Dr. Eric W. Davis on New Light-Speed Breaking Science (2013 Interview)

Transcript

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so before the break we're trying to figure out how humans might be able to travel at the speed of star trek within our lifetimes didn't go too great so now we're going to go a little too a little bit deeper joining me now co-editor and co-author of frontiers of propulsion science and senior research physicist at the institute for advanced studies in austin dr eric w davis dr davis how are you doing how you doing doing great good good glad to have you i took one look at you and i said this is a gentleman who can explain warp drive to me like you just you've got that look about you oh it's it's it's easy think of space as the ocean think think of space as the ocean and michael phelps is a starship right he's propelled by fission or fusion rocket any kind of rocket but he's swimming vigorously leaving the planet earth and he's going to swim all the way to alpha centauri 4.3 light years away all right he's flying his arms kicking his feet spending a great deal of energy and he can't go very fast as a matter of fact the resistance of the ocean water is going to keep him limited to below the speed of light einstein's special theory says you can't go faster than light you can't even reach it but you can always stay less than warp drive is a whole different matter what you do is you use exotic energy and exotic energy is just basically a fancy word for vacuum energy you're going to use some quantum energy from the vacuum and you're going to surround your warp drive ship your starship with a bubble of this energy and it bends space it creates like a surf effect like a like michael phelps is now standing on a surfboard and instead of swimming through space at less the speed of light he's surfing on space the space is like the wave of the ocean water that surfs him to the beach faster than light he can move faster than light rather than the speed he would have had gone through if he was swimming the old way okay the old-fashioned way through rockets okay i'm closer to understanding but that doesn't mean i'm close to understanding uh so so what is holding us back from creating a warp drive uh first of all it's a technology development program uh the theory requires stupendous amounts of vacuum energy which we make in really tiny amounts in laboratory experiments on the earth uh we just don't know how to make humongous amounts of vacuum energy however my colleague and personal friend sonny white at the nasa johnson space center has uh done a modified theory of warp drive where he has brought the energy requirement down to something possibly that that can be done engineering in his lab it could be engineered possibly down to about the mass equivalent of the voyager 1 space probe uh and then the next question is to produce this negative energy this exotic energy uh in the laboratory using a technique that can be scaled up to make the magnitude of energy that's needed so it's just a technology development program right now the theory exists the proof principle exists uh this is valid and proven in einstein's general theory of relativity it's just that we just don't have a technology to make it right now and it could take us 100 years it could take us 200 years to build this technology but disruptive innovations are not predictable they can pop up anytime between now and 200 years from now they could pop up next year 10 years from now 50 years from now and we could have warped drive within our lifetime we just can't predict when some genus is sitting somewhere and a light bulb goes off over his head and he figures out a innovation which can overcome this problem of producing negative energy in large enough quantities now how if it happens how fast are we talking travel wise how fast would potentially travel well let me tell you einstein's general theory doesn't have a speed limit at work for warp theory right uh you can go infinite speed however richard abuzi another colleague of mine who's the president and chief executive officer of icarus interstellar uh he does he has done warp drive studies using quantum string theories uh for his phd thesis at baylor university uh he found that the ultimate speed limit is 10 to the 32 times the speed of light that's 32 factors of 10 times the speed of light that's what he believes the quantum theory limits the speed of light at right or i'm sorry what he what the quantum theory says the maximum faster than light speed is i'm sorry right so here's my question uh how do you steer like on if you're going that quickly how would you steer at that speed how how what's wouldn't you wouldn't you just necessarily run into something going that quickly right i mean wouldn't you uh that's a pos that's a possibility there's been the question of when you're modifying space in front of your direction of motion to bring your target closer to you right that means all the asteroids meteorites and radiation is going to pile up and cl you know just slam into you uh full head on that's a problem that's going to have to be solved yet it might be a matter of a shield system of an array of high-powered laser beams that'll just vaporize everything in your path of travel uh what you feel sitting inside the starship is basically nothing you're you're sitting at rest you're inside the ward bubble you're not moving this the bubble is moving you yeah so you don't feel anything right okay so we we but still at in 2012 we still have not put a man on mars uh what do you think is the importance of interstellar travel do you think that's still something very important yeah well interstellar travel is very important because it expands the parameter space for exploration by a million times over the solar system the solar system doesn't have any human friendly planets other than the earth so we really are limited in what we could do as far as colonizing the other planets uh open up some commercial mining and colonization programs that can expand our economy add new jobs uh increase our physics and astrophysics knowledge increase our technology and things like that if you go into interstellar space the parameter space for all those things now becomes nearly unlimited don't forget that there are hundreds and hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered including dozens of super earth and a handful of earth's sized exoplanets that are still being investigated at this time right this gives us a bigger parameter space for being able to send man out to colonize new worlds uh possibly even meet extraterrestrial intelligences mm-hmm and and what would the effect be on a human being how could a human being travel like that what do you think it would obviously wouldn't look like star trek but can i understand that that's right well as i said when you're in the warp bubble you're sitting inside it you're just at rest right the warp bubble modifies space to carry you there like a surfer on a wave it's the wave of space that moves you to your destination the ship is not moving the space is moving the ship so you feel nothing but when you're looking out uh through your view your uh your monitor like on the starship enterprise bridge you have the big view screen uh or your windows or whatnot you don't see the stars rushing by like on star trek the next generation uh what you see is all the stars in your field clump down and they form a little ball of a fuzzy hazy light that's blue shifted all the stars that move behind you all get collapsed down in view to a ball of fuzzy hazy red red-shifted light so you don't see any star bulls going by you so uh it's a very bizarre view yeah you uh dr davis you just bent my brain in half you should see it thank you very much for being with us you're welcome [Applause] attack of the show weeknights at 7 only on g4