I thought you guys might like this one.
http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive

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...wow is this for real?

I wonder if this one suffers from the problem I read about on Slashdot, where in order to reach warp speed, you must destroy the solar system? Or maybe I was thinking of that Star Wars novel.

I think it was that you destroyed the destination.

Regardless of clever general relativity wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, I still don't see how this would not violate causality.

1600 pounds of mass energy is a ****load. We can do it, but it's still a ****load.

About half of the United States energy consumption in a year.

The vehicle in question wouldn't be moving, space around it would be. Super simple stuff.

This is going to sound stupid, but is it possible to damage 'space'?

Also, anyone know exactly how they accomplish this warp field? I haven't stayed relevant in advances in Physics, but the only thing I've ever heard of distorting space was gravity and I havent heard any breakthroughs that indicate we are closer to creating or nullifying gravitational force.

Regardless, when all the stressfulness goes away the end result is information in one place that is a lot farther away from it's starting point that it could have gotten if it had been traveling at c. Now, I don't have a very good understanding of general relativity causality stuff, but wouldn't that still result in frames of reference where the ship left after it arrived?

The natural expansion of the universe is already doing that. There are already distant galaxies moving away from each other "faster" than c because of the expansion of space

Lets just build the damn thing then find out what happens.

Nobody knows. We don't even know what space is, so we can't even guess what it would mean for space to be damaged.

Energy distorts space. The original theoretical model requires negative energy, which probably doesn't exist, and it requires an astronomical amount of it. Transporting a few atoms to the nearest star would have required the mass of Jupiter.

This model reduces the energy requirements down to something that's challenging but not impossible. It's cool, but it's not what they want to test now. What they're trying to figure out is if they can use the Casimir effect to generate a region of spacetime with lower than vacuum energy - locally negative, in a sense - to see if they can actually distort spacetime in the way they want. If they can do it, at least we'll know that faster-than-light travel is possible.

In a thousand years. When we can actually build one of these at a macroscopic scale.

Nobody knows what to build yet. If they did, they certainly would. Practical, efficient faster-than-light travel has unlimited economic potential.

You know what's funny? I went to see this scene from Contact on youtube after you posted it, and I clicked on the opening sequence as well, where the camera leaves the solar system while playing old radio broadcasts.

The relevance to this thread is that they totally slowed down the speed of light to make the montage more scenic in the beginning, playing broadcasts about Robert Kennedy at Jupiter!

Darn, I was expecting when faster than light travel happened it would be through space-bending, Wrinkle In Time style. That or wormholes, if an object that could create and sustain one was ever devised.

-Well, until a warp drive is actually constructed and shown to work, I can still hold out hope for all that stock in Tesseract Propulsion Systems Inc.

Wait a second, I'm one hell of a physics layman but can't that cause.. the destruction of the universe?