By James Donahue

Those die-hard physicists that dreamed of making the Star Trek concept of zipping among the stars in giant ships become reality, with the help of warp (faster than light) speed, have hit a serious snag.

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek television, films and books, may have invented the phrase “warp drive” to explain how space ships managed to zip at faster-than-light speed from solar system to solar system and from galaxy to galaxy within limits of half-hour and one-hour shows. We are sure other science fiction writers have used similar ideas, since light speed puts an obvious prohibition on space travel.

It wasn’t until 1994 that Mexican physicist Michael Alcubierre began looking at Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and his concept of a fabric of space time and envisioning the feasibility of faster-than-light travel. He thought that relativity prohibited faster-than-light speed under normal circumstances, but he wondered if a ship might possibly enter a “bubble” of spacetime that would shrink in the direction of travel, acting like the proverbial “wormhole” that moves objects at lightning speed to other places in the universe.

Alcubierre’s ideas were interesting, but Italian physicist Stefano Finazzi and a team of scientists working with him at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, added the mathematics of quantum mechanics to the formula. What they found seems to have put an end to thoughts of space ships ever traveling at warp speeds in space.

“Warp drives would become rapidly unstable once superluminal speeds are reached,” Finazzi reports.

The team also used quantum mechanics to study a stress-energy tensor within an alleged spacetime bubble and found that the front wall of such a bubble, traveling at superluminal speed, would be subjected to extreme stress. This implies that even the bubble would be unstable if forced to travel at faster-than-light speeds.

Thus the Italian team concludes that Alcubierre’s warp drive is impossible.

And that is all the more reason for we humans to get busy now and take steps to not only stop ravaging and polluting our planet, but find ways to rebuild the garden. We cannot afford to listen to the critics spurred on by big business interests and people who prefer to bury their heads in the sand instead of facing reality.