What is the Alcubierre warp drive and how does it work?

Answer 1

It is a mathematical metric showing how a ship could theoretically travel faster than light in a global sense while not violating any physics laws. It works by not propelling the ship conventionally such as with rockets, but actually "warping" spacetime around the ship itself. The ship is actually sitting still inside of the spacetime warp bubble but on the outside you are going faster than light. From what we know so far, the only way we think we can artifically warp spacetime is by somehow manipulating exotic matter, such as dark matter perhaps, which as of now we have no idea how to do. In Star Trek they generate a certain form of matter called "warp plasma" from an antimatter reactor. They then shoot the plasma, which I thorize to be some form of exotic matter, onto a warp coil which creates the bubble outside of the ship. They shoot the plasma onto the warp coil in a pattern, which creates propultion.

As of now, we will need some large physics breakthroughs to make this work, and we don't even know if it's possible right now. If we were to fund things like NASA more instead of wars and unneeded welfare, we could have something like this and be exploring the stars in 100 years instead of 400.