Star Trek Travel May be Possible

It may turn out to be possible to actually build a warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel (the way people traveled in TV’s Star Trek).

A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind. With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.

Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn’t being warped at all. In Space.com, Clara Moskowitz quotes Icarus Interstellar CEO Richard Obousy as saying, "Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light, but the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light."

Is somebody else doing this already? People from across the UK have reported seeing bright objects in the night sky that could be meteors, "space junk" (or UFOs?)

In BBC News, Jonathan Amos quotes Brian Guthrie, who watched the mysterious objects pass through the sky, as saying it appeared to be something "pretty large breaking up in the atmosphere. I’ve seen shooting stars and meteor showers before, but this was much larger and much more colorful."

Amos quotes witness Diane Martin from as saying that she saw "a bright yellow and orange ball" and considered calling the police before her husband checked the internet and found other people had seen it. "We only saw the one. It was quite low as well. It wasn’t that far away to be honest. We thought something was actually going to come down in the actual village."

Or as Obousy says, "If we’re ever going to become a true spacefaring civilization, we’re going to have to think outside the box a little bit, we’re going to have to be a little bit audacious."