During its nearly 60 years of films and shows, Star Trek has high-tech communication devices that vaguely resemble phones with old schools, magical replicators that can cause a very famous subject by will, and galaxy full of aliens that are going to look like people (though people Now there is a solid canonical reason for that). But for every viewfinder or turbo elevator that requires passengers to grab on the handle, there are countless more gadgets and theories that have a basis in true science. Now, one of the most prominent can be closer than ever to become a reality.

Even the most ordinary "Trek" fans have heard about the Warp Drive device that allows the various federation arspoints to skip through the (relatively) blink of the eye. There is a reason why the faster travel has remained in science in science for more than a century, after all. The space is very, very large, and mankind has always dreamed of engaging very, very far. However, to this day, this technology has not only been considered out of our reach - it's purely impossibleAs I would defy all the laws of physics as we know. The biggest of them all? You will not travel faster than light, universally accepted limit on the speed of the universe.

As it turns out, it may be time to go back to the drawing board. According to a recent article by National geographicalThere may be a way to turn this concrete work of fiction ... and "Star Trek" could end up as the main reason why. Astrophysicist and "Warp Drive" researcher Alexei Bobrick is quoted as saying: "It's amazing how science fiction writers imagine things, and we then realized they could work. It's really nice."

Believe it or not, it seems that ein bornboys (A well -known rules sticker) and his writers "Star Trek: The Original Series" were ahead of their time. Although visually similar to "how, let's say, the Millennium falcon travels through the Hyperpost at the" Starwells War ", the use of distortion in Star Trek is approaching the alignment of real -world physics than we once expected.

According to the rules made of this franchise, Warp Drive essentially works by overlapping the space-time around the moving stars in the bubble, which then accelerates to speeds that far exceed the speed of light. (This is definitely an overwhelming version because it includes too much mathematical and decimal points for the proper explanation here. That I leave that to Vicki fansThank you very much.) Compared to other scientific properties that rely on worms or sliding methods or whatever you have, Trek manages to avoid the boring problem that has emerged a genius named Albert Einstein-namely, the theory of relativity that does not state that there are no objects in the famous universe. Although this seems to include items such as Starsevils, Trek assumes that it is not the USS Enterprise that is intensified to impossible speeds but real Space.

This technical is the key, obviously. And before we saw this in live action, as a glorious nervous shot in 2016 "Star Trek Beyond" shown (and withdrawn from true physics, as explained for Trek core here). National Geographic talked to Trek scientific advisor and astrophysicist Erin McDonald, who explained:

"If you wrap the ship in the Spacetime fabric and then that fabric goes faster than light, carrying you, it doesn't actually break any laws of physics."

Okay, just to be clear, we're not Quite the moment when we can all Sign up for the Starflit Academy And get out of the stars with wide eyes and clear hearts ... but we are approaching! The national geographical report continues to explain how the biggest obstacle is not the concept of "Warp Drive" itself, but the huge amounts of energy needed to make it work. A research paper published in 1994 theorized the squeezing of the space-time in front of the spaceship and expanding the space-time behind, the first accepted scientific model that shows the idea of ​​distortion in action. The only disadvantage? To move even the smallest objects, this method requires energy approximately to the mass of our sun.

Fortunately, science has advanced to jumps and boundaries since 1994. Alexei Bobrick, astrophysicist quoted earlier, teamed up with Ianani Martir to find a solution for bubbles far more favorable than the previous ones. Although at the moment requires much less energy (somewhere at the level of several Jupiter -sized items), it has not yet disrupted the possibility of traveling faster than light. But even this small amount of progress is the biggest step, however, to a functional distortion. It is now a question of simply doing so ... Or, in non-pycard, to discover how to increase speed while reducing the amount of energy you need.

The report warns that we remain "a few lives" away from the permanent implementation of any of this work space - a little Less optimistic than the "first contact" date of 2063 with volcanoes, after a successful curvature test in the Canon Franchise - but we still see this as a victory.