Could Aliens Use Warp Drives to Get Here?

Term: Warp drive: a proposed way of moving a craft by bending space around it, so that the craft reaches a destination faster than light would in normal space.

Term: Alcubierre drive: a warp drive design published by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.

Term: Negative energy: a theoretical form of energy density below zero, which some warp designs require and which has not been produced in useful amounts.

Could Aliens Use Warp Drives to Get Here?

Not with anything we know. Warp drives are mathematical solutions in general relativity, and the best-known design, published by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, needs matter with negative energy that has never been made in useful amounts. Later work has reduced the requirements for slower-than-light designs. Faster-than-light travel remains unproven and far beyond current technology.

The Alcubierre proposal

In 1994, Alcubierre described a bubble of curved space that would contract space in front of a craft and expand it behind. The craft would sit inside the bubble and move faster than light relative to distant space. The mathematics work within general relativity, but the design needs negative energy density.

The energy problem

Early estimates for the original design were enormous. Physicists Pfenning and Ford calculated that it would require negative energy about ten orders of magnitude greater than the mass-energy of the entire visible universe. Later work brought the number down, but a very large amount of exotic matter remained.

New work, with limits

In 2021, Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire published a model of what they called physical warp drives. They showed that some slower-than-light warp bubbles might be built with positive energy in principle. Their work also showed that any warp drive is a shell of matter that needs propulsion. Other physicists argue that generic warp drives still violate energy conditions, and that positive-energy faster-than-light designs remain disputed. Creating, steering, and stopping a bubble is an unsolved problem.

What this means for UFOs

The speed-of-light barrier is a strong objection to the idea that UFOs are craft from other stars. It is not proof that visitors could not have arrived, because no one can rule out physics that we do not know. But the claim that they did requires an assumption about that physics. I regard that as a serious weakness of the extraterrestrial explanation, and I do not regard it as a proof.

What is solid and what is not

The mathematics of warp drives is published. No warp drive has been built or observed, and no negative-energy source has been shown at useful scale. In my book Disclosure: They Are Not Extraterrestrials, I present the speed-of-light problem as the strongest scientific argument against the extraterrestrial view, and I note that the warp drive is the best-known reply. Disclosure is available on Amazon. You can find more of my work at ckqbooks.com.

Sources

Miguel Alcubierre, The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity, Classical and Quantum Gravity (1994). Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire, Introducing Physical Warp Drives, Classical and Quantum Gravity (2021). Santiago, Schuster, and Visser, Generic warp drives violate the null energy condition, Physical Review D (2022). The Conversation, New warp drive research dashes faster than light travel dreams (2021).