High-speed travel between galaxies theoretically possible

However, Professor Geraint Lewis is unsure if human will be able to come up with a warp drive to make high-speed travel between galaxies a reality. But what worries Lewis is that even if we could mine such elements to build the warp, still there isn’t any guarantee that it will work and the drive will travel faster than light.

Geraint Lewis, an astrophysicist from the University of Sydney, believes that the fabled speed is possible – in line with Einstein’s theory of relativity.

“If you look at the equation that Einstein gave us, it shows you can bend and warp space so you can travel at any speed you like in the Universe”. He says that we will not need to upgrade our rockets, but rather, we will have to find a material with “negative density energy”.

“It is not a material that we actually have in our hands, but there are signs that there are aspects of the universe that actually have this kind of property.” he said.

According to Lewis, to make it possible we need to build a warp drive that will be made of elements with negative density energy. While explaining, a scientist said that the spaceship would produce warp bubble around it with the help of two very big rings to travel between galaxies through space. Last year, he collaborated with artist Mark Rademaker to create designs of a potential faster-than-light ship.

For now scientists are constantly working on finding ways to bend the space. The trial and error is still going on and scientists are persistently working to find a way to space.

Professor Lewis admitted that it is a theoretical concept, but there are instances when a speculative idea has been converted into something substantial in the future. The new gravitational telescopes with high sensitivity are being built for detecting the gravitational waves – the ripples in the curvature of space and time (a theory first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1916).

According to Professor Lewis, all that would be required to achieve the warp speed is to bend the space.

In the next hundred or thousand years, there will be a lot more information available about the universe and this concept of hyper-fast travel can become real. Einstein’s theory of relativity holds the answer to the mystery – a negative density energy.

These distances are big constraints in colonizing the universe, so a way needs to be devised to beat that speed limit.