Extraterrestrial

Could failing warp drives point us in the direction of intelligent aliens ?

By T.K. Randall
June 30, 2024 ·  7 comments

Could aliens have figured out how to build warp drives ? Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Alorin Anyone who has ever watched Star Trek will no doubt be familiar with the concept of warp drive - a futuristic propulsion system that can enable travel through space at faster-than-light speeds.

A mathematical model for an actual real-life warp drive was proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 whose "Alcubierre drive" worked by contracting space in front of a spacecraft and then expanding space behind it - thus propelling it along without relying on conventional propulsion.

Now a new study by an international team of scientists has taken things one step further by suggesting that not only could advanced extraterrestrial civilizations have already mastered this technology, but that it may even be possible for us to detect when they are using it.They propose that if an alien warp drive was to suffer a "containment failure", the resulting collapse might emit gravitational waves that we would be able to pick up with LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory).

Of course, as things stand, there is no known way to actually achieve a working warp drive, but that doesn't mean that a more advanced alien civilization hasn't figured out how to do it.

And if they can do that, then it's also likely that they will have suffered a few containment failures along the way.

"Going beyond standard astrophysics as we did in this study really challenged us to adapt and push the methods to their limits, and this knowledge and experience will certainly help us as we study more challenging regimes in astrophysical applications in the future," said study lead author Katy Clough from Queen Mary University of London.

Source: Gizmodo | Comments (7)

Tags: Warp Drive