I'm not saying it's aliens,...

[SunnyD]

It was just Spaceball 1.

 

[Fritzo]

Do you happen to know more about this than the physicist who developed the theory?

The work has been described in Warp Field Mechanics 101, a NASA paper by Harold Sonny White.[5][6] Alcubierre has expressed skepticism about the experiment, saying "from my understanding there is no way it can be done, probably not for centuries if at all".

To be fair, when Alcubierre came up with the idea, it was thought a ball of energy the size of Jupiter would be needed. With the new geometrical design, a relatively tiny fuel source would be needed.

 

[Jeff7]

That's true and why it will probably never work.

However,

There is one small lead:



The EM Drive NASA was playing with may manipulate the quantum vacuum in a similar way that Casimir plates do:



So as of right now I'd say there is long long odds for this to actually work, but not currently impossible. NASA has put a nickel in the slot machine budget wise to see if it might work.

And even if you can't figure out all of it, you're still adding to the sum of human knowledge. Sometimes that leads to really significant things.

"Huh.....if I move a magnet past this mess of wire, a compass over there moves. Iiiiiinteresting."

But you couldn't really say, "I want to make cars run on electricity. Go figure out what electrons are and how to make them move through metal. Then we can store that charge in an assembly of chemicals and metal to be released later. Also figure out a control system of tiny solid-state switches."



Even figuring out how to warp spacetime at the microscopic level could lead to something useful.

 

[Ichinisan]

I thought it was supposed to be "in a galaxy far away."