DREAM OF INTERGALACTIC TRAVEL – STILLS FROM WARP SPEED TRAVELLING The drawings are based on still images of intergalactic travels taken from various Science Fiction films.Stills from Warp Speed Travelling BIG (full bleed/fill out/ all over) # 01 70x100cm. Warp drive is a hypothetical faster-than-light (FTL) propulsion system in many works, most notably Star Trek. A spacecraft equipped with a warp drive may travel at apparent speeds greater than that of light by many orders of magnitude. In contrast to other hypothetical FTL technologies such as a jump drive or hyper drive, the warp drive does not permit instantaneous (or near instantaneous) travel between two points but involves a measurable passage of time. Spacecraft at warp velocity can continue to interact with objects in ”normal space”.
The first steps towards interstellar travel have been taken, but the stars are very far away. Voyager 1 is about 17 light-hours distant from Earth and is travelling with a velocity of 0.006 percent of light speed. … meaning it will take about 17,000 years to travel one light-year!!!! Fortunately, the elusive “warp drive” now appears to be evolving past difficulties… with new theoretical advances… and a NASA test rig under development… … to measure artificially generated warping of space-time. The warp drive broke away from being a wholly fictional concept in 1994 when physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested that faster-than-light (FTL) travel was possible if you remained still… ..on a flat piece of spacetime inside a warp bubble… that was made to move at superluminal velocity. Rather like a magic carpet The main idea here is that.. although no material objects can travel faster than light … there is no known upper speed to the ability of spacetime itself to expand and contract. The only real hint we have is that the minimum velocity of spacetime… …expansion during the period of cosmological inflation …was about 30 million billion times the speed of light. The warp effect uses gravitational effects to compress… the spacetime in front of a spacecraft… …then expand the spacetime behind it. The bit of spacetime within the warp bubble is flat… … so that the spacecraft would float att zero-g along the wave of compressed and expanded spacetime. The net effect is rather like surfing, where you are nearly stationary… …with respect to the wave, but are travelling with the speed of the wave. Where as many of the theoretical studies consider a warp bubble moving at… … ten times the speed of light, there is no known limit to the potential speed. Such a warp bubble could in principle be used to enable subluminal travel (travel slower than light) … as well as superluminal travel (travel faster than light) This may seem as silly choice – why travel slow rather than fast? However, it is likely to turn out far easier … … to achieve a subluminal warp drive for a number of fundamental reasons. Besides, space travel at 90 percent of the speed of light… … is far superior to anything we currently have on the books. This sounds too easy, and in many ways it is. Thus far all superluminal warp drives require negative energy… … and pressure to form and maintain the warp bubble. Michio Kaku dubbed Alcubirre´s notion a “passport to the universe. It takes advantage of a quirk in the cosmological code that allows for the expansion and contraction of space-time …and could allow for hyper-fast travel between interstellar destinations. Essentially, the empty space behind a starship.. would be made to expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration. Scientists speculate that such a drive could result in “speeds” … that could take a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks… even though the system is 4.3 light-years away!!!!Stills from Warp Speed Travelling super extended widescreen # 01 200x30cm.
Certain kinds of hypothetical spacetimes called warp drives, which in a sense can be said to admit a kind of faster-than-light inertia-less and time-dilation-less travel, have been studied by some theoretical physicists since about 1990.
Stills from warp speed travelling ( multiple window ) aka the limits of infinity, 50x65cm