Hello and welcome back to Life’s Biggest
Questions, I’m Ron McKenzie-Lefurgey.
For centuries, humanity has looked to the
stars and wondered what was out there.
In recent decades, space exploration has become
a reality.
However, if we want to really explore outside
of our own solar system, we’ll need to figure
out a way to travel at great speeds, maybe
even faster than light.
Can it be done?
Let’s find out.
If you want more What If videos, check out
our “Biggest What Ifs” playlist on the
channel.
Now get ready, it’s time to ask the question:
Could we Travel Faster than the Speed of Light?
As was discussed in our video How Fast can
Humans Go, our current understanding of physics
would lead us to believe that nothing can
travel faster than the speed of light.
Particles with mass require energy in order
to accelerate.
However, as an object approaches light speed,
it gains more and more mass, to the point
where you would require more energy than exists
in the universe to move at light speed.
So it seems that actual faster than light
travel is impossible; does that mean we’ll
never see the outer reaches of space?
Not necessarily.
There are a number of hypotheses as to how
we could travel vast distances in a relatively
short time.
One possibility that is often put forth is
using Worm Holes to travel quickly through
space.
While these holes haven’t actually been
observed, they are theorized to exist, acting
as a bridge between two points, similar to
the Portal gun from the Portal games.
Some theorize that we could use these holes
to travel vast distances in the blink of an
eye.
Unfortunately, we haven’t found a way to
use these holes, or even solid evidence that
they exist; but that hasn’t stopped people
from studying them.
A 1988 paper by Michael Morris, Kip Thorne,
and Yuri Yurtsever even proposed an idea for
a wormhole time machine.
However, according to Stephen Hawking, keeping
these holes open would require negative energy.
More on that later.
Another fun place to look for methods of effectively
travelling faster than the speed of light
is science fiction.
And two of the most popular sci-fi franchises,
Star Wars and Star Trek, take rather different
approaches to this problem.
In Star Wars, ships are outfitted with a hyperdrive.
This involves a ship accelerating near light
speed and entering hyperspace, an alternate
dimension that can be used as a sort of shortcut
between two points in physical space.
This requires large amounts of calculations,
as Han explains in the film.
Even though the ship is physically in another
dimension, large objects in physical space
would cast “Mass Shadows” that could affect
the ship in hyperspace.
This would allow people to effectively achieve
ridiculous speeds, crossing the galaxies in
a matter of days.
Some nerds even calculated this, and determined
that the Millenium Falcon could potentially
travel over 1000 light years per hour.
Unfortunately, as of now, this remains in
the realm of science fiction, as we have no
convincing reason to believe hyperspace exists,
or that it can be used in this way.
Star Trek, on the other hand, has a somewhat
less impressive, but more realistic, mechanism:
The Warp Drive.
The Warp drive involves the manipulation of
Space Time.
By annihilating deuterium and antimatter,
the warp drive can cause warp fields to form
a subspace bubble that distorts the local
spacetime continuum.
This is significantly slower than the hyperdrive
from Star Wars; at Warp 9.9, which is faster
than most ships in Star Trek can travel, a
ship can reach speeds of just 2.44 light years
an hour.
Very impressive, but nothing compared to the
Millenium Falcon’s 1000.
However, this is particularly relevant to
the question, because it actually fits in
somewhat with our current understanding of
physics.
The Warp Drive actually inspired the Alcubierre
drive, posited by theoretical physicist Miguel
Alcubierre.
It involves a whole bunch of calculations
that I’m far too stupid to understand, let
alone explain, but I’ll try to give a simplified
explanation.
This drive would cause the spacetime fabric
in front of the ship to contract, while causing
spacetime behind it to expand.
This can be compared to a surfer being carried
along the water; the water doesn’t necessarily
move with the surfer, it’s the waves moving
up and down that propel them forward.
Sadly, while many believe that this could
work, we are a long way away from making this
a reality.
We currently don’t have the technology to
manipulate space in such a way, and even if
we did, we would likely need large amounts
of negative energy to power the device.
What’s negative energy?
I’m glad you asked.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states
that the energy density of any electric, magnetic,
or other field fluctuates randomly.
It’s been found that if you suppress these
fluctuations in a vacuum, you can increase
the positive energies in some places, while
causing the regions that previously had 0
energy to possess negative energy.
Essentially, one area of space borrows energy
from a region that didn’t have any to start
with, producing negative energy.
Unfortunately, this has only been done to
produce very small amounts of negative energy,
which leads many scientists to believe that
it will be quite some time before we can make
enough to power a warp drive, if it is even
possible.
And now we return to our question: Could we
Travel Faster than the Speed of Light?
Well, in terms of physically moving faster
than light speed, it seems that it can’t
be done.
That said, we do have some promising ideas
of how to EFFECTIVELY move faster than the
speed of light, like the Alcubierre drive,
but we still have a lot to learn before this
can become a reality.
However, with enough technological advances,
and with the ability to produce large amounts
of negative energy, we could eventually find
ourselves travelling to a galaxy far, far
away, or even, a long time ago.
Thank you for watching Life’s Biggest Questions,
I hope this was interesting and informative,
and maybe even inspired you to look into it
further on your own.
If you liked this video, please thumbs up
and subscribe to the channel down below.
While you’re down there, let me know if
you think we’ll ever figure out a way to
move faster than light.
Until next time, I’m Ron McKenzie-Lefurgey
with Life’s Biggest Questions, wishing you
the best of luck, on your quest for answers.
