-: Hi, my name is Erin MacDonald,
I am an astrophysicist, a science fiction consultant,
and technical advisor.
So, by day, I'm a rocket scientist,
and by night, I'm a warp drive expert.
(dramatic symphonic music)
So when we're looking at possibly
how warp drive could actually work,
the fun thing is that our universe,
we can think of as a sheet of spacetime.
So, it's four-dimensional spacetime.
Some of you might have seen this trampoline idea.
And the whole law that we can't really break
is the speed of light.
Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
It follows a straight line,
because light doesn't have any mass.
But, the idea with warp drive is that
just because nothing can travel
faster than the speed of light
on the surface of spacetime,
nothing says that spacetime itself
can't go faster than the speed of light.
And so the idea with warp drive
is that you build a bubble of spacetime around your ship,
and then that propels you faster than the speed of light.
And if you want to go even faster than that,
you build another bubble around that,
and another bubble around that,
and you can think of that as being like
warp factor one, two, three, and then,
eventually you get to the point where you wrap
all of space and time around your ship,
and that, you can think of as warp factor 10.
Some people don't want to talk about that.
(laughing)
38 00:01:19,140 --> 00:01:21,334 Yeah, that's when terrible episodes happen.
(laughing)
-: How do you know this isn't
the best thing that's ever happened to me?
-: There's this huge collaboration
called the LIGO Collaboration
that is trying to find gravitational waves.
And in 2015, 100 years after Einstein's prediction,
they did actually detect ripples in spacetime
from colliding black holes,
which is objectively awesome.
And so, we saw black holes collide
from the ripples in spacetime that had traveled
billions of light years to get to us,
and the way I like to see it is, with science,
a lot of times, is that you theorize something,
then you see the indirect effects of things.
So, for Einstein, it was seeing light
curve around gravitational wells.
So you see light get curved maybe around the sun
or now we see, it's called gravitational lensing.
Light get curved around dark matter or galaxy clusters,
and Tilly even uses gravitational lensing
to detect cloaked Klingon ships,
which is my favorite fact ever.
-: Long range sensors have detected
the power signature of a cloaked Klingon vessel.
-: So you see these indirect effects,
and then the next step is to directly detect that thing,
and we directly detected spacetime with gravitational waves.
And the next progression is to learn to play with it,
so that's when we can get warp drive.
-: Captain, we're passing warp 10!