What appears like a cool headline for sci-fi nerds actually has far-reaching implications: the logical equivalence principle means that anything that humans are able to think of can also be discovered by extraterrestrial civilizations.
I know, I know, ET civilizations have not been officially discovered yet. But it’s only a matter of time until this happens. And will the mode of contact be via interstellar radio messages that take decades to arrive and respond to, or via faster than light spaceships?
We as humans are just at the beginning of our exploration into flight. We’ve been flying just for over 100 years. “Faster than light flight” is just a variant of that journey of discovery. Imagine what a species only 100 or 500 years more advanced than us might have achieved already… and where we are in 500 years time.
And because we believe this, the Contact Initiative thinks it’s entirely possible that extraterrestrial spacecraft can visit Earth without too many difficulties.
The key to interplanetary travel is faster than light transport: a soliton warp bubble may be made from plasma, thereby warping space itself. A soliton warp bubble is a solitary complex wave, a self-reinforcing wave packet that maintains its shape while propagating at a constant velocity.
This concept known as ‘warp drive’ makes it possible to break the light barrier without violating general relativity. It would be easy to bridge the chasm between the worlds of different solar systems and galaxies when one travels at hyperspeed.
Miguel Alcubierre was the first theoretical physicist who tackled the problem of FTL travel in the year 1994. The metrics he laid out were all very logical and did fit within the framework of general relativity, but they called for an unknown exotic form of energy to work.
Then, in March 9 2021, Dr. Erik Lentz published his “solution to warp field equations for positive energy”. He’s achieved a theoretical breakthrough because his approach uses positive energy instead of non-existent negative energy.
He went on to graduate school at the University of Washington and in Seattle he got his Phd in theoretical physics around 2017. Then he went on to do a post-doc at the University of Göttingen in Germany and he’s been working on theoretical physics ever since.
Erik studied at Embry Riddle University because of their degree program in space physics where he was able to specialize in exotic propulsion systems. At Embry Riddle he was exposed to a lot of very interesting ideas and learned a lot about general relativity, with, amongst others, Dr. Quentin Bailey.
Dr. Erik Lentz soon realized that faster than light travel was more of a fundamental physics problem than an engineering challenge. During the Covid-19 lockdown he found myself with a lot of free time and immersed himself in the problem and its solution. His discovery that exotic matter or negative energy is not required to create hyper fast warp fields is a breakthrough.
General relativity does permit these superluminal (faster than light) mechanisms. His warp equations obey what’s called the weak energy condition, essentially meaning that it only requires positive energy to make hyper fast Warp fields happen.
FTL travel is now a little more science and less fiction.
The Contact Initiative believes that life in the Universe developed more than once. We are one small island in an infinite sea of space harboring life. If we can develop a theory of faster than light travel, then there is a chance that other life in the universe has already done this before us.
In this case, shielded by fuzzy plasma fields, we may be in the process of being visited by UAPs that are not of this Earth. But who cares about the “may be”. The Contact Project wants to try and make radio contact, to discover the truth.
Original publication: Erik W Lentz, Breaking the Warp Barrier: Hyper-Fast Solitons in Einstein-Maxwell-Plasma Theory, Classical and Quantum Gravity, March 2021. DOI: 10.1088/1361-6382/abe692 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/abe692
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