8/8/2023 0 Comments Real warp drive ship gifAlice is also tens of billions of lightyears away, but her and her elevator are in one of those great cosmic voids where everything is mostly empty space. As the space between everything in our universe expands (which we are pretty sure is due to dark energy), the expanding space "pushes" Bob away from us at faster than light (FTL) speeds. This is analogous to how Bob in a distant galaxy-tens of billions of lightyears away-is moving away from us earthlings faster than light speed. ![]() With all of that said, what if the space behind her was expanding-faster than the speed of light?Īn Alcubierre warp drive-whatever that is-involves a region of flat, Minkowsky spacetime "taking a ride on" an expanding space faster than the speed of light. And since Alice turned off her elevator's propulsion system, we can be sure that she's not moving through space. Since the Alice-elevator system is in the middle of empty space far away from any massive objects, we know that there is no force of gravity moving them through space. Space can move as fast as it wants, even faster than the speed of light. But Einstein's general theory of relativity places no speed limit at all on how fast space itself can move. In other words, suppose that Alice is in the middle of empty space (far away from any massive galaxies) floating in an elevator no matter what kind of propulsion system was installed in her elevator, she and her elevator could never move through space faster than the speed of light. ![]() ![]() Einstein's special theory of relativity places a "cosmic speed limit" on how fast objects can move through space: thou shalt not move through space faster than the speed of light, \(c=366,000 mps\) (miles per second).
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