Welcome to Bright Ones! The 3 minute podcast that sniffs out underreported good news! Let's get sniffing! Has humanity finally found a loophole in the universe’s speed limit? Scientists are revisiting the idea of a warp drive. Physics universal rules say that a spaceship can't move through space faster than light. However, it's technically possible for space itself would bend around the ship allowing a shortcut that doesn't break any laws. Stuck to our normal spaceships a trip to our closest neighbor Alpha Centauri would take tens of thousands of years. That's 70 thousands of dog years btw! The idea was first proposed in 1994 by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. However Alcubierre’s original math required enormous amounts of “negative energy,” something scientists have never observed in usable quantities. Without it warp drives seemed to be forever impossible. But newer research has opened a possible loophole. A loophole in a loophole I guess! Scientists Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire proposed models for slower-than-light “physical warp drives” that may work using mostly normal positive energy instead of huge amounts of exotic negative energy. We like that idea! A SPACESHIP POWERED BY POSITIVE ENERGY HA! That does NOT mean anyone can buil a warp engine. And scientists still don’t know how to stabilize, steer, or safely stop a warp bubble. So warp drives are still highly theoretical. But researchers are now debating them as serious physics problems instead of dismissing them outright as pure fantasy. Until Captain Picard or Chewbacca come to take us for a trip around the galaxy, keep an eye out for the good news out there and like me try to be a good boy WOOF