On one particular Friday night in 1992, Miguel Alcubierre couldn’t stop thinking about Star Trek. For someone who, as a child growing up in Mexico City, devoured books filled with illustrations of our solar system or adorned with names like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, it wasn’t necessarily a rare occurrence. Now a PhD candidate studying at University College in Cardiff, Wales, Alcubierre’s life mirrored a kind of proto–The Big Bang Theory, the nerd-sitcom from the late aughts. He spent his days playing Dungeons & Dragons, coding, and reading lots of science fiction—all while studying and calculating numerical relativity. Every Friday night, Alcubierre and his friends would rent a VHS tape of Star Trek: The Next Generation and watch an episode or two before heading out to the pub. A sci-fi sequel to the 1960s original series, The Next Generation (“TNG” to its most ardent fans) follows the crew of the USS Enterprise in the 24th century as it traipses across the galaxy, discovering “new life and new civilizations.” The closest star system to Earth, Alpha Centauri, lies some four light-years (or about 25 trillion miles) away. If Starfleet relied on 21st-century technology, the show would be less trek and more slog. So how exactly does the Enterprise’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard hop among planets within the temporal confines of a 45-second TV commercial? Easy: He uses a warp drive, a nifty little propulsion trick that allows the crew to exceed the speed of light by warping space and time. During one of these Friday night watch parties, as the Enterprise crew once again raced off into the farthest reaches of the galaxy, the interstellar journey sparked an idea in Alcubierre’s mind. “I just kept thinking [Star Trek] always talks about a warp drive, and we know from relativity we can warp space,” Alcubierre says. For his PhD, he’d been researching what happens when black holes collide, a controversial phenomenon back then because it undermined many foundational theories of physics at the time. Due to their mass, the objects, according to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, would produce enough gravity to distort space-time. Maybe there was something there. The idea isn’t a crazy one. Einstein’s theory says that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but many scientists now believe that in the fractions of a second after the actual Big Bang that created the cosmos as we know it, the universe must have experienced an inflationary period where space itself expanded faster than the speed of light. Even today, galaxies are speeding away from us faster than light—at least from our perspective. So if faster-than-light travel is technically possible, Alcubierre wondered if we could artificially create those conditions to bend space-time, shrinking the distance and time between two points. Space-time, as astrophysicists refer to it, is the concept that fuses the three dimensions of space—which define how we typically experience everything around us—with time to create a fourth dimension. Einstein was the first to push the idea that time wasn’t a universal constant and could be experienced differently depending on external factors, including the speed at which one was traveling. He called it the space-time continuum and suggested it could be manipulated by things like gravity. You could bend it—or, in other words, warp it. Alcubierre couldn’t let the idea go. “I couldn’t sleep that night,” he says. “When you’re doing physics, words are not enough—you need to do the math… The next day, I went to my office to do the calculations.” In less than two years, his work, once exclusively undertaken by sci-fi writers, would evolve into a paper, suggesting that it’s possible to modify space-time in a way that allows a spaceship to travel at the speed of light—kickstarting a decades-long effort among scientists to understand, design, and search for warp drives. The possibility of traveling to the shimmering dots littered across the Milky Way had occupied human minds long before we understood what those small pinpricks of light even were. Our immense smallness in the ever-expanding cosmos is still a relatively new revelation. In 1924, American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that Andromeda was its own galaxy by identifying a star within it. Now, astronomers estimate that there could be as many as two trillion galaxies in the observable universe (the portion of the universe that light has had time to reach). NASA estimates there are at least 300 million habitable worlds in our galaxy alone, and around 24 of those, by last count, are considered “superhabitable,” meaning they support conditions better for life than our home planet—containing plentiful water, a thick atmosphere, and mild surface temperatures. Here’s what we know about our own planet: Earth is doomed. If humanity hopes to survive, it’s not a matter of “if” we’re leaving it, but “when.” Billions of years from now, when the sun exhausts its hydrogen stores and begins fusing helium, our host star will transform into a red giant and eventually swallow our planet entirely. However, long before this fiery doomsday scenario, our star’s increasing luminosity will disrupt plant photosynthesis; that could happen in as few as 600 million years. Even if we miraculously survive that knockout punch by escaping to a nearby planet or moon, the sun’s long-term transformation into its final stage, a white dwarf, will eventually finish the job. In theory, we have options. Some of the habitable planets may even exist within 30 light-years of Earth—practically right next-door in a galaxy that spans some 100,000 light-years across. But how are we going to get there? Even if we could approach that incredible 186,000 miles per second barrier, journeying between stars would still cleave years—if not decades—off of our lives. If humanity unlocked the secret of warp travel, such a journey could last minutes or even seconds. When he theorized the working warp drive model, Alcubierre used Einstein’s field equations, formulas calculating how gravity forms from space-time being curved by mass and energy. Imagine space-time as a taut bedsheet suspended in mid-air. If you place a bowling ball—let’s call it the sun—on that bedsheet, the sheet will curve due to the sun’s mass, and the curvature translates to what we experience as gravity. WHAT IS THE CASIMIR EFFECT // Named after Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir, the effect describes a tiny attractive force that arises between two uncharged, closely spaced metal plates, caused by quantum vacuum fluctuations (zero-point energy). It proves that even “empty” space seethes with electromagnetic modes. Compared to the energy density in the vacuum outside, lowering the total energy density between two plates leads to a relative negative energy density, but this effect is very small. Within hours, Alcubierre had developed an intriguing concept: A bubble, as he envisioned it, encircled a flat space-time metric (without gravity) that could house the theoretical ship. The bubble, created by a massive amount of something called negative energy, contracted space in front of the bubble and expanded the space behind it, so that it could travel the cosmos untethered by speed-of-light restrictions. He had worked out the exact recipe of mass and energy to transform this sci-fi warp dream into a space-faring reality. The results were exciting, but not promising in any practical sense. For starters, negative energy may not even exist. “Negative energy is something we don’t have, as far as we understand in classical physics, because it would require negative masses, and we don’t have negative masses,” Alcubierre says. Sure, there is a quantum phenomenon known as the Casimir effect, that produces tiny amounts of negative energy in specific laboratory conditions. But Alcubierre’s calculations didn’t just need a little negative energy—they needed a mass equal to the entire visible universe of the stuff. That was a problem for another day. Alcubierre published his paper, “The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity,” then went back to studying black holes. He had no idea that the search for warp drives was only just beginning. Growing up in Washington, D.C., Harold “Sonny” White developed a deep love for aerospace by wandering the halls of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, but it wasn’t until 1997, when he was working for Boeing in Wichita, Kansas, that a chance encounter with Alcubierre’s work helped ignite a new passion. Pursuing a master’s in physics at the same time, White made sure to bone up on mathematics so he could also work in the field of general relativity. After getting his PhD in physics at Rice University, White joined NASA in 2004 as an expert in flight robotics, then eventually became the lead at NASA Eagleworks Laboratories, also known as the Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory, working on the future of deep-space exploration. Almost immediately, he set the administration’s sights beyond Earth’s closest planetary neighbors. “One of the things NASA used to always say is that ‘Mars is the ultimate destination for humans,’” White says. “I worked hard to change that parlance…if you say Mars is the ultimate destination in the solar system, we can accomplish that with chemical propulsion.” By the time he started his NASA tenure, physicists had already spent roughly 15 years debating the Alcubierre warp metric, improving upon its original premise or scrapping the idea entirely for a whole new warp-drive regime. In 1995, Russian theoretical physicist Serguei Krasnikov set out to tackle what’s known as the “horizon problem.” Because a spacecraft moving faster than light wouldn’t be able to communicate outside of the warp bubble, it’d essentially be isolated from the rest of space-time at this superluminal speed—meaning speed faster than light. In other words, it couldn’t be controlled from inside. Krasnikov solved this by theorizing a kind of warp tube along which a spacecraft bent space-time in its wake: a one-way highway that established a path and used it to make a return trip along the same corridor, without needing to control the superluminal bubble from inside. The downside would be that spacecraft could only travel along established routes—never mind the fact that his concept still required negative energy. In 1999, Belgian physicist Chris Van Den Broeck implemented a minor alteration to Alcubierre’s concept by shrinking the bubble’s surface, improving the design so it could run on a few solar masses of negative energy (one solar mass represents the mass of our sun—or about 333,000 times the mass of the Earth). Two years later, José Natário, a math professor from the University of Lisbon, revealed his idea of a zero-expansion warp drive by building the same “warp bubble” kinematics without expanding and contracting space, “sliding” the bubble through space instead of stretching it. “It’s not a practical idea at the moment, and I doubt it will ever be,” he says. “Space bending is very difficult…We know light going past the sun bends [1.75 arcseconds, or ¹⁄₁₈₀₀ of a degree]…so all the mass of the sun can only bend light a little bit.” Then, in 2008, Baylor University scientists Richard Obousy and Gerald Cleaver refined negative energy requirements even further (an amount equal to the mass of Jupiter) by manipulating the extra spatial dimensions and vacuum energy, but it also didn’t lead to a practical design. Up until then, much of the work iterating and improving Alcubierre’s concept had been happening by physicists and researchers in off-hours as a side quest, but then the idea began taking hold within more prestigious institutions. In 2010, the director of the Tactical Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), David Neyland, conceived a joint effort between DARPA and NASA known as the 100-Year Starship. Neyland’s goal was to motivate scientists to dream up a working spaceship that could make humanity an interstellar species. This was the moment White had been waiting for—his dreams of developing superluminal spacecraft were getting mainstream attention. For this symposium, White expanded upon the Alcubierre warp drive with a paper titled “Warp Field Mechanics 101.” Within its pages, White detailed how increasing the warp bubble’s thickness could decrease overall energy densities. Working with Obousy’s concept, White improved the calculations to masses similar to the Voyager 1 spacecraft. “I used a couple of optimization techniques by changing the shape of the rings and then oscillating the intensity, and that reduced [the negativity energy density requirement] to just under a metric ton,” White says. A STEP CLOSER // In 2014, NASA scientist Harold “Sonny” White and Dutch artist Mark Rademaker designed a theoretical superluminal spacecraft, the IXS Enterprise. Unlike its slim, cylindrical namesake and fictional Star Trek counterpart, the IXS Enterprise is nestled within two thick toroidal rings that (hypothetically) generate the warp field. The concept blurs the line between science fact and fiction. White worked with artist Mark Rademaker to portray the most “realistic” warp drive to date—in terms of appearance, at least. They called their starship the IXS Enterprise, a superluminal spacecraft based on Alcubierre’s original warp metrics that looks like something right out of Star Trek. White revealed the ship’s design at the SpaceVision conference in 2013. By 2019, White had left NASA and joined Limitless Space Institute as its advanced research and development director. The nonprofit aims to develop the next generation of interstellar engineers and, hopefully, create technologies that will aid them in their deep-space journey. White remains one of the warp drive’s most vociferous evangelists and regularly gives talks or goes on podcasts to preach that interstellar vision. “I don’t know if, I don’t know when—20 years, 200 years, never—but I can say the following: I know what I need to be doing next,” White says. “The calculations I did moved [warp drives] from impossible to plausible, but feasible is a whole other chapter.” And Gianni Martire is all about what’s feasible. As cofounder and CEO of Applied Physics, Martire is focused on developing warp drive models that don’t rely on negative energy or other impossible concepts. “Negative energy simply doesn’t exist in the universe,” Martire says, “so not only do you need a magical unicorn, you need millions of magical unicorns.” The self-taught physicist left finance and tech investments in 2020 to create a public benefit company to support scientific research working to solve the most pressing challenges facing humanity. One of those challenges is warp drives. Martire, along with Alexey Bobrick, PhD, an astrophysicist and theoretical physicist at Monash University in Australia, developed a theoretical model of a warp drive in 2021 that doesn’t require negative energy. Their concept altered one important aspect: It made warp drive slower than light. That doesn’t mean their spacecraft is slow. It’d still travel at roughly 10 percent the speed of light—18,600 miles per second. Martire calls it a “crawl before you can walk” approach; it reflects his goal of moving the warp conversation from the theoretical to the experimental. To do that, Martire has handed out more than $200,000 in grants to scientists working on their own warp models. One of those grants went to Jared Fuchs, a researcher from the University of Alabama in Huntsville who, in 2024, along with his collaborator, Christopher Helmerich, detailed a warp drive that satisfied all four energy conditions: null, weak, strong, and dominant. In simple terms, it relied on energy sources that work without the use of exotic matter. Fuchs and Helmerich used their own online toolkit, known as Warp Factory, to create this subluminal warp drive. The publicly available app allows other researchers to test their own warp metrics to see if they violated the laws of physics. “The extremes of what you can do with these theories are interesting,” Fuchs says. “The holy grail is that there really is something that’s possible, but understanding the limits of these theories is important.” Nearly 30 years after Alcubierre first pondered warp drives, another scientist in the U.K. considered a new question: Could we possibly find a warp drive that already exists? WARP DRIVE’S FICTIONAL ORIGIN // Edwin Hubble’s discovery of Andromeda as a galaxy in its own right fueled giant advances not only in astronomy and physics during the 1920s but also in science fiction. In 1926, a 20-year-old American sci-fi writer, John W. Campbell Jr., wrote a little-known story called “Islands of Space” for the Spring 1931 edition of Amazing Stories Quarterly. In it, Campbell writes what’s considered today as the very first description of a warp drive. “A gravitational field tends to warp space in such a way that the velocity of light is lower in its presence. Our drive tries to warp or strain space in the opposite manner.” Campbell’s story wasn’t an instant classic. “This is a real lousy book,” American sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon wrote when reviewing a book edition of Islands of Space in 1957. “BUT…it is a cornucopia of technological and mechanistic matter…this is narrative which could not occur without its science—the purest, and almost rarest form of science fiction.” A decade after writing those words, Sturgeon would find himself crafting a handful of scripts for a new TV show on NBC called Star Trek. To solve the conundrum of space travel, the crew in the series relies on a warp drive that wraps space-time around itself by using massive power mediated by fictional “dilithium crystals.” Of course, no such mineral exists in our universe. The universe is massive. Our Milky Way galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond our own. Surely, some intelligent form of life, thriving among those countless balls of swirling plasma, must’ve figured out how to travel faster than the speed of light. That possibility has been gnawing at British astrophysicist Katy Clough, who came across a possible way to test warp drive existence. Neutron stars and black holes are cosmological heavyweights that make even our sun look light, and when these behemoths collide, they create ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves. In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, detected the very first gravitational waves and has since detected hundreds more. Because warp drives would similarly produce gravitational waves due to their mass manipulations, Clough wondered if LIGO could possibly detect gravitational waves generated by a collapsing warp drive. If so, such a discovery would not only confirm the existence of intelligent life but also that functional warp drives already exist. Using gravitational-wave simulation techniques, Clough and her colleagues published a study in 2024 in the Open Journal of Astrophysics that modeled the collapsing warp drive—or a “warp core breach” in Star Trek parlance—of a spaceship traveling at 10 percent the speed of light and then tracked if LIGO could detect the energy fluxes it created. It turns out the strength of such a breach—if it occurred within one megaparsec (3.26 million light-years) of Earth—would theoretically be detectable. “It is all connected…we were just using the techniques that we normally use for simulations of black holes and neutron stars—they did carry over to warp drives,” Clough says. However, the energy emitted would be at frequencies about 300 kHz, much too high for LIGO to detect. “Generally, larger objects generate lower frequencies,” Clough says. Because supermassive black holes are so large, their spins are slower than those of two colliding stars, for example. Something extremely small, such as a warp drive, would produce even higher frequencies. The European Space Agency is currently developing LIGO’s successor, a trio of satellites connected by lasers to detect the warping of space-time by the minute differences between these lasers, known as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). But it’s actually designed to search for gravitational waves generated by supermassive black holes, which generate ultra-low frequencies. It’s unlikely that a government or space agency would fund a high-frequency detector solely to search for warp drives, but there could be other, more practical scientific applications for such a system. “There are a few signals that would have higher frequency,” Clough says. “Primordial black holes are really the main target…really small black holes would create signals in that kind of range.” If they were to fund one of those, then we may be able to listen to warp breaches in space. Like many scientists who’ve pondered warp drives, she subscribes to the mantra of “never say never.” After all, at the turn of the 20th century, scientists weren’t sure there were even galaxies beyond our own, so who really knows what we could one day discover. “I think there’s just so much we don’t know,” Clough says. “When you look back through the history of science, you see examples of this all the time. People think something is science fiction…and then they realize there is a way to make this happen.” It’s been more than 30 years since that TNG episode inspired Alcubierre to investigate the real-world possibilities of the warp drive. And in those first few years, he mostly avoided talking about his namesake creation and, instead, plunged into black hole science, developing important coordinate conditions that many black hole simulations still use today. But eventually, he realized that he could make his sci-fi–inspired research work in his favor. “That paper has made me famous outside of academia,” he says. “I can use this fame to try to bring more people into science.” Now, Alcubierre gives talks in the hopes of inspiring young people to pursue science—occasionally posing for a photo with passersby who recognize him, especially in his hometown of Mexico City. In a way, this is the real work of warp drives. Should such a fantastical concept ever exist, it will require efforts that span generations to unlock the remaining mysteries of the universe and to seek answers to questions we don’t even know to ask yet. When the original Star Trek episodes began to air in September 1966, two superpowers raced toward the moon in the midst of the Cold War. “They show you a future where humanity has united…I think today that’s a future we should aim for, even if those technologies may not be possible in real life,” Alcubierre says. Humanity isn’t a stranger to dedication stretched across millennia. Great cathedrals of Europe took several centuries to build. If Alcubierre created a kind of blueprint, then researchers like White, Natário, Martire, and Clough are the first shovels to pierce the soil. They’re laying the scientific foundation in the hopes that maybe one day—decades, centuries, or millennia from now—someone will finally build the spire.