Hyper-fast interstellar travel via a modification of spacetime geometry
- Department of Mathematics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC (United States)
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
We analyze difficulties with proposals for hyper-fast interstellar travel via modifying the spacetime geometry, using as illustrations the Alcubierre warp drive and the Krasnikov tube. As it is easy to see, no violations of local causality or any other known physical principles are involved as far as motion of spacecrafts is concerned. However, the generation and support of the appropriate spacetime geometry configurations does create problems, the most significant of which are a violation of the weak energy condition, a violation of local causality, and a violation of the global causality protection. The violation of the chronology protection is the most serious of them as it opens a possibility of time travel. We trace the origin of the difficulties to the classical nature of the gravity field. This strongly indicates that hyper-fast interstellar travel should be transferred to the realm of a fully quantized gravitational theory. We outline an approach to further the research in this direction.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Assistant Secretary for Management and Administration, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 626471
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-97-4249; CONF-9708146-; ON: DE98003002; TRN: AD-a339 582
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: NASA Lewis Research Center meeting on breakthrough propulsion physics, Cleveland, OH (United States), 12-14 Aug 1997; Other Information: PBD: Aug 1997
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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