Today’s subject is a little outside of Irreal’s usual fare but as I said in my first post, Irreal is about, among other things, anything that excites my geek sensibilities. This definitely excites my geek sensibilities.
The subject, as you can tell from the title, is warp drives. According to FastCompany, scientists now believe that the idea of faster than light travel by means of a warp drive is theoretically possible. That, of course, energized the engineers to decide what such a thing would look like. The answer is—to me, at least—surprising. For theoretical reasons that you can read about in the FastCompany article, the answer is that such a spaceship would look like the Enterprise.
The first designs envisioned a doughnut shaped ring around the ship that would contain the warp drive but designers soon realized that a pair of nacelles mounted on pylons at the side of the ship—just like Star Trek’s Enterprise—is actually the best design.
As I said, this was surprising to me but it shouldn’t have been. As the article points out, science fiction has a track record of accurately predicting future technology long before it becomes fact. Jules Verne’s predictions of trips to the moon and nuclear submarines are examples, as are laser sails from Pournelle and Niven’s The Mote in God’s Eye. The article gives other examples.
When I was younger, I loved Star Trek (both classic and NG) but in accordance with conventional wisdom at the time I knew FTL travel was impossible. It turns out though, that Roddenberry was right. Not only may it be possible, he even got the space ship design right.