this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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The biggest problem is sustaining 1g for 9 days straight. It might not sound like much, but it's a huge amount of delta-v.
Using an Alcubierre drive, would not only reduce the time for the trip, but also the normal space delta-v required, so the amount of fuel, efficiency, and so on.
That's not what it says, and for good reason.
Right now, the work on the math for a warp bubble, done over the last 30 years, has reduced the energy requirements by some dozen orders of magnitude. A form of negative energy is already being used in experiments like LIGO, and a few years ago, what could be considered as "negative mass" was discovered in phonons.
As long as either the theory, or the math, leading to Alcubierre's calculations doesn't get disproven, warp drives are "possible", we just don't know "how"... and so far, all related experiments are rather going in the direction of getting to the how, not in the direction of disproving it.