Well. This could be a game changer. New Warp Drive theory

[Drashner1]

Hey, folks.

Bit sad that y'all beat me to talking about this, as I was rushing on here after a friend sent me a link to an article about this.

There are, however, some thoughts which occurred to me while reading up on this.

Firstly, it'd be neat if the SFnal dream of faster-than-light travel was solved through this method. The paper itself (https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07125) does directly mention superluminal travel being possible through this method, as does a lot of the literature talking about this. Of course, this raises all the usual issues of causality, and I'd imagine something like the Unruh Effect would probably destroy any vessel attempting FTL travel.

I wouldn't be too sure about the Unruh Effect since - technically speaking - anything inside a warp bubble is at rest and the bubble itself isn't really moving in the conventional sense of the word. Space-time itself is not really subject to the same rules of physics as everything inside space-time, which is part of the reason things like cosmic inflation (and warp drives which use a similar effect AIUI) can allow the universe to expand at a vast multiple of light-speed for a brief time.

It has been suggested - and OA presumes this to be the case - that causality issues would trigger a sort of Visser Effect inside a warp bubble attempt to achieve or exceed lightspeed - basically virtual particle creation goes thru the roof exponentially, flooding the interior of the warp bubble with high energy radiation to such a degree that even magmatter can't survive. Hence, why OA warp bubbles can get tremendously close to c, but can't actually achieve or exceed it.

Secondly, and most importantly for the OA setting, both the mass and energy requirements laid out in this piece of work sound far, far more reasonable than the requirements of the void/alcubierre bubbles we described in our various reactionless drive pages. The positive mass described is considerable (though the author believes it can be reduced by as much as 60 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE!!!) but the drive requires no finnicky, high S-Level exotic matter. If these drives work for subluminal travel (and they seem to be about as plausible as the alcubierre-natario metric?) they might:

- A) drastically reduce the mass-energy requirements for the creation of reactionless drives
- B) possibly place the manufacture of at least some of these drives within the hands of, if not modos, low transaps?

At the very least, some classes of reactionless drive may fall within the purview of High-S Ultratech (that is, ultratech provided by S4+ archai), which would allow modo polities to build their own reactionless ships, revolutionising travel.

Would love to hear folks' thoughts on this -- especially if we can get the bat signal working and call in Adam Getchell to take a look at the physics!

Speaking editorially, I don't think we'd want to put reactionless drives within the purview of lower S minds. We rather like them as being the tools of the AI Gods and it would also be a lot of work to make such a change.

Also - even if this latest theory turns out to be totally correct - we still don't know how to create a warp bubble and therefore it remains just as plausible that they are beyond human/low transapient intelligence and remain the tools of the AI Gods.

Note that OA does not currently state in the EG exactly how much mass-energy is required to make a warp bubble or how exactly the procedure works - so for all we know this theory is correct and that's exactly what's in play in OA.

Barring some truly definitive RL results (the consensus in physics becomes that this kind of thing is both correct and about as doable for humanity as any other kind of starship if not more so; someone actually builds an experimental rig or even a drive that works; etc.) I think our general approach on this would be to keep an eye on it and let it percolate before making any changes to the OA setting itself.

My 2c worth,

Todd