Potential Detection of Alien Warp Drives Through Gravitational Waves from Collapsing Warp Bubbles

Could Gravitational Waves Reveal Faster-Than-Light Travel? New Theory Suggests It’s Possible

In the nineties, a physicist known as Miguel Alcubierre proposed the possibility of a warp drive which might make faster than light travel possible. At the present, many scientists suggest that searching for ‘post technological’ civilizations is possible through the identification of some other kind of phenomenon, specifically gravitational waves releasing from collapsing warp bubbles, however this event is entirely different from any we experience. As this idea is still theoretical, it gives us a lot to think about in the existing theoretical frameworks of physics and might help advance the search for alien life. For that reason, certain major issues like stability and the means to cease such a drive remain unnoticed.

This article will amaze you with the possibility of identifying extraterrestrial civilizations with the help of the theoretically-possessed warp drives.

In the 1990, a Mexican theoretical physicist named Miguel Alcubierre had espoused an original warp drive that could move a space vessel at a speed faster than the speed of light.

To perform such a task in this hypothetical drive, then the wave spread out within front of it must be able to expand the curvature of space while on the other end it has to be compressing it. This may result to the formation of a warp bubble to cover the required distance in space travel, whether interplanetary, or intergalactic in a much shorter time span.

Though the name may sound like a concept from the Star Trek show, some scientists consider it to be full of potential and are currently trying to determine if this technology could present new ways of searching for post technological civilizations using apparatus such as LIGO.

This idea is as yet untested but in a paper that has not been peer reviewed, researchers from Oxford and the Max Planck Institute propose that the collapse of the Alcubierre warp bubble might be creating detectable gravitational waves—a thinking experiment that might help in the search for intelligent alien life even if it is only speculative.

Pull Over

Of course, the possibility of an interstellar spacecraft that can travel at faster than the speed of light means a radical overhaul of the physics of the universe.

At the same time, there are a lot of questions left unsolved. One considerable difficulty is to explain how such a spacecraft could be stopped: passengers inside the warp bubble cannot exert any influence on the matter of the universe lying outside the bubble , the authors pointed out.

The other important challenge is stability. As stated in the study, “there is no known equation of state to maintain the warp drive metric stable over time” The warp bubble may have initially settled but it will switch from this state rapidly and give scenarios where the warp fluid, and the spacetime distortions either dissipate or converge at a single point.

Surprisingly enough the same instability could potentially make the warp bubble discernable. If it were to collapse, it could produce waves that are of a different type that those currently being detected.

The signal would differ from the familiar compact binary mergers, familiar to the gravitational wave observatories, and would be similar to the phenomena that are associated to the collapse of an unstable neutron star or with the direct merging of two black holes, the paper says.

But the authors note that most of these findings are more or less speculative at this stage.

‘To know how general these signatures are and to lay out how easily they will be detectable, more research is required,’ conclude the authors.

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