#3: A Major Breakthrough
Shoot for the stars.
Finally, some sci-fi. This week’s prompt is:
Discuss a groundbreaking scientific or technological advancement that humanity has not yet achieved.
We live in an age of scientific and technological advancement. Just a few weeks ago, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves Physics Frontiers Center (or NANOGrav PFC for “short”), in conjunction with astrophysicists from around the world, announced that they had detected low-frequency gravitational waves (i.e. ripples in space-time travelling at the speed of light likely originating from supermassive black holes) for the first time. It gets better. They made this discovery by using the cores of dead stars to turn our galaxy into a gravitational wave detector. That is the coolest sentence I have ever had the pleasure of typing.
As the above-linked articles note, this discovery is in-line with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and the method by which it was discovered gives us an entirely new way of looking at the universe.
Think of all of the things we might learn with this powerful new observational tool. Full disclosure, I am not a scientist, physicist, or engineer. I don’t even use the metric system. I am absolutely unqualified to expound upon the scientific implications of this discovery or what it may help us learn in the future. However, I am a sci-fi nerd with a Substack, so I’m going to give it a shot anyway.
My hope is that this discovery is a step closer to that miraculous tech that makes interstellar human spaceflight look so easy in Star Trek: warp drive. More specifically, the Alcubierre Drive.
In short, the Alcubierre Drive (proposed by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994) is a hypothetical, “highly speculative but possibly valid” idea for faster-than-light (FTL) travel. Since Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905, we have understood the speed of light, 299,792,458 m/s (or “c” if you’re in a hurry), to be the ultimate speed limit of the cosmos: no matter or information can travel faster than this speed. However, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which he developed between 1907 and 1915, does not necessarily preclude FTL travel because it accounts for the curvature of spacetime where the special theory of relativity did not. In a nutshell, general relativity implies that there could be ways to work around the speed limit, and the Alcubierre Drive is one of them.
An Alcubierre Drive would “warp” spacetime itself around an object, creating a gravitational wave that contracts the space in front of the object while expanding the space behind it. The object doesn’t move within this “warp bubble,” but the bubble travels through the fabric of spacetime at FTL speeds carrying the object with it. Since the object is not travelling “locally,” it is not violating the c speed limit.
I got very excited about this idea when scientists published a potential method for reducing the power required to power an Alcubierre Drive from the equivalent mass-energy of Jupiter (too big) to that of the Voyager Spacecraft (not so bad) back in 2012. For the first time, warp drive seemed like it might be within the realm of possibility. However, it remains science fiction for now. The articles linked throughout discuss a number of problems with the idea that put the Alcubierre Drive far beyond our current reach.
That said, there appears to be a real push among the scientific community to research and solve these problems, and NANOGrav PFC just turned the galaxy into a gravitational wave detector for them. Detecting and understanding gravitational waves seems like a pretty important step towards developing technology that manipulates spacetime if you ask me. I think I’ll go start packing for my trip to Alpha Centauri.
NOTE: The articles linked above will give you a much more in-depth understanding of the science behind these ideas than I am capable of providing here. If any readers happen to be physicists screaming at their screens as they read this, please leave a comment below. Substack has an edit button, so I am more than happy to correct any inaccuracies and I would love to learn something new along the way.