How To Detect Faster Than Light Travel

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Published 2024-07-18
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Warp drives may or may not be possible, but if they are then could a distant alien civilization’s warp fields produce gravitational waves that we could see here on Earth? According to a recent study.. Actually maybe, at least eventually. And we now know just what to look for and how to look for it.


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What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse: arxiv.org/pdf/2406.02466

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All Comments (21)
  • @ThisOldSkater
    Love that "you didn't think I was gonna get there, did you" smirk at the end.
  • @dddd6606
    Achieving "1% speed of the Sun" requires some truly exotic physics!
  • @jajssblue
    I'm glad to have lived through the first era of Gravitational Wave detectors.
  • @samsmith2635
    So this is how the Vulcans detected Zefram Cochrane's first Warp Vessel....
  • @DmT922ha
    But can we detect Ludicrous Speed?
  • @Axodus
    FTL is a great indie game btw.
  • Oh my god this is so exciting I was just at the LISA symposium in dublin last week!! Wow from being a kid watching this to seeing some of the stuff im working on oh my god I cant describe how this feels.
  • @thewatcher14
    14:22 , the speed of the sun? I think you meant the mass of the sun. Love the content btw, keep up the great work!
  • @livinlicious
    It's funny because in Star Trek they always say "detecting xyz warp signature". Basically we can argue they have sensors on board that analyse the gravity waves of different warp technologies. So you can scan for actual warp drives around you. Now imagine this technology to measure these gravitational waves becomes so small it fits into a small device you can just have in your ship. Similar to how big cameras were 100 years ago and now we have tiny sensors that are basically cameras the size of needle heads. That's my head canon now.
  • @Kokally
    I'd expect a superluminal warp field collapse to immediately become a black hole. Matter can't normally surpass the speed of light and so superluminal matter would immediately be compacted against the causality speed limit. The matter would instantly be compressed into a singular point, a singularity.
  • @samanthaqiu3416
    people only know Alcubierre for his warp drive paper, but future generations will know him for his amazing introductory book on 3+1 formulations of numerical relativity
  • I ordered the Higgs boson merch from Serbia. Still hyped for it to come!
  • @netopir3804
    Just the evening before I head to holidays, I get this video that will get me dreaming and sleep tight.
  • @BrentHollett
    This is my preferred Fermi solution. A Lightspeed+ capable civilisation is spreading to the "home-like" planets of the universe. Because they can go Lightspeed+, communication is done by packet on couriers rather than radiowaves or other loud moving noise. So they're a very quiet, pin point islands, type of civilisation. We won't detect them until a scout ship appears in our solar system, and says "Hi, we weren't expecting anyone else"
  • @jounik
    9:52 A spherical Klingon in a frictionless vacuum: "Moo."
  • @tehlaser
    Scientists: “every time we look in a new way at the universe, we find things we weren’t expecting” Also scientists: “best not build a high frequency gravitational wave detector, we don’t expect there’s going to be anything to detect” confusedpikachu.jpg