Warp Drive Is Actually A Weapon Of Mass Destruction
The trouble with traveling to other planets has always been the vast distances involved and the limitations of lightspeed travel. As far as we know, nothing in the universe can move faster than the speed of light. That means that even if you go as fast as the laws of physics will allow, it would still take decades to reach the nearest inhabited planet. Science Fiction has long theorized that the solution to this problem might be warp drive.
As seen on shows like Star Trek warp drive would allow a spacecraft to move faster than the speed of light by pushing the ship outside our universe to a place where those lightspeed limitations no longer apply. Physicists have done real work to make this a possibility but recent research from the University of Sydney suggests one, huge, obstacle: Space isn’t empty.
That big, black void between planets actually is full of radiation and tiny particles which their research suggests would be “swept up” in the warp bubble and then focused into areas in front of and behind the ship. This wouldn’t actually be a danger for anyone inside the warp bubble but for anyone hanging out at the ship’s destination it would spell certain doom. They explain, “Any people at the destination would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for [forward] region particles.”
This problem might be solved by aiming your craft just a little off to the side of your destination, allowing the release of all that energy into some unpopulated part of space, but even that may not do it. It could be that the particles will blast away from the craft in all directions.
