but Alcubierre’s ideas are clearly still front and centre when it comes to hyperdrive attempts.

The Alcubierre Drive isn’t NASA’s only hyperdrive project, however. And something which seemingly doesn’t rely on exotic matter is the Cannae Drive. The Cannae Drive is an alternative propulsion system which basically works by converting contained microwaves into radiation pressure, to create thrust - in what’s called a “cavity thruster”. It’s technology similar to the EmDrive, which also uses contained microwaves to generate energy, earning it the nickname the “Impossible Drive” in some sections of the media. But these systems are beginning to seem increasingly not “impossible” in real life. They both apparently break the “momentum conservation” laws of physics, but they’ve also both been shown to work during numerous experiments - including, in 2016, when NASA actually built a small-scale working model! In theory, a craft using any type of cavity thruster would be able to travel much faster than one powered only by a conventional engine and fuel, not least because it would also be so significantly lighter. It’s still early days, but it has been speculated that a Cannae Drive could get human travellers to Proxima Centauri in only a few decades, compared to the tens of thousands of years it would take a Voyager probe to get there.

There is another school of thought, though, that perhaps it isn’t the hyperdrive itself that we should be focusing on, at all. Instead, we should take a step further back from even the Alcubierre approach - where a hyperdrive device creates its own hyperspace to work within - and just focus on how to unlock hyperspace in general, for even conventionally powered vehicles. It’s a theme which again comes up time and time again in sci-fi; Einstein-Rosen Bridges, or wormholes.

While they remain theoretical constructs that haven’t been created or observed, wormholes manipulate spacetime by creating alternative pathways between different points… and have been deemed mathematically plausible. For the purposes of today’s question, though, the space between wormholes might be seen as similar to the idea of “hyperspace”; as a sub-space region we could move around in. Once more, you could potentially make a trip at FTL speeds by travelling between two particular points faster than light outside of the wormhole could… but without locally exceeding the speed of light and breaking the laws of physics.

How close are we to creating wormholes of our own? Well, not that close… but we are seeing advances made all the time. In 2015, for example, a team at the Autonomous University of Barcelona built a device which managed to forge a path through space without any evidence of a magnetic field. It’s magnetism was essentially invisible, meaning that the path - dubbed, by some, a wormhole - couldn’t be detected from the outside. True, it’s a long way from that to genuine, time-hopping, galaxy-breaching tunnels through space… but the groundwork is being laid. And, in a totally theoretical and far off future world, if we were to suddenly find ourselves capable of mastering and manipulating wormholes, then perhaps we wouldn’t need a hyperdrive at all. Or, maybe “hyperdrive” would simply be the name we’d give to any technology capable of producing the wormholes for us to walk through.

There’s no telling how far hyperdrive technology could go, but thanks to the hypothetical Alcubierre Drive, the almost practical Cannae Drive, and our ever-growing understanding of how to bend and shape spacetime… this hallmark of science-fiction could one day be the key to exploring galaxies far, far away.

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