I keep telling people, we're gonna get FTL travel by accident. Some researcher is going to be looking at a bunch of data, see something weird, and say "Hey, anyone notice this before?"
No way would understand anything in the paper. Does it have anything about the possibly of scaling it up?
A whole lotta scientific discoveries have happened that way. Alexander Fleming didn't think much about some of the stuff he found, and it was his students who realized that something important was going on and that's how penicillin became a thing.
Clamp down on your excitement, folks. It ain’t real. https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/no-warp-bubble/
While I'm hopeful something like warp drive will eventually exist, I'm not optimistic about it. Space is not easy to warp; Einstein tells us it takes a very large amount of matter or energy to do it on any appreciable scale. It takes the entire Earth to curve space sufficiently to keep you planted on the ground; if you hold onto a piece of iron, you can easily be lifted off the ground with a very small electromagnet. The exceedingly miniscule effect reported in this thread isn't really warping space, it's just creating a very small region of space that's got slightly less energy than surrounding space. Considering this is only accomplished by moving two conducting plates VERY close to one another, it's not clear how this could be used for anything practical, let alone interstellar travel. Want to convince me this is warping space? Shine a laser through the region and show that it curves or changes frequency. I think Dr. White's tendency to make audacious claims has undermined his credibility very severely.
Proof of concept. Once it's shown to be possible on a small scale, doing it on a large (practical) scale becomes an engineering problem.
I think that our best chance at creating something like warp drive is discovering that dark matter (and dark energy) are actually real and that we're able to use them to make a warp drive. I know folks like to complain about how slow we're progressing in space flight, pointing out that in less than fifty years we went from the Wright Brothers' first hops to jet planes, while we've yet to make similar progress in space flight, despite the fact that it's now been fifty years since Neil first got his footie prints on the Moon, but they're not looking at the long view of history. Humanity is ~250K years old, for large swaths of that time we walked. Nobody knows who made the first boat and the oldest one we've found dates from 7,400 BCE, round that up to 10,000 BCE, and that still means we spent ~200K+ years just walking and maybe swimming. Even if you say that humans figured out how to make rafts or boats 100K years ago, that still means we spent ~100K years just walking. Horses were likely domesticated ~3,500 BCE. We're looking at around 2,500 BCE for the first boat with a sail. There's fudge room with the dates, but you're starting to get the idea. Even with all the improvements to the design of sails and ships, it wasn't until ~1492 (because the designs of the ships Columbus used weren't exactly new when he set sail) that they'd advanced to the point where one could routinely sail from Europe to the Americas easily. If we put the first sailboat in 3,000 BCE and say that the first truly trans-Atlantic capable designs didn't show up until 1400 CE, we're looking at over 4,000 years. The first steamboat was built in the late 1700s, that's 300 years. The late 1700s was also when the first hot air balloon flight took place. For the early years of steamships, they all continued to have sails, using the steam engines only when the winds were unfavorable, it wasn't until the mid-1800s that we'd figured out the kinks in steam engines where steamships could dispense with sails. We'd also figured out how to make hydrogen balloons at about this same time. It was only in the early 20th Century that we figured out how to build ships using internal combustion engines that were capable of long ocean voyages. So, it took us, approximately 10K years from figuring out how to build a fucking boat to being able to make one that ran off of internal combustion engines. We figured out how to make airplanes less than 300 years after the first hot air balloon went up. And we went from having ships powered by steam in the mid-1800s (when you're talking long trips) to nuclear-powered ships about 100 years later. The first locomotive was built in the early 1800s, by the mid-1800s we figured out how to build motorcycles (and at ~the same time, the automobile, one day I'll get into how, even if you're limiting cars to being internal combustion-powered, Daimler-Benz weren't the first), and now there's trains that go 250+ MPH. So, basically, you can say that humanity spent ~230K years on foot, and then in the last ~20K years we went from sail and horses to landing on the fucking Moon (not to mention sending probes into interstellar space). That's quite the fucking leap. Some estimates put the average existence for a particular species at ~2 million years (before they either go extinct or evolve into something else). IOW, in less than an eye blink, we went from foot power to routine SpaceX rocket launches. Good christ, if that rate holds, in another eye blink we'll be out-doing every SF story ever told.
And in the last twenty years porn had been widely available, and even more recently on a small hand held device. The earliest cave paintings were made about 30k years ago. 100 years ago, porn was barely available on small grainy black and white images. We've come a long way.
Except it really isn't. Proof of concept would be using the effect to make something move...at any speed! And it would be from a demonstrable warping of spacetime. The physics are understood, but engineering may not be possible because the physics are predicated on conditions that may not be physically real. And this recent finding does nothing to change that. If you want to convince me a warp bubble is real, show me that it distorts spacetime in some measurable way. By all means, research should continue because you never know. Einstein once predicted that nuclear energy would never be feasible because achieving it would require splitting the atom "at will." He had no idea the neutron would be discovered soon thereafter, and make splitting the atom at will a fairly simple matter.
