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Sonny White of NASA's Johnson Space Center presented his calculations on the energies required to travel faster than Einstein's famous speed limit: the speed of light. By White's reckoning, his design of starship -- that is "adjusted into more of a rounded doughnut, as opposed to a flat ring" and oscillates the warp intensity -- could be powered by the approximate mass-energy of the Voyager 1 space probe.

Although "the mass-energy of the Voyager 1 space probe" may not sound like much, if you convert the 722 kilogram Voyager mass into raw energy (using Einstein's famous mass-energy equivalence equation: E=mc²), White's warp drive would require 6.5x10¹⁹ Joules (65 exajoules) to create a warp bubble. That's nearly the entire annual energy consumption of the United States.

Clearly, this monstrous energy requirement isn't practical, but it's one heck of an improvement over previous estimates.

As described by Eric W. Davis, senior research physicist at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, and co-author of Frontiers of Propulsion Science, the warp drive can be envisaged as a means of "surfing" through spacetime:


Fill 'er Up with One Jupiter
Although Alcubierre's calculations showed that unimaginably huge amounts of energy would be needed to create this warp bubble, recently, Richard Obousy, co-founder and president of Icarus Interstellar (a key partner of the 100YSS), used our new understandings of quantum mechanics and applied them to the warp drive.

Obousy's approach is to manipulate dark energy -- the mysterious force that appears to permeate the entire Universe, causing it to expand -- in such a way that extra dimensions (as predicted by string theory) can facilitate the creation of a bubble of spacetime.

"Given that extra dimensions have not yet experimentally been shown to exist, and the idea that dark energy is an artifact of these extra dimensions is somehow related to these dimensions is clearly highly theoretical," Obousy told Discovery News, "however it provides us with an interesting perspective from which to examine the problem."

Although this method would theoretically allow a Alcubierre-like solution to traveling faster than the speed of light, vast amounts of energy would still be needed -- the approximate mass-energy of Jupiter no less -- but at least it's an improvement from the "all the energy in the Universe" solution.
Referring to White's work, Obousy continued: "The Jupiter calculation was purposefully created as an 'upper bound' to the problem, and I'm glad that the work performed by my colleagues has demonstrated ways to reduce the energy requirements down further."