• 00:00:14 The short history of Erik's discovery (and theory) of faster than light speed travel.
• 00:06:20 How Faster Than Light Speed travel would actually work?
• 00:16:20 How much energy would be required for a warp drive propulsion? Is there enough energy in the universe to make faster than light speed travel feasible?
• 00:25:29 Why the 'twin paradox' will be solved with a warp drive?
• 00:32:47 Did Stargate get the 'warp' drive idea right after all?
• 00:39:13 Are Black Holes a form of cosmic pollution left over by 'misconnecting warp drives'?
• 00:44:50 Is time the same for everyone in the universe?
• 00:50:10 What compels us to be pioneers?
• 00:53:05 Do we live in a simulation?
• 01:03:43 What are other 'faster than light' phenomena in the universe?
• 01:14:34 How does 'dark energy/ dark matter' work? What do we know about it?
• 01:25:10 Are there more dimensions than the four we can easily interact with? Does time exist without a conscious observer?

You may watch this episode on Youtube - #94 Erik Lentz (How to build an actual warp drive).

Apologies for the sound quality during the first few minutes - it gets much better after the initial five minutes!

Erik Lentz is a Ph.D. physicist and focuses on the theoretical, computational, and experimental aspects of searching for dark matter as well as faster than light travel.

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Torsten Jacobi: Eric, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time.

Erik Lentz: Oh, thank you for inviting me. Hey, absolutely.

Torsten Jacobi: Eric, you changed the world recently and you gave us faster than lights if you travel, at least theoretically, right? You published a paper recently where you outlined the options, how we can achieve that. And it's been so long and I had many people here on the podcast who were very, very convinced that this barrier can never be broken. So I'm really curious about your thoughts and maybe you can help us a little bit more, how you came up with this, what did you do before and what makes you so confident that this could actually be a possibility?

Erik Lentz: I mean, I've been interested in this field for decades. I think a lot of people who get into STEM as a profession, we're all fans of science fiction in one form or another as children. And for me, it was definitely Star Trek. And I was really fascinated by the whole world that was set up by all the series and movies and whatnot. And I really resonated with the technology that seemed to facilitate all these things. And one that really stood out to me, that was really the physical link between the interstellar community possible was the warp drive. Otherwise, you'd be spending tens of thousands of years just trying to communicate across this vast network of civilizations. And so this seemed to be a really key point. And as it became older, it became obvious to me that someone would have to invent such a thing. And so it's been a fascination to see if something like one of these plot devices like the warp drive technology would actually be possible in the real world. And it took some time in order to build the technical acumen in order to be able to pursue that. But the desire was always there. And so what happened that, say, 2021 or really 2020 became the year that this paper came out for me is that I found the time to actually really delve into the topic. And we can, I guess, thank the pandemic for that because I found myself sitting at home with a lot of free time on my hands trying to find a way to fend off cabin fever and this project that I really wanted to do. And so I built into the literature to see what the status of people who had passed had been because, as your listeners may know, there is some existing literature on the concept of warp drive. You could say it kind of started seriously with Al Cubietti in 1994 when he was still a graduate student. He made this Al Cubietti drive this first example of a mechanism that could transport observers like you or me, people who move primarily through time rather than space, find a way that they could move effectively through this manifold of space time effective papers in the decades since then. And like you said, the literature seemed to indicate that this was while you could create such imaginary geometries, they were not really feasible because they had all sorts of problems, namely having to do with what sort of matter and energy would be needed to force them. And so this was something that was still problem in the literature when I looked back into the spring of last year. And I wanted to see if there were any loopholes, if there were any stones left unturned in all of the possible solutions to Einstein's relativity. That would allow for both a mechanism that could transport things at arbitrary speed, including faster than the speed of light as well as – that not necessarily need these exotic sources of energy and matter. And so the process that I undertook to do that was essentially just start to delve in the different types of geometries that would provide these properties that I would use that I would use that I would use that I wanted and constrain down, come up with a set of rules that would narrow down that set of solutions and these other constraints like positive energy and other things. And eventually, I found this vision set of rules that I could construct via a computer simulation how one of these geometries would take the example of one of these geometries and that's what you saw in the paper last year and what's been circulated in the past few months in the media. So this is all very exciting. I don't know if I'd say I've completely changed the world yet because there are still a lot of challenges ahead to this sort of research, but it is very exciting.

Torsten Jacobi: That sounds fascinating, Eric. When you published this paper and it's been a couple months since then, when you would have to explain your theory to a 13 year old, how would that work? Maybe we can be in that same position. How can we actually get to that point where we can travel faster than the speed of light? What is necessary and what effect are we taking advantage of?

Erik Lentz: Well, we're taking effect of the advantage that unlike special relativity, special relativity is usually what we appeal to when we think of nothing can move faster than the speed of light. That's relativity. That's actually not quite true in the context of special relativity and the principle of special relativity says that two objects cannot move relative to each other at a single point faster than the speed of light. So this is a very local statement when we bring it into the context of general relativity. So because moving from special relativity where we're all moving on this flat background space time and Kosti space time, and we make that space time in the context of general relativity dynamic and reactive to the matter and energy that lay on it, there are a few tricks that we can take advantage of. Namely that if we separate bodies, there's now no longer a principle that says that the bodies cannot move away from each other or towards each other, being at two different points effectively faster than the speed of light. In fact, we see a phenomenon like this, we believe, in our own universe, namely this acceleration quantity, the fact that galaxies very far away from us appear to not just be moving away from us, but accelerating away from us. This is a phenomenon called inflation. There's also a period that we believe in the early universe where a much more violent form of inflation happened where objects moved away from each other at a rate that increased exponentially with time. And as it becomes further.

Torsten Jacobi: Some of those outer galaxies and planets, from what I remember, they move away faster than speed of light. So we can never catch up, never see that galaxy.

Erik Lentz: Precisely, precisely. And by virtue of them being further apart and this acceleration mounting with that increasing separation, eventually they start moving away from you faster than the speed of light and they fall out of what's called causal contact. It means that you can't communicate with them anymore via something like a light beam. And they fall behind what we refer to as a horizon, an event horizon, of a different type than say you'd find around a black hole, but similar in effect that you can no longer communicate between these two bodies. And we're essentially doing something similar with the warp drive. We're taking advantage of something that kind of looks like inflation, a much more complicated form of inflation because it doesn't necessarily just inflate. It also contracts. And use this to our advantage in order to effectively make some motive device that propels us through this space time. The alkybietic metric is maybe the most intuitive form of this concept in that when you calculate what's called the extrinsic curvature, it's the form of curvature. It essentially tells you how space is being curved in the presence of the higher dimensional space plus time manifold. But what it tells you is for the alkybietic metric, you have this nice picture of what almost looks like a wave. And this is what is propagated in the media very often, that you have some flat region in the center of this warp bubble. Also can be referred to as a soliton because it's nice and compact in size. And in this center flat region is where you'd put a ship or some such thing. In front, on the leading edge of the bubble in the direction of travel, you have this dip in the graph that's most often circulated. And this tells you that we have a relative contraction of this extrinsic curvature. It's kind of telling you that the space is being compressed in front of the bubble. And behind, we have this peak in the extrinsic curvature which is telling us that the space behind is relatively expanded. Now, the combination of these things kind of gives us an intuitive feel that we are kind of making the distance to our destination shorter and the distance from our origin point longer. This is not entirely accurate because this region of locally contracting expanded space does not extend all the way to the destination or from the origin. But it does give us a nice intuitive feel for that you're essentially dragging yourself along by pulling yourself by contracting space in front of you and renormalizing it behind you by expanding it. Now, other solutions are a bit more complicated in that and the interpretation becomes a little less clear. But most of these solutions do have similar, all of the solutions have curvature of one form or another. The particular type of curvature that's put in this plot of this nice acubiety drive wave shape, most of them are nonzero but not all of them. There is one example, one well known example called the Natadio drive where that particular form of the curvature is zero everywhere.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, well, I know that was mentioned in what I read about the white paper. It would reduce the speed of travel, say to the next star system, to a few years or a few dozen years instead of, I think, a current propulsion systems that we have would be a few hundred years, a few thousand years, right?

Erik Lentz: Well, current chemical rockets, they're limited by their exhaust velocity and how much fuel you can carry, which the limit is, the entire vessel is made of fuel. And at that limit, you are essentially, I believe, limited to about twice the exhaust velocity, instantaneous exhaust velocity. So with current chemical rockets, we're talking about some tens of kilometers per second, which translates to tens of thousands of years to get to Proxima Centauri, which is a bit excessive. There are somewhat fewer terms.

Torsten Jacobi: There was recently a story about that. I think it was three generations, right? I don't know if you watched that movie. What do you think? They had children. They basically had children that were born in a traveling rocket, so to speak. And they were primed and raised by themselves and no parents around. There was one parent around, but he kind of dies early. And then the idea is that they will, their grandchildren will actually be at the same age when they reach their destination. It's only about 100 years, right? That's not super long. And then the whole ship kind of falls apart until then there's a lot of struggle, and eventually they make it. So it's a good movie, though, it's well done.

Erik Lentz: But I believe the rocket probably used in that movie was a nuclear rocket because their exhaust velocity is much, much higher. The energy levels able to be utilized from nuclear fuel, whether it's fission, fusion's obviously much better. The utilization percentage is much higher. But I believe, yeah, there have been some studies to say that, say, with a nuclear fusion rocket, it may be possible to make the trip to speed one ship up to some tens of percent of the speed of light. Of course, that would take some time. And so the journey would take maybe a generation or two.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah. Freeman Dyson worked on the Orion spacecraft. He was one of the co conspirators. Right. And they had supposed to have micro explosions, nuclear explosions, and that would propel them if they were controllable. Also, depending on how much material they take with them, unless they go close to a star and refuel, I don't know, that's so feasible. But at least it sounds faster, it sounds more and more sustainable. But it never, because of the nuclear arms treaty, it never went into any testing from what we know. Maybe it's hidden from us, that part of history.

Erik Lentz: Perhaps I knew though that there were some tests of fission rocket systems, I believe, all the way up into the early 70s. But those were also discontinued. There are some, I guess, small collections of engineers and physicists who would like to resume those tests. Just because the specific propulsion of those engines is much higher than chemical rockets. But I don't know what the status of that is.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah. Well, there's people who say we have these bases on Mars. In the movie, we communicate with the aliens there. And that's where we build all the rockets, on the dark side of Mars, right? Well, maybe that's a little bit too much of a conspiracy. Going back to what you came up with, it generally seems so with the precedent that lights we traveled initially, it all sounds relatively easy until we realized, whoa, the amount of energy that's required. And often, that seems to be bigger than the sun. And that's where the discussion ends, because we don't know how to harvest even a portion of the sun properly, the solar cells here. But we are really far away from harvesting the full sun power. Fremant dice was working on something similar. How does that work with your theory that you are suggesting?

Erik Lentz: Well, my theory is, I guess, also impractical from a total magnitude of energy viewpoint. The previous studies, previous warp drive studies, required, yes, on the order of solar mass magnitude energy. And I'm not just talking about the radiative pressure of the mass. I'm talking about converting every kilogram of mass in the sun into an actionable form of energy, the E equals mc squared type of conversion. A perfect conversion. Not only was it. A perfect conversion, right, that has never been achieved. Well, only via matter, antimatter annihilations. Those are the only ones that I'm familiar with. We don't use them to often. Not only. Seasonings. It's a little expensive at the moment. I think some thousands of trillions of dollars per gram. It's a little out of our reach. But in any case, not only did the total magnitude of energy need to be of the order of solar masses, the sign was also what made it impractical. Not only did you need that magnitude, but you needed to make it out of some media that we don't know exists in that sort of concentration and that sort of density. We needed exotic matter, things with negative energy density, of some very astronomical size. We needed to be able to make that. We needed to be able to make it stable. There were some initial papers. I think by fending in forward, they were the first ones to make the computation of the Alcubietti Drive to say, OK, it may be possible that we use properties of the vacuum, use a chasmier effect in order to make naturally occurring exotic matter. We essentially make the width of this bubble so small that we get a chasmier effect so the local energy density can, via quantum effects, become negative. But in order to make that bubble wall thin enough so that these would naturally occur, we would need to make them on the order of hundreds of Planck lengths. Planck lengths are, oh gosh, what is it? Oh, it's 10 to the minus 30 or so centimeters or so across. It's extraordinarily small, far beyond the distance scales that we can probe, say with the LHC, some many orders of magnitude beyond that. But you'd need to make that all the way around a bubble and say, if you made the bubble interior 100 meters in radius, the total effective negative energy you'd have to make that bubble in the bubble wall would exceed the total magnitude energy in the visible universe by orders of magnitude. So it becomes extremely impractical, very much a problem. So instead of making it naturally occurring a chasmier effect to fuel this, you'd want to find some naturally occurring stable source of negative energy density, which we may have some hints of something similar to that going on with dark energy, sources of inflation that we seem to be observing in the universe, but we don't know precisely what the sourcing media looks like. But in order to make that in such high densities and such concentrated quantities, we have no idea. It's much easier to, say, take things with positive energy density, atoms, things that you and I are made of, and try and manipulate that to make very high density dynamic fluids in order to source such things. But before last year, we didn't really know how to make a solution that could utilize these sources and actually make a warp drive out of them. And that was the impetus for me looking into literature and making the paper that we saw come out last year and get published in the early months of this year. Just to be sure, with what you're suggesting in that paper, what is the amount of energy required just to go to Alpha Centauri? Right. Right, right, right. The energy question. So the energies are similar in magnitude to the old estimates. But the sign is correct now. Now we have positive energy densities. But to make something radius 100 meters go at the speed of light, we would need some tens of percent of the solar mass equivalent in order to do that. So very high amounts. 20% of the sun, we would need. Yeah, say 20%. Right. So five times 10 to the 29 kilograms of material compressed into something that is 200 meters across. And that's to go the speed of light. Not faster. In order to go faster, you'd need more energy. But then you could get to Alpha or Proxima Centauri in a little over four years.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah. When we think of this, and we obviously in an extremely early age, that's all theoretical. But if we take this all the way out, say we're going to be way more efficient. And it's only going to take 1% of the sun to travel that far. And maybe an even better speed. So we make magnitudes of improvements. I'm thinking of the early days of the internet, right. We put all this fiber under the ocean. We thought, oh, it's not going to be enough. And then five years later, we realized, oh, man, we 100 times more efficient. So we actually put too much fiber underneath the oceans. But as I'm saying, there's going to be a huge amount of efficiency gains to be made if you ever get into a practical solution. But I mean, we only have one really easy applicable source of energy in our solar system, right. It seems like still an amazing amount of energy that we have to procure. Even if you get way more efficient, interstellar travel, we're going to get rid of all this suns, right. If you take it from such a solar source, it doesn't mean that's what it's going to be. But it seems inherently very limited. So if anyone comes up with interstellar travel, it seems to be we have to agree. Right, wouldn't we be seeing a blinking out of all the stars in our galaxy? The stars should be going away. That's what I'm trying to say, right. Because I mean, the equations that you make, they're right. Or you can't do much about it. The energy seems to be, if we are curving space, just to go to the next star system, it seems to be a huge effort. There shouldn't be a lot of stars left. If someone else in the universe sooner or later has come up with such a travel system.

Erik Lentz: Right. So I would agree that if we cannot make extreme savings in the energy efficiency of these warp drives, then if they ever become feasible, that would pose an existential threat to the rest of the galaxy. I still have some hope that gains in efficiency can be made far beyond the one or two orders of magnitude that you just mentioned. I'm hoping that something on the order of tens of orders of magnitude can be of savings can be made in the energy density. There have been studies, again, in the context of the acubi eddy drive, the natario drive, things that already used exotic matter, in order to save energy on tens of orders of magnitude scales. So maybe bringing the energy from 10 to the 30 kilograms to 10 to the 20 kilograms, 10 to the 10 kilograms, maybe even down to the kilogram scale. And if we're talking about a kilogram scale, then maybe we're in the realm of something like a fusion generator or even a fusion generator. Especially if we say, slow ourselves down for the prototypes, which I think would be inevitable. You'd want something that is both smaller in diameter. So maybe you are putting something the size of a small satellite into one of these warp bubbles, and you're making it move, say, some kilometers per second in orbit. Maybe you're just having it change orbit above the Earth. Then you don't need nearly as much energy as well. You can scale it down in that way, but you'd also need some other energy saving mechanisms just to get there.

Yeah, that's where we want to go. We want to go to the stars, because otherwise we begin almost to go there right now. I mean, it takes a little bit of effort, but maybe Elon brings us to Mars in 10 years from now. One of those problems that we have with traveling close to the speed of light is that time is so relative that the people inside that spacecraft have a very different perception of reality and how time goes than the people who haven't traveled. So we would never be able to return into the same time. I think depending on the speed, it could be thousands of years different when you return, like the Earth has either. I know I always confuse who's traveled quicker, but you definitely, in hundreds of generations after you've left, I don't know, that's only for one eight year trip to Opposite Ari and back in 10,000 years into the Earth's future. But with a warp drive, we can avoid this, and of course, how this works. Right, so the twin paradox, that example from special relativity, where you have two twins, one moves away, experiences time at seemingly a slower rate because when they return, the one that went on a trip has aged relatively little compared to the one that stayed on Earth. So how this changes is because they change reference frames. Right, they start in the same reference frame, then one twin accelerates to something close to the speed of light, and you get all of these dilation effects. They accelerate again to return, and then they come to a standstill relative to the original twin. But Eric, if you travel at the speed of light, the time stands still and you don't age, right? It's not possible. Sorry, close to the speed of light, near light speed, near light speed. Sorry, I was being imprecise. But in the case of the warp drive, if you were to recreate this twin experiment, you start off with one on Earth, one gets in a ship, the bubble forms around it, and off they go, seemingly accelerating from the viewpoint of the one on Earth. They see the ship go get farther away. But within the warp bubble, the second of the twins never feels any acceleration. They do not accelerate. They do not effectively change frame of reference with respect to the original twin. So the rate of passage of time locally for both of these twins remains the same. Because the ship is in the same position. The reason why they're separating, while not necessarily experiencing different rates of passage time, yes, is because of the curvature. But so the twin that's traveling goes to Proxima Centauri. The curvature collapses so they can actually, say, look around. And this twin has aged, say, if they're moving at the speed of light, the drive moves at the speed of light. They've aged four years. They've seen four years go by from within the ship. Then they get back in the ship, the warp bubble reaccumulates, and they come back to Earth to tell everyone about what they've seen. And they come back, and it's been total, say, eight or nine years. But also, the original twin on Earth has also aged that same amount. So you don't necessarily have the same problem of being able to explore the universe, but never being able to tell anybody about it because your civilization is long since dead. Yeah, that's really neat. It really solves a lot of practical problems on that. I guess, although it does necessarily mean that in order to really see much of the surrounding galaxy, you really have to be able to accelerate faster than the speed of light because you're still limited by the passage of time for the people in the ship. So you really want to not just meet the speed of light. You really want to get beyond a 10, 100, 1,000 times in order to really be able to travel, say, to the galaxy center and back in a reasonable amount of time within your lifetime. Yeah. So there's still that shot. What happens if we travel, say, 10,000 times the speed of light? So let's assume that's in that warp drive. That's in a future scenario. What happens to time when that person that travel comes back to work, would that still hold true that time has moved the same for both twins? Or would that be a different constellation? I mean, I think it would be effectively true. You can, of course, design one of these warp drives that does have the ship inside experience some acceleration. So you do have this difference in time rate of passage. But beyond that, no, they should match fairly precisely up to, I suppose, what happens during the process where the warp bubble is sort of accumulating in magnitude, what would be seen by somebody outside of it as the acceleration phase as the ship moves off. And that is actually something that hasn't been done in the literature, a precise mechanism for accelerating or decelerating one of these. Although I imagine because of the very calm nature of the spacetime inside of the bubble, it would be fairly straightforward to maintain that throughout the entire process. So they wouldn't experience any acceleration, so the rate time of passage wouldn't change. But there's the question of, OK, so what happens if you are going to see a star that is moving relative to the Earth? You're going to have to, there's going to be, effectively, some dilation between your original frame of reference and your destination. So you're going to have to match that in some way. And so there'll be some effect when you're exploring whatever that star or other galaxy, whatever your destination is. There'll be whatever physics goes on during that time. And then you'll have to reverse the process and come back. So there may be some effects from matching the trajectory of your destination. But if we're just dealing with the plainest of scenarios and the two objects are sitting on a relatively flat spacetime and moving, not really moving relative to one another, you shouldn't really see that sort of impact. You know what it sounds like? It's a bit like the Stargate universe. I'm a big fan of the science fiction shop. And what their pseudoscience, so to speak, is, right? So they have these gates, and you basically go through an event horizon. And you don't even have to move, right? So you're exactly being rerepresented on the other side of the event horizon. And it's not a beaming device. It doesn't sound like Star Trek. But when I hear that, I feel like the ship is basically, it only needs to move a few inches, right? Because space is moved so much around that the ship movement doesn't matter much anymore, right? And depending on how much you use, how you create that warp bubble. But let's assume we can make it a gate, like literally something we have at home, like a home device. You literally just enter the warp revenue, and you jump in, and you jump out on the other side, or push it out, let's say that. And we wouldn't necessarily, I mean, we can basically travel in a space suit, right? Because we are in it only for a few seconds, and then we come out on the other side. Do you think we can go that far? I mean, that's kind of the general assumption that I put into my solution. And what has been done with the other solutions is that it's a very calm area inside the bubble. You're essentially in free fall, right? So if like somebody out on a spacewalk, you have the sensation of floating. And even as the bubble forms around you, or dissolves around you as you reach your destination, you feel virtually no sensation whatsoever, as far as motion is concerned. Our typical intuition about motion really is based on acceleration or vision of things moving relative to us. You would have some sensation of seeing things move by, but you wouldn't have the sensation of acceleration. You wouldn't feel that you were being cold or pushed or anything like that. So there's also no radiation problem, right? A lot of people felt that warp drives were huge radiation issues. Well, yeah, so there are problems with radiation from a couple different viewpoints. There's the hawking radiation issue that if you create a warp drive fast enough, you create an event horizon. You essentially isolate the inside of the bubble from the rest of the universe. And that has its own just classical physics problems in terms of how do you, if you were able to make one of these things and you have a horizon, how do you communicate with the rest of the bubble? So when you reach your destination, you can actually dissolve it and rejoin the rest of the universe and actually observe what destination you went out to go see. And that's a whole other problem. But having to do with radiation, once you create one of these event horizons, there is this concept of hawking radiation where if virtual particles are created on either side of the horizon, they will be out of causal contact and be unable to annihilate with one another. And so you get effectively radiation of particles that are created on your side of the event horizon and they can impinge on you. And there have been some calculations of the radiation that would possibly result from such a horizon. And it's not good. However, however, the, I think some of these difficulties can be overcome simply by virtue of geometry of the interior region, right? The initial Cubietti drive was very spherical in shape. The shell, the shape of the event horizon was very spherical. So everything that would appear on either side of the horizon would propagate towards the center. So the ship would, the entire volume of the interior would be radiated. It's possible that if you shape the edge of the horizon in such a way, you may be able to create regions that are radiation free. Correct. Yeah. So that may be one way around it. It's not necessarily omitting radiation within that calm region altogether. But it's, I think, a step in the right direction. There's another problem having to do with radiation in that you have this shell that's moving at faster than the speed of light. What happens to things it runs into, right? There's space dust, there's comets, there's all sorts of things that it could possibly encounter on the way to its destination. What happens to those? Well, with the standard QBA drive, it seems like all of these objects that impinge on the leading edge of the bubble get stuck. They get their time rate of change as they move through this high region of high curvature. Essentially, they get swept up with the bubble and they move along with it. So you have this mounting shell of energy on the leading edge of the bubble. And what happens when you then stop the bubble, if you're able to overcome this horizon problem and stop your drive at your destination, what happens to all this energy on the leading edge? Well, it seems like it gets radiated out in front of you in almost kind of some very coherent pulsed laser beam. And so that could also be potentially very dangerous to your destination mostly. But that might also be something that can be overcome via geometry that you could perhaps instead of necessarily catching everything, you could change the front end of the shell or change the geometry, not just the shape, but the actual degrees of curvature so that instead of getting caught in the leading edge, you might be able to deflect it around. And it would essentially come out the back end of your drive relatively unimpinched on. One thing that I immediately thought of is when we now think about, I love how detailed you are already into this, when we think about a faster than light speed travel, someone in this universe must have done it. So that's known as kind of a Fermi paradox, which isn't going to be a paradox, it seems to be just a lunch note. But anyways, it's become quickly known as this. Others must have done this and why didn't they visit us? And maybe when you talk about the issues that there are of a faster than light speed travel, is it possible that some of the things we see in the universe are kind of a pollution created by other people creating warp drives, thinking about black holes, thinking about pulsars, car stars. All these things that we see, maybe they are just pollution, where some of the warp craft didn't work properly. Is that something that ever occurs to physicists or this is just too much science fiction? I think it occurs to physicists. But I also believe that there is a mantra that happens in physics, particularly in astrophysics, as they encounter new phenomena that they are unfamiliar with, they don't know, they see some gamma ray source, some repeating gamma ray source or unrepeated, some new phenomenon that they are unfamiliar with, what exactly is causing it. And I think for a lot of them, not some small part of their brain is saying, oh, maybe it's some sign of intelligent life of some advanced civilization. But then this mantra also comes into their mind, okay, it can't be aliens. I can't say it's aliens because that's perhaps, that I'll get branded as the person who says everything is aliens. And so they look everywhere, but for a result. And so far, that seems to be working out fairly well. But as we advance our own knowledge of what different phenomenon we can create via technology, like possibly this warp drive, we're confronted with questions, Fermi Paradox like questions, do these things, can they actually exist? And if they exist, and we can create them, why hasn't everyone else? Why don't we see signs of this? In the case of the warp drive, you already mentioned one, right? Why don't we see suns blinking out because we need so much energy seemingly to make one of these? And maybe if these things are actually happening, there is a means of saving vast amounts of energy so you do not need so much. Maybe you only need an asteroid's worth, something like 10 to the 12 kilograms. Those are much more difficult to see disappearing from other star systems. As far as seeing the effects of, say, the creation and acceleration and deceleration and diffusion of one of these drives, it may be that such signals are very focused. That instead of seeing some gamma ray burst, which radiates in many different directions, fortunately for us, with such intensity that we even being light years or tens of thousands of light years or millions or billions of light years away, we can pick up some few light particles, some few photons in our telescopes. It may be that these drives are very efficient in that they don't give off much in the way of excess radiation. That's also possible. I'm a little less sure of that one considering some of my recent thoughts on how one would actually accelerate one of these drives. Because not only do you need to satisfy the Einstein equations, which are what tell you, given a particular source of matter and energy, how the space time is going to react. You also need to satisfy the general relativistic form of conservation of momentum or refer to as conservation of stress energy, the covariant conservation of stress energy. You need to, if you're going to create something that propagates across space time, this thing cannot just create non trivial stress energy out of nowhere. There has to be some equal and opposite type of reaction in a covariant geometric sense. What does that look like? That might be a possible signal, but precisely what that sort of radiation or geometric disturbance, maybe there's some gravitational wave given off by one of these drives as they accelerate or decelerate. I don't know yet, but these are definitely things that I'm thinking about. What's great about the warp drive is it gives us the option that someone could visit us mostly in real time, but we think of the long term space travel. So far we always felt like, well, the time horizon is so far off. We notice from light that by the time the light gets here from a few million light years away, that's a million years have passed from the