star trek warp inventor

April 23, 2014

Warp Drive Research Key to Interstellar Travel

As any avid Star Trek fan can tell you, the eccentric physicist Zefram Cochrane invented the warp-drive engine in the year 2063. It wasn't easy.

By Mark Alpert

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

As any avid Star Trek fan can tell you, the eccentric physicist Zefram Cochrane invented the warp-drive engine in the year 2063. It wasn’t easy. Cochrane had to contend with evil time-traveling aliens who were determined to stop him from building the faster-than-light propulsion system (see the 1996 movie Star Trek: First Contact for details). But in the end he succeeded, and centuries later his warp drive powered the interstellar voyages of the starship Enterprise.

What Star Trek fans may not know is that a physicist in the real world—specifically, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston—is investigating the feasibility of building a real warp-drive engine. Harold “Sonny” White, head of the center’s advanced propulsion program, has assembled a tabletop experiment designed to create tiny distortions in spacetime, the malleable fabric of the universe. If the experiment is successful, it may eventually lead to the development of a system that could generate a bubble of warped spacetime around a spacecraft. Instead of increasing the craft’s speed, the warp drive would distort the spacetime along its path, allowing it to sidestep the laws of physics that prohibit faster-than-light travel. Such a spacecraft could cross the vast distances between stars in just a matter of weeks.

For readers and writers of science fiction, this is extraordinary news. It doesn’t really matter that other physicists scoff at White’s idea, arguing that it’s impossible to alter spacetime in this way. Nor does it matter that NASA has allocated only $50,000, a mere smidgeon of the space agency’s $18 billion budget, to the warp-drive research. What makes White’s project so exciting is the immensity of the challenge. It’s heartening to know that even in this era of fiscal belt-tightening, the federal government is willing to place a small bet on the big dream of interstellar travel.

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A surprising number of scientists, engineers and amateur space enthusiasts fervently believe in this dream. They’ve shared their hopes and hypotheses at academic conferences. They’ve founded organizations—the 100 Year Starship project , the Tau Zero Foundation , Icarus Interstellar —that seek to lay the groundwork for an unmanned interstellar mission that could be launched by the end of the century. Their ardor has grown in recent years as astronomers have detected a slew of Earthlike planets orbiting stars that are relatively near our sun. A few dozen of these worlds occupy the so-called “Goldilocks zone” around their stars—they’re neither too hot nor too cold to support life. If further observations confirm the existence of a habitable, idyllic planet in our corner of the galaxy, how could we resist sending an interstellar probe to explore this strange new world?

The problem is getting the spacecraft there in a reasonable amount of time. Believe it or not, NASA already has a probe that’s crossing the space between stars: Voyager 1 , the plucky 1,600-pound craft launched in 1977 to investigate Jupiter, Saturn and their moons. After completing its primary mission the probe zipped past the outer planets, and in 2012 it left the solar system and entered interstellar space. Voyager has traveled almost 12 billion miles since its launch and is now zooming away from us at 38,610 miles per hour. But even at that blistering speed it would take at least 70,000 years to reach any of the nearby stars that might harbor habitable planets. Researchers need to make some serious breakthroughs in spacecraft propulsion to get there faster.

Although White and a few other scientists are tantalized by the possibility of warp drive, most of the interstellar enthusiasts have focused their attention on technologies that are less hypothetical. Icarus Interstellar, for example, is coordinating a study of a proposed mission that would use fusion power—the energy produced by slamming atomic nuclei together—to propel the spacecraft. Nuclear fusion is what gives the hydrogen bomb its bang, and if the energy is properly controlled and harnessed it could accelerate a probe to phenomenal speeds, thousands of times faster than Voyager 1. But researchers have been trying to build a fusion power plant for the past fifty years without much success. The technology hasn’t proved itself on Earth yet, and it’s certainly not ready to be installed in a spacecraft.

Another big problem is interstellar dust. Although the dust grains in deep space are microscopic, they’ll cause plenty of damage to a probe that’s barreling into them at millions of miles per hour. The spacecraft would have to be equipped with heavy shielding, which would increase the amount of fuel needed to accelerate the craft. And then there’s the need to decelerate the probe before it reaches its destination. There’s no point in sending a spacecraft on a hundred-year journey to a nearby star if it’s going to whiz right past the star’s habitable planets. During the later stages of its voyage the probe would have to turn its engines around and fire them in the opposite direction to slow itself down. But then the spacecraft would need to carry an even heavier load of fuel.

The complications seem as endless as space itself. The tremendous difficulty of interstellar flight may help explain the famous paradox first noted by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950: if intelligent life is common in the universe, where are all the aliens? Perhaps extraterrestrials have never visited Earth because it’s just too hard to get here.

Nevertheless, the dream of interstellar travel remains stubbornly alive. Last September the 100 Year Starship project held a symposium on the topic just a month after Icarus Interstellar hosted its own conference. At a time when NASA is struggling to fund all its priorities —building a new launch system for its astronauts, sending new probes to Mars—planning for an interstellar mission may seem absurdly premature. But advocates such as Jill Tarter, who pioneered the effort to hunt for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, argue that exploring other star systems is essential to humanity’s long-term survival. As long as the human race is confined to Earth we’re at high risk of extinction from a planetary catastrophe—a nuclear war, a pandemic, an asteroid impact and so on. The only other world in our solar system that comes even close to being habitable is Mars, and it would take hundreds of years of climate engineering to make the Red Planet livable for humans.

So the ultimate fate of our species may lie among the stars. Perhaps in a thousand years or so our civilization will look something like Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets. To reach that point, though, we need to adopt the motto of the starship Enterprise. We have “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

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Comment and Physics

How star trek’s warp drives touch on one of physics' biggest mysteries.

Field notes from space-time | Star Trek’s light speed engines may not be possible in our universe, but we are learning more about the particles that fuel them

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

12 June 2019

Paramount Pictures/RGA

EVERY year, I attend the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, and every year, I get asked whether warp speed will ever be possible. In the Star Trek universe, humanoid species zoom around the galaxy at speeds faster than light, using warp engines fuelled by antimatter. Travelling faster than the speed of light is unlikely, but antimatter is real. Every particle has an antimatter partner that we call an antiparticle.

So, as a particle physicist, what I really want to be asked about isn’t the likelihood of travelling long distances quickly, but instead about the particle type that underlies this fictional technology. Star Trek ‘s futuristic antimatter engine touches on one of the great unsolved mysteries in particle physics: where is all of the antimatter anyway?

The best known type of antimatter is the positron, which is the antielectron. The positron has the same mass as an electron, but the opposite electrical charge. When matter collides with its antimatter partner, they annihilate each other . This isn’t simply a matter of theory: we have seen antimatter in the lab, and not just with the electron and its partner.

Positrons can be made through radioactive decay. They are also created in a pair with electrons when extremely energetic photons, better known as gamma rays, interact with atomic nuclei. Antiprotons have also been produced, and, in 1995, scientists were finally able to directly combine positrons and antiprotons to create antihydrogen.

Although antimatter is real, it is rather difficult to make in the lab. Since matter and antimatter annihilate one another on contact, one has to wonder why we are here at all. If they are each other’s complete opposites, one might expect the same amount of matter and antimatter to have been produced in the big bang, quickly leading to annihilation and an empty universe. Instead, we live in a highly asymmetric version of the universe, where the negatively charged electron is a fundamental particle that forms a core part of all atoms, hovering in their orbitals. Why did nature use only half of the building blocks available to it?

“ Star Trek ‘s futuristic antimatter engine touches on one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of particle physics”

Efforts to make sense of this asymmetry are under way in both theoretical and experimental physics. Many theorists believe that the lopsided bias towards matter is connected to violations of something called charge-parity symmetry, more commonly known among physicists as CP symmetry. This is a property that demands that all particles are interchangeable with their antiparticle when their spatial coordinates are flipped, a kind of mirror symmetry. Most observed particles obey CP symmetry, but it can be violated.

Though most famous for being the facility where the Higgs boson was first detected, the Large Hadron Collider is also home to experiments that are seeking to learn more about CP symmetry breaking.

The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment, for example, specifically focuses on b-physics. B-physics refers not to low-budget physics, something that our governments surely dream of, but instead to the physics of beauty quarks (sometimes referred to as bottom quarks).

Beauty quarks are just one of six flavours of subatomic quarks, which are the constituents of neutrons and protons. The other five varieties have equally delightful names: top, up, down, strange and charm. The fundamental “weak” nuclear force can cause quarks to change flavours, and it also causes the quarks to break CP symmetry. This gives us an important hint that CP symmetry violations are possible, leading theorists to consider matter-antimatter models that rely on it.

In addition to beauty quarks, LHCb can also study the properties of charm quarks. Excitingly, the experiment recently found the first evidence of CP violation among them. In order to achieve this result, LHCb looked at decays of D° mesons – short-lived particles made of a charm quark and an up antiquark.

This result is an exciting affirmation of a phenomenon that scientists had expected to find for decades, but had yet to produce in the lab. The discovery doesn’t radically change our perspective on physics yet because it matches theoretical predictions – and it certainly isn’t a warp engine. But it suggests that, under the right conditions, CP violation can occur. Perhaps those conditions existed during the big bang, producing the nearly antimatterless universe we see today.

• This column will appear monthly. Up next week: Graham Lawton
• particle physics

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Is Star Trek’s Warp Drive Possible?

The concept of the warp drive is currently at odds with everything we know to be true about physics.

Central to science fiction, and Star Trek in particular, is the ability to travel the galaxy at speeds far faster than light via a fictional technology called a “ warp drive .” What is that, and will we ever have one ?

No Warp Drive for You

A provisional answer is “no.” According to the accepted laws of science, nothing can travel faster than light . Even though light is fast enough to circle the Earth over seven times in a single second, space is very large. It takes eight minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth, and it would take four years for light from our Sun to reach the nearest star ( Proxima Centauri ). Most stars—and hence, most planets—are much more distant, so travel time would be correspondingly longer. The distances are so vast that interstellar travel would take lifetimes.

That makes for a boring sci-fi plot, so the creators of Star Trek invented a convenient, but imaginary, technology. According to Star Trek canon, the warp drive works by creating a “warp bubble” around the spaceship, inside of which space is literally warped. In front of the spaceship, space is compressed, while behind the vessel, it is expanded. In this way, a spaceship never travels faster than light; it merely passes through a shorter distance. For example, if a warp drive could shrink the distance to Proxima Centauri by 1/1,461 times the normal length, it could travel there in a single day.

A Massive Problem

Is this realistic? Maybe. To begin with, our best modern understanding of space comes from Einstein’s theory of general relativity . In this theory, gravity is understood not as a force as we typically imagine it, but rather as a bending of space. So, if space can be bent or distorted in some way, then a warp drive could be within the realm of accepted science.

However, this is where things get tricky. Within the theory of relativity, the quantity that bends space is mass (or, equivalently, energy). In familiar and simple terms, the enormous mass of the Earth bends space in its vicinity. This distortion results in the phenomenon we know of as gravity.

While the bending of space by matter is a fact, it doesn’t help our warp drive very much. The bending of space near the surface of the Earth is relatively modest. After all, the distortion doesn’t appreciably shorten the distance between the Earth and the Sun, let alone the nearest star. Thus, for a warp drive to be a useful propulsion technology, a spaceship might have to carry with it a mass much larger than a planet — or even larger than a star. This extra mass would make the craft too difficult to move, meaning that the idea just isn’t tenable.

Negativity about Negative Energy

Does this completely invalidate the idea of a warp drive? Not quite. The equations governing special relativity are rich and complex and there are many solutions. In 1994, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre found a solution that distorted space in a way very similar to that originally envisioned by the creators of Star Trek . Under exactly the right conditions, it is possible to expand space behind an object and compress it in front.

There is a problem, though. To accomplish this distortion, researchers would have to use negative energy—that is, reduce the energy of empty space to below zero. According to Einstein, a warp drive requires an impossible premise. As an analogy, it’s possible that some mathematical calculation involving a person’s height might have a solution that is negative. But what would it mean for a person to have a negative height? It doesn’t make physical sense.

Therefore, while scientists try to find loopholes in the conditions required for Alcubierre’s solution, most think that a warp drive will not be created this way; negative energy is a mathematical artifact and not a physical phenomenon.

Is a Warp Drive Possible or Not?

Altogether, our current understanding of the laws of nature neither allows for faster-than-light travel nor an Alcubierre-like solution to warping space. However, those who dream of traveling the stars should not give up. Scientists do not have a full understanding of the laws of nature. Indeed, my colleagues and I spend our days looking for new phenomena—things that have never been seen before.

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In speculative science, it is always foolhardy to say that something is impossible. In 1850, if you asked the best scientists of the day if it would be possible to speak in Europe and have someone in America hear you, or if it would be possible to look inside a person’s body, they would have told you “no.” Yet a scant half century later, the invention of radio and discovery of X-rays would have proved them wrong.

That is what it will take for a warp drive to be a reality. Some bright soul is going to have a new idea, something quite different from our current understanding of physics. Then, maybe—just maybe—we will be able to boldly go where no one has gone before.

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Star Trek: What is Transwarp?

W riting for a science fiction show in the 70s and 80s must have been endlessly entertaining. Nothing would rouse excitement more than finding or developing a new term. When a Star Trek writer grabbed a word like "phaser" or "warp," they knew they could apply it to a million ideas. These vague names serve as shorthand labels to zhuzh up their plot devices. Transwarp is a go-to term for traveling beyond the usual light-speed methods.

Traveling faster than light is central to any space-faring universe. In Dune , the Spice Mélange that controls the universe is primarily used to guide navigators. Star Wars invented a more fantastical solution in Hyperdrive technology. Star Trek rightfully venerates Zephram Cochrane, the inventor of its warp drive, as a scientific hero. Transwarp doesn't invalidate his success but improves it in some ways.

Star Trek: What Happened to B-4?

What does transwarp mean in star trek .

Transwarp is a broad term referring to any technology that travels beyond the limits of a standard warp drive. It's been attached to transporters , communicators, probes, tunnels, and more. In some cases, it's added to existing devices to improve their performance. The Borg created a conduit through "transwarp space," a realm of subspace that allows transwarp travel to communicate without delay across tens of thousands of light years. These transwarp conduits enable vessels to skip 15 years of travel time in moments. Borg and Voth ships regularly carry transwarp coils, which allow them to open portals and travel through the transwarp space. The Borg eventually devised a transwarp network, granting them fast transport anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy. These examples treat transwarp as a wormhole-based system, but some stories treat it as a new level of velocity, measured above those of warp speed. The film continuity , an alternate timeline in canon, used transwarp beaming to board a moving enemy ship. Their Scotty summed it up like this:

The notion of transwarp beaming is like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse.

Is Transwarp faster than warp speed?

Transwarp technology allows near-instantaneous transmission across distances. Using Cochrane's warp drive, starships can break the speed of light. Warp factor denotes the speed of light, but increasing attached numbers demonstrate faster travel. Warp factor 2 is eight times the speed of light or 2,398,339,664 m/s. Warp factor 3 is 27 times the speed of light, and the numbers increase from there. After years of research and experimentation, Starfleet determined warp factor 10 to represent a theoretically infinite speed. Warp factor 10 became known as the transwarp barrier, the border between warp speeds and transwarp speeds. Though inarguably the most concise and understandable, this definition has not always been canon. Transwarp corridors are said to be 50 times faster than the highest available warp factor. Star Trek Voyager offered the transwarp barrier explanation in the 1996 episode "Threshold." Exceeding warp factor 10 would theoretically require a vessel to occupy every point in space simultaneously, placing the transwarp barrier beyond the bounds of possibility. Voyager 's Flight Control Officer, Tom Paris, was the first human to use the technology, at least in the mainline continuity.

The episode in which Tom Paris breaks the transwarp barrier is only partially about that momentous accomplishment. He figures out the trick to transwarp speed at the end of the first act. Most of the episode tells the story of the nightmarish side effects he experiences after his achievement. Paris suffers painful symptoms that ruin his body, laying him up in the sick bay for days. The transwarp also alters his perception and personality, causing him to flit incoherently through emotional states. The ship's doctor deduces that Paris is evolving, undergoing mutations that may hit humanity over the next thousands of years in only a few days. Paris's new form kidnaps Captain Janeway , steals the Cochrane , and pilots them through transwarp to an uninhabited jungle planet. They mate and produce offspring. The crew rescues them, treats their evolution, and returns them to their natural states. They leave the kids on their new home planet. Paris's accomplishment places him in rarified air among the most accomplished pilots. The instant transwarp teleportation Paris imagined never came, but his name was forever etched in history.

Transwarp travel provides a narrative escalation from Star Trek 's already faster-than-light travel. If a character wants to exceed speeds humanity will likely never accomplish, they can reach for the transwarp coil. It's not one of Star Trek 's more iconic inventions. There aren't many episodes unpacking the implications of its design or the long effort to perfect it. Transwarp details only pop up when an enemy needs an edge or a Starfleet engineer needs a project. Transwarp technology could theoretically enable instant transmission across the universe, turning a trip to other solar systems into a five-minute ride. As Tom Paris' experience demonstrates, it's got some issues to work out.

Star Trek: What Happened to Thomas Riker?

The U.S.S. Enterprise , depicted here in the 2013 movie Star Trek: Into Darkness , relies on its warp drive to zip across the galaxy.

Inside the Quest for a Real ‘Star Trek’ Warp Drive

It may be a while before starship captains can race across the galaxy, but engineers and physicists have a few ideas for making it so.

Within the Star Trek universe, traveling across the galaxy is a breeze thanks to the famed warp drive . This fictional technology allows humans and other civilizations to zoom between star systems in days rather than centuries.

Such rapid travel times are impossible in the real world, because our best theory for the way the universe works, Einstein’s special relativity , says that nothing moves faster than the speed of light.

While current rocket propulsion systems are bound by this law, plenty of hopeful engineers and physicists are working on concepts that might bring us a step closer to Star Trek ’s vision of racing across the cosmos.

“Currently, even the most advanced ideas behind interstellar travel entail trip times of decades and centuries to even the closest stars, due to the restrictions of special relativity, and our abilities—or lack of—to travel at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light,” says Richard Obousy , director and founder of Icarus Interstellar, a nonprofit dedicated to making progress toward interstellar flight.

“Being able to build starships with the capability to travel faster than the speed of light would open the galaxy for exploration and possible colonization by humans.”

Nuclear Engines

Distances in space are so vast that astronomers usually measure them in light-years, the distance light can travel in a year’s time. A single light-year equals about six trillion miles.

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The closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is 4.23 light-years away, so even traveling at the speed of light, a one-way voyage there would take 4.23 years. That may seem pokey, but it would be a huge improvement over current technology.

Right now, the fastest spacecraft headed away from Earth is Voyager 1, which is puttering along at about 38,600 miles an hour. At that rate, it would take more than 70,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.

Still, various teams have proposed ways to at least reach a fraction of light speed and hasten our exploration of interstellar space.

Back in 1958, researchers at San Diego-based defense contractor General Atomics came up with Project Orion , which involved a spacecraft driven essentially by nuclear bombs. A controlled series of nuclear explosions would propel the ship at high speeds, rapidly carrying a hundred tons of cargo and eight astronauts to places like Mars and even the outer solar system.

Faster propulsion technology would allow us to visit our galactic neighbors, like this satellite of the Milky Way known as the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Blueprints were also created showing how to adapt the technology for interstellar travel. However, all experimentation with this so-called nuclear-pulse propulsion came to a halt with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

Announced earlier this year, the ambitious Breakthrough StarShot initiative represents a less explosive effort to undertake an interstellar mission. Run by a conglomerate of billionaires and big thinkers, including famed physicist Stephen Hawking, the project’s goal is to send a flotilla of postage stamp-size spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, a triple star system that’s 4.3 light-years away. (See “Is the New $100 Million ‘Starshot’ for Real?” )

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The tiny spacecraft would be attached to a thin light sail, a piece of technology that would allow mission managers to propel the probes with lasers shining from Earth’s orbit. The lasers would accelerate the craft to 20 percent the speed of light, and the probes would arrive at their destination in roughly 20 years.

While many of the tiny travelers may never make it to Alpha Centauri, a few of them should survive and may even fly past any planets orbiting the far-off stars , beaming back data about these alien worlds.

“I’m incredibly excited to see private money being used to explore breakthrough ideas that may advance the field of interstellar flight,” Obousy says.

“I hope to see more like this in the future. While there are engineering challenges associated with the Starshot Initiative, none appear insurmountable.”

Warping Reality

Of course, the real breakthrough would be a true warp drive, which requires technology to catch up with our theoretical designs.

In 1994, Trek fans got a glimmer of hope from Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who came up with a radical theory of hyper-fast space propulsion that doesn't break Einstein’s special relativity.

Instead of accelerating the spacecraft itself to light speed, why not bend, or warp, the fabric of space and time around the ship itself? Alcubierre presented calculations that produce a bubble in space-time in which one end is expanding and the other is contracting. A spaceship could, in theory, be carried along with the warp bubble and accelerated to velocities up to 10 times the speed of light.

While that sounds simple on paper, to make it work, we may need to harness exotic forms of matter, like antimatter, that for now are poorly understood. In addition, numerous unsolved issues plague the creation and control of a warp bubble, Obousy says.

“One such problem, for example, is the idea of causal disconnection, which implies that any spacecraft sitting within the bubble would not be able to ‘communicate’ with the exterior of the bubble, suggesting that a ship would not be able to ‘turn off’ the bubble once inside of it,” he notes.

As is often the case in space travel, developing true interstellar travel like what we see in Star Trek will require significant changes in the cost and energy requirements.

“Currently, the amount of energy and money required to entertain the notion of manned interstellar travel is measured in large fractions of global output—specifically, tens of trillions of dollars, and energy measured on the scale of what many large countries use annually,” he says.

Still, he adds, “the finest minds of the 15th century could not have predicted the technological wonders of the 21st century. Similarly, who are we to say what technology the humans of the 27th century will have mastered.”

Andrew Fazekas, the Night Sky Guy, is the author of Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe and host of NG Live! " Mankind to Mars " presentations. Follow him on Twitter , Facebook , and his website .

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Screen Rant

Star trek: how fast warp speed is (& how it compares to hyperspace).

Warp speed is the key to making Star Trek work - but just how does this fictional form of travel work, and how does it compare to Star Wars?

Here's how fast  Star Trek 's warp speed actually is, and how it compares to other forms of travel in science-fiction, such as  Star Wars ' Hyperspace. When Gene Roddenberry began to work on  Star Trek , he was faced with a thorny problem: he wanted the show to have some semblance of scientific accuracy, but at the same time, he also needed the Starship Enterprise to be able to move at incredible speeds.

The solution was the warp drive (or, as it was actually called in  Star Trek 's pilot episode, the hyperdrive). This brings matter and antimatter into collision in order to generate a phenomenal amount of power, and the reaction is regulated by a rare mineral called dilithium . The matter/antimatter reaction allows the starship to travel faster than light - several multiples faster.

Related:  Star Trek: How Stardates Are Calculated (& What They Really Mean)

But just how fast is warp speed? The original  Star Trek series was unclear, but over time the franchise has established clear rules. Let's explore them.

Warp Speed In The Original Series

The original  Star Trek series was wildly inconsistent in its portrayal of warp speed, with the concept basically used as a plot device to get from A to B at whatever speed an episode's writer wanted. Warp speeds of 10 or higher were treated as unsafe, at least until the Enterprise was refitted in  Star Trek: The Motion Picture , when it gained the ability to safely travel up to warp 12. The fastest warp speed shown on-screen was an alien vessel that could actually reach warp 35. All these inconsistencies clearly bugged Gene Roddenberry, and as a result warp speed was recalibrated for  Star Trek: The Next Generation in order to create something a little more well-structured.

Warp Speed In The Next Generation Era

According to the Star Trek Encyclopedia , in simple terms, the new warp speed factor 1 is the exact speed of light, 299,792,458 m/s. Each factor above is a multiple of that warp speed, although what those values are vary depending on the show in question.

• Warp Factor 1 - 1x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 2 - 10x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 3 - 39x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 4 - 102x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 5 - 214x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 6 - 392x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 7 - 656x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 8 - 1,024x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 9 - 1,516x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 9.99 - 7,912x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 10 - Infinity

In theory, a ship traveling at warp 10 is moving so fast that it essentially exists in all places and all times simultaneously. It's only known to have been achieved once in the entire history of  Star Trek , in the  Star Trek: Voyager episode "Threshold". There, Tom Paris successfully traveled at warp 10, but the experience proved to have a transformative, evolutionary effect upon any organic matter. The crew of Voyager wisely ditched the idea, concerned about the consequences. It's worth noting that warp speeds seem to have been re-calibrated again in the future timeline glimpsed in "All Good Things," where two vessels are said to travel at warp 13. Presumably as technology became more efficient, Starfleet saw the value in creating a new scale with a wider range. In a technical note, science adviser Andre Bormanis suggested that in this future timeline, warp 15 would be the Threshold limit.

In truth, warp travel is usually little more than a plot device to help the Federation's starships jump across the galaxy at speed. Almost every sci-fi series has its own equivalent, simply because the alternative is to slow your story down for quite a while as the crew jumps from one star-system to another.

How Warp Speed Compares To Hyperspace

In  Star Wars , for example, ships that break the speed of light are able to access another dimension called hyperspace . This is essentially another plane of reality, one where the laws of physics operate differently. By accessing hyperspace, a spaceship can move at a phenomenal speed; there are different classes of hyperdrive, which allow different speeds.

It's important to note that a journey through hyperspace can be disrupted; if a vessel encounters the gravity shadow of a stellar mass, such as a planet, star, or black hole, they are ripped out of hyperspace. That's why the trip from Tatooine to Alderaan in  Star Wars took 16 hours, which is actually pretty slow for a 10,000 light year journey in a ship with an illegal class 0.5 hyperdrive, and is roughly equivalent to Star Trek 's warp 7. The dream scenario would be to acquire a hyperdrive of class 0.0, which would be analogous to Star Trek 's warp 10.

More:  Picard Isn’t The First Star Trek Captain To Say “Engage”

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Why Warp Drives Are About To Get Better

The mathematics of warp drives is fiendishly difficult. now a specialist software package is set to change the way physicists model star trek-like travel..

“Warp speed, Mr. Sulu!” With these words, Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise prepared his ship for faster-than-light travel while inspiring a generation of aspiring physicists who watched Star Trek from their sofas.

So it’s no surprise that in 1994, the theoretical physicist, Miguel Alcubierre, worked out how a warp drive might work in the real universe. The key feature of a warp drive is that it can propel a spaceship at superluminal speeds without the occupants experiencing huge acceleration.

Alcubierre’s idea was to create a flat region of spacetime inside a highly distorted bubble of spacetime that moves across the universe. The passengers sit in the flat region where the acceleration is zero, while the bubble as a whole, travels at superluminal speed, or at least exceedingly high velocity.

The big question, of course, was whether the Alcubierre drive was physically possible. The answer turned out to be probably not, because it required negative energy, which is not allowed by our current understanding of physics, and unfeasibly large energy densities.

Bubble Physics

Nevertheless, Alcubierre’s work inspired others to look for alternative warp drives that might be physically possible. In 2021, physicists worked out how to make a warp drive using positive energy, although with unfeasibly high energy density. Indeed, there is a whole class of warp drives.

But evaluating these models is hard because of the fiendishly difficult mathematics behind them. The mathematics involves two stages.

Having come up with a structure for spacetime that might allow warp speed, the first is to solve Einstein’s field equations to determine the flux of energy and momentum. This flux is given by mathematical entities called stress-energy tensors.

Once these have been found, the second stage is to work out whether the stress-energy tensors are physically realistic. In other words, whether they violate the laws of physics or require impractical resources, like infinite energy density.

These calculations are so complex that physicists often revert to simple solutions that make the equations involved more manageable, such as assuming spherical symmetry. However, this inevitably ignores potentially interesting spacetimes with more complex geometries.

Now Christopher Helmerich at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and colleagues have developed a software package called Warp Factory, that takes on the mathematical heavy lifting. “Warp Factory is a specialized toolkit designed for analyzing spacetimes related to warp drives,” say Helmerich and co.

They put it through its paces by characterizing the stress-energy tensors of a range of known warp drive geometries, such as Alcubierre’s, and evaluating their physical plausibility.

None of these models are close to being anything other than mathematical curiosities but the Warp Factory provides new ways to understand them and leads to new insights into their nature. In particular, it allows physicists to study subluminal warp drives in more detail, which may turn out to be the ones of most interest.

“This comprehensive toolkit provides insightful visualizations in both 2D and 3D, offering a deeper understanding of metrics and their corresponding stress-energy tensors,” say Helmerich and co.

Factory Download

The team have made the Warp Factory available for download so anybody can study their design for a revolutionary warp drive. That’s no guarantee that physically plausible warp drives will emerge. But it provides a tool that will surely kickstart research in this area. “We aim to further warp drive research and hopefully bring us closer to realizing physically achievable warp drives,” say the researchers.

So don’t be surprised if more plausible warp drives emerge in the coming weeks and months. Indeed, Helmerich and co hint at as much in their paper. “In a separate paper, currently in preparation, a new constant velocity warp drive solution has been found without energy condition violations,” they say. Just how physically plausible this will be, is not yet clear.

Nevertheless, Mr. Sulu would surely be impressed.

Ref: Analyzing Warp Drive Spacetimes with Warp Factory : arxiv.org/abs/2404.03095

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Published Apr 16, 2024

WARP FIVE: Callum Keith Rennie on Discovery's Gruff First Officer

The Star Trek: Discovery actor talks Rayner's second chance, command style, and more!

SPOILER WARNING: This article contains story details and plot points for the fifth season of Star Trek: Discovery.

Getty Images / StarTrek.com

Welcome to Warp Five, StarTrek.com's five question post-mortem with your favorite featured talent from the latest Star Trek episodes.

We're only three episodes into Star Trek: Discovery 's final season, but the stakes could not be higher. Not long after saving the entire galaxy from the Dark Matter Anomaly, Captain Michael Burnham and the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery is handed a Red Directive mission from Dr. Kovich.

An 800-year-old science vessel was found on the edge of the Beta Quadrant. Aboard that ship is "something vital to the security of the Federation." They are to retrieve that artifact; however, they're not the only ones on the hunt for the artifact's ancient power. While chasing two criminals in the fifth season opener, " Red Directive ," Burnham comes across Captain Rayner and the U.S.S. Antares who is also hot on their trail and unwilling to let Moll and L'ak go as easily as the Discovery captain.

StarTrek.com had the opportunity to speak with actor Callum Keith Rennie on making first contact with Star Trek , demotions and second chances, his approach to Discovery 's newest distinguished yet gruff first officer, and more.

Point of First Contact

"Under the Twin Moons"

StarTrek.com

Like many others, Rennie was first introduced to the franchise with The Original Series in his youth.

"My first contact with Star Trek was watching it on TV with the original," remembers Rennie. "That's the one that I always reference. If it comes on, I watch it still. For me, I did see all of those other variations as they came out, but I held onto my Spock and my Jim Kirk."

For the Love of the Federation

"Red Directive"

In "Red Directive," as Burnham and Discovery is in hot pursuit of this season's main antagonists, Moll and L'ak, they soon learn that the Antares captain has been pursuing them for quite some time, and he refuses to let the slippery pair go each time they're within grasp.

When asked how big of a threat Moll and L'ak, as well as the Progenitor tech, pose to the Federation? Rennie teases that more will be revealed in time, "He has a history [with them] that will be explained later."

Speaking on the choices we've seen Rayner make in response to the two criminals, he shares, "That's Rayner's style of command. His is, 'We're to get those people; we're not to make concessions.' There's no other way outside of what he wants to do. His drive is to succeed; 'Pick a thing, I'll go do it.' That's what he knows how to do."

The distinction is clear; Rayner is a gruff, smart Starfleet captain who holds a clear line between commander and crew — he leads, they follow. His approach is, you get the job done and apologize later.

In an earlier discussion with StarTrek.com , executive producer and co-showrunner Michelle Paradise noted, "What's interesting about [Captain Rayner] is that he is going to be a bit of an antagonist, but not in a bad guy way. He's going to push Burnham, and we'll get to see new sides of Burnham and new growth in Burnham because of her interactions with him."

He has a storied track record of wartime success. In " Under the Twin Moons ," Federation president Rillak has to remind him that times have changed and they're no longer at war. However, the Antares captain sees threats everywhere, arguing that the Breens are in-fighting, the Orions are regrouping, and war is always a possibility. Not only that, Moll and L'ak now have a head start at retrieving a piece of technology with unbelievable power. He wants everyone to stop living in a "candy-colored holo fantasy."

The Fallout of Q'Mau

During Burnham and Rayner's first run-in, while Discovery 's captain sabotages the fleeing thieves' ship while on the hull of their ship, she tells the Antares captain to release its tractor beam hold as the enemy vessel's warp bubble is starting to collapse and her ship can't beam her out to safety while she's in the diminishing bubble. Then, while on Q'Mau together, Rayner continues to pursue Moll and L'ak on his own leaving Burnham and Cleveland 'Book' Booker behind; stating he doesn't have time for their "strategic advantages." Rayner plans to thwart their getaway by detonating the explosive charges hidden in a mountain's entrance, risking the potential of harming those living on the settlement of Q'Mau. Burnham reminds him they're on a non-Federation planet undertaking a highly sensitive and classified mission. When the detonation spirals into a fast-moving avalanche that would decimate the local inhabitants, Discovery requests Antares aid them in creating a shield to block the avalanche as there is not enough time to evacuate. However, Rayner holds off on letting Antares leave orbit at the risk of allowing the two thieves to evade them again.

When Rayner is held accountable for his actions as Federation Headquarters holds an inquiry to the events on Q'Mau. Despite his commendable 30 years of service to Starfleet, and his longstanding friendship with Admiral Vance, the Antares captain was forced to take an early retirement.

"Here's a guy who's been in command for 30 years," Rennie distills. "He goes in to help Burnham and her crew, and then the next thing you know, he's dismissed. So, all of that is bad. If he didn't show up to participate in any of that, he would still just be running his own crew and doing his own thing. He'd be happy on the Antares until the end of time. But he went to help, he made a decision that caused a problem, and then he was fired, sent out to pasture, and he has to make a decision to go, 'Am I done or am I not done?'"

Second Chances and Second Contacts

"Jinaal"

Valuing Rayner's aid he provided her crew while she was on Lyrek, Captain Burnham tells Rayner she'd like for him to be part of her crew — her first officer position has opened up — and she knows he's not ready to end his Starfleet career here. After all, no one understands the value of a second chance more than Burnham herself.

Reflecting on the opportunity presented to his character Rayner, Rennie notes, "He wants to try to be a better person. He's looking at his stuff going, acknowledging at times that he's been too impulsive and doing the the thing that he shouldn't have done, and but doing it anyway."

On his second chance, Rennie adds, "Does he want to be retired or does he still want to be part of the Federation and Starfleet? And he makes that choice, believing, 'What's the worst that can happen? They'll fire me again.'"

An important component of modern Star Trek has been to show the many facets of Starfleet and the Federation. It's not a monolithic institution incapable of faults.

"You do the best job you can at the given moment, and sometimes that works out and sometimes that doesn't," reflects Rennie. "You have to be, 'Well, let's take that risk.' From a commander standpoint, nothing's infallible. There's certain missions that only certain people will be assigned to because of their style. He's the man for the job," before teasing, "You'll soon discover why he's a little harsh at times."

In " Jinaal ," while Burnham heads to the surface of Trill to unlock their latest crew, Rayner is tasked with getting to know the senior crew better. While his first impression wasn't great, he now has the opportunity to make a second first impression. Unfortunately for him, his second contact isn't off to a great start when he offers the crew 20 words to provide him insight into them.

It's not going to be an overnight scenario for Rayner to change his ways. "He doesn't want to participate with the Discovery crew the way Burnham wants him to be a team player," he explains. "He's not in that space yet. He's not good at, 'Let's all be friends.' It's not his style."

Joining the Discovery Family

Rennie's experience joining a series in its final season mirrors Rayner's experience joining a tight-knit crew.

"Coming into a show, you're a new kid in school, you don't know who you're going to be friends with," states Rennie. "You don't know if you're going to get along with anybody. Much like Rayner is there to do his work, I'm there to do my work. But, my [personal] experience was fun. Episode to episode, time spent with everyone, you warm up. There's a warmth that just grows as you move along [with Sonequa Martin-Green and this cast], and you've become part of something."

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Christine Dinh (she/her) is the managing editor for StarTrek.com. She’s traded the Multiverse for helming this Federation Starship.

Star Trek: Discovery Seasons 1-4 are streaming exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., the UK, Canada, Switzerland, South Korea, Latin America, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and Austria. Seasons 2 and 3 also are available on the Pluto TV “Star Trek” channel in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. The series streams on Super Drama in Japan, TVNZ in New Zealand, and SkyShowtime in Spain, Portugal, Poland, The Nordics, The Netherlands, and Central and Eastern Europe and also airs on Cosmote TV in Greece. The series is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

Warp 2 barrier

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The NX-Beta on the flight to break the warp 2 barrier

The warp 2 barrier was a warp barrier .

Warp factor 2 , or eight times the speed of light , was the theoretical maximum warp speed in the early stages of Vulcan and Earth warp technologies. After the invention of warp drive by the Vulcans , it took them a hundred years to design an engine capable of breaking the warp 2 barrier. ( ENT : " First Flight ")

In the 22nd century , such Earth ships as the ECS Horizon , an Earth Cargo Authority operated J-class freighter commissioned in 2102 , and Starfleet operated Neptune -class survey ships were among the early ship classes with warp capability limited in technology by this barrier. ( ENT : " Horizon ", " Singularity ")

It was not until the 2140s that the warp five engine conceived at the Warp Five Complex by Henry Archer broke the warp 2 barrier. In 2143 , Commanders A.G. Robinson and Jonathan Archer demonstrated this advanced warp engine in the second NX-class prototype, the NX-Beta , by holding the ship steady at warp 2.5. ( ENT : " First Flight ")

After the warp 2 barrier was broken, it became possible to upgrade older starships, such as the Y-class freighters, with a warp three engine . ( ENT : " Fortunate Son ") Freighters used by the Federation still remained limited to the speed of warp 2, even as late as the 2260s . ( TOS : " Friday's Child ") In the 2360s , subspace resonators used by Starfleet could be modified to function as warp cores, though ships using them were limited to warp 2. ( TNG : " The Next Phase ")

See also [ ]

• Flux paradox
• Time barrier
• Transwarp threshold
• 1 Abdullah bin al-Hussein

Star Trek Just Doubled Down on Its Wildest Body-Switching Concept

Welcome back to Trill.

Body switching is a classic sci-fi trope. From Freaky Friday to Farscape , and of course, most of Quantum Leap, the idea of the consciousness from one person inhabiting the body of a different person will never stop being the fuel for speculative stories that are both hilarious and profound. But, when Star Trek invented the “joined” species of the Trill in 1991, it took the body-switching/body-surfing trope to a new level. While a specific Trill symbiont might live for several hundreds of years, this slug-like creature generally inhabited a humanoid host. This “joining” often created a new hybrid personality each time, sort of like Time Lord regeneration from Doctor Who mashed up with internal alien parasites from Alien; a chest-burster that never burst, but just stayed in you forever.

And if all of that wasn’t wild enough, on June 12, in the episode “Facets,” 1995, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine added a new wrinkle to Trill canon. Not only were the memories of all the previous hosts alive and well in the current symbiont, but, through a process called “zhian’tara,” a specific host’s personality could leave the symbiont and enter into the body of... anyone! Basically, this was Trill joining via spacey magic, and now, 29 years after “Facets,” Star Trek: Discovery is doubling down (tripling down?) on this very specific form of consciousness transfer in the Season 5 episode “Jinaal.” Spoilers ahead.

The Trill host trick

Dax and Odo discuss sharing memories in “Facets.”

Although the Trill were established in The Next Generation episode “The Host,” the vast majority of Trill canon comes from Deep Space Nine , thanks to the presence of Jadzia Dax, who later, in Season 7, switched hosts and became Ezri Dax. But, in the memorable Season 3 episode “Facets,” Jadzia’s previous host, Curzon, left her body through the zhian’tara process and settled in the body of the station’s resident shapeshifter, Odo. From that point, Odo’s entire personality was merged with Curzon’s, which put everyone on the station in a deeply uncomfortable position.

As a stand-alone episode of DS9 , “Facets” remains a fantastic story about memory, regret, and what one generation owes the next. But, the legacy of “Facets” is easily the concept of zhian’tara, which was used to save Gray Tal’s consciousness in Discovery Season 4, and now, in Season 5, is being employed again to unravel an 800-year-old mystery.

Discovery’s return to Trill

Cubler (Wilson Cruz) takes on an ancient Trill tradition in Discovery Season 5.

The planet Trill was first seen in DS9 in the episode “Equilibrium,” but Discovery has actually visited the planet more times, starting in the Season 3 episode “Forget Me Not,” and now again, in “Jinaal.” This time the need to transfer the memories of one previous Trill host into someone else is all connected to the secrets Jinaal Bix has about researcher of the Progenitors in the 24th century.

After transferring Jinaal’s consciousness into Culber, the entire personality of our stalwart Starfleet doctor changes, and, just like “Facets,” he suddenly becomes cockier, and more evasive. If you watch “Facets” right after watching “Jinaal,” the parallels are clear. While Curzon’s secret was connected to something personal, Jinaal’s secret has broader implications. Turns out, Federation scientists were working on cracking the Progenitor tech during the era of the Dominion War, and so they decided to bury any knowledge of the technology to prevent any planet or government from weaponizing their research.

Interestingly, this detail dovetails with Picard Season 3 a bit, in which we learned that Section 31 was pushing different Federation scientists to weaponize the organic nature of Changelings. Basically, the Dominion War created a lot of corrupt scientific research within the Federation, making the top-secret Daystrom labs that Riker, Raffi, and Worf raided perhaps just a small sample of the horrible top-secret weapons the Federation has developed.

What Discovery does is make it clear that Jinaal did the right thing at the time by hiding the research — even if that doesn’t help our heroes at the moment.

A classic Original Series nod

Sargon enters Kirk’s body in “Return to Tomorrow.”

Of course, within the canon of Trek, the Trill weren’t the first time the franchise explored the concept of sharing consciousness. Spock transferred his katra to Bones in The Wrath of Khan , and Kirk switched bodies with Janice Lester in the controversial final TOS episode “Turnabout Intruder.”

But, one wonderful 1968 episode from TOS Season 2 — “Return to Tomorrow” — featured ancient beings borrowing the bodies of Kirk, Spock, and Dr. Ann Mulhall in order to build more permanent, android bodies. When the ancient being of Sargon enters Kirk’s body, one of the first things he says is: “Your captain has an excellent body.”

Now, 56 years later, when Jinaal finds himself in Culber’s body, he says something similar: “Wow, this guy really works out!”

Across decades of internal canon, Star Trek can make the same body-switching joke, and make it work, in any century.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 drops new episodes on Fridays on Paramount+.

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