[0712.1649v6] Warp Drive: A New Approach.
December 2007 should be remembered as the date that a viable warp-drive burst forth from multi-dimensional obscurity… well no, but the blogosphere did notice the paper by Richard Obousy and Gerald Cleaver which tackled the warp-drive concept via LEDs (Large Extra-Dimensions) and gave an estimate of how much energy it would take – a 1000 m3 volume needs 1045 joules of cosmological constant energy. But that’s for that whole volume to be filled by a sufficiently strong cosmological constant for the vehicle to be propelled at lightspeed. If it was confined to a thinner shell the energy requirement would be much less. Say it was as thick as the postulated LED (10-6 metres) then the volume is reduced by ~3.2 million fold to ~3×1038 joules… still pretty “yipes!” but now only Ceres mass in size, not half a Jupiter.
Alternatively there’s the “Pocket Universe” design suggested by van de Broek, which had the ship in a mini-space connected to our own by the warp-bubble itself. In this case the minimum volume is probably ~(10-6)3 metres3 and the energy required is just ~1024 joules. That’s just 10,000 tons of mass-energy converted into the cosmological constant of the warp-bubble… if we can figure out just how do the trick of converting energy into cosmological constant, of course. I think the LED size-limit is probably as small as a tamed bit of space-time can get, so we’ve quite a task in mass-energy manipulation to fling ships around in warp-bubbles. Eventually experiment will tell us more about the LEDs – if they exist, for starters – and perhaps give us a big hint on how to make a “pocket Universe” wrapped in a cosmological constant…