Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Miguel Alcubierre, Inventor of Warp Drive?

Episode Date: September 9, 2014

Inspired by Star Trek, distinguished physicist Miguel Alcubierre developed the general relativity-based model for warp drive 20 years ago. Hear why he doubts it will ever be a reality, and learn about his current research on gravitational waves.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Warp Factor 7, Mr. Sulu. Make it so this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Inspired by Star Trek, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre came up with the basis for warp drive. Twenty years later, he'll tell us why he doubts that we'll ever achieve it and about the other fascinating work he does with numerical relativity. Bill Nye previews a congressional hearing about putting asteroids within our grasp, and we'll learn there's more than one way to describe the orbital period of Pluto

when we visit with Bruce Betts for What's Up. Emily Lakdawalla is ready to take us out of orbit. Emily, it seems like week in, week out, it's Rosetta that we talk about, but it just keeps getting better. It took a long time for Rosetta to get there, and it's going to take a long time for us to appreciate all of the amazing science that it's going to be doing at the comet. But this image that you've now got posted as part of this September 4 entry, you can clearly see a comet doing what a comet does when it gets close

to the sun. That's right. And of course, it's not surprising to see jets from a comet. That's what comets do, after all. But it is very exciting to see it in the photo. You can see two very distinct jets that seem to cross each other coming out of the neck. But also when I was looking closely at these images, I'm pretty sure I see some other areas of enhanced brightness above the background. I think there are several locations where there's stuff coming off of this comet. I guess it's just going to get better and better, right? What else is happening with this mission? Well, this week actually is the European Planetary Science Congress, which is the first big scientific meeting that's happened since Rosetta arrived at the comet. And from all the tweets I've been seeing, they've been sharing a lot of amazing

photos and preliminary discussion of what they're seeing at the comet. It's all still very preliminary. There's not much posted. There is one brand new OSIRIS image, which is their high resolution camera, a four megapixel camera that is producing these amazing looking pictures. Looks like Mount Everest floating in space. It's pretty exciting. I had a couple of other quick topics. You're going to be with us when we do our live webcast, and we'll also have it on Planetary Radio.

That'll be for the MAVEN Mars orbital insertion on the evening of the 21st. We're going to do our live webcast beginning at 6 p.m. Pacific time, and you'll be able to find it from the Planetary Society website, of course. But there is yet another spacecraft that just, what, a couple of days, three days later, will be arriving at Mars. That's right. The Mars Orbiter mission, India's first interplanetary mission, seems to be doing pretty well on its approach. They're slightly worried about their main engine, not for any particular reason. It's just that they haven't ever turned on a spacecraft main engine after 300 days of not operating it before.

So they're going to do a little test two days before orbit insertion to find out whether the thing still actually works. Well, we'll wish them all the luck on this world or that other world. There is one more world, something happening out at Saturn, which is awfully good news. I'm so relieved. All seven of the NASA missions that were undergoing reviews for their extended missions got their extended mission funding. But Cassini, in particular, got three years of extended mission funding, taking it right out to the very end of its mission in 2017. We're very excited about that. Three more awesome years on Cassini to look forward to.

Well, congratulations to project scientist Linda Spilker and that whole crew. And of course, we'll be talking to Linda again pretty soon on this radio show, as we've done many times in the past. And we'll keep doing with you. Thanks, Emily. Thank you, Matt. She's our senior editor, planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy, talking about a hearing which, as I spoke with Emily, is only a couple of days away. You might still be able to catch it on the congressional website,

a hearing about the Asteroids Act. It's H.R. 5063, House of Representatives Bill 5063. This is where we're going to negotiate, debate, discuss who has the rights to asteroids. What are the legal ramifications of getting resources, which would be mining asteroids. And the Planetary Society will be represented by our president, Jim Bell. And he'll read our statement about the importance of asteroids scientifically. I spent some time with Chris Lewicki a couple weeks ago, Planetary Resources, and he's a guy, he's a rocket scientist, was a mission director on a Mars mission.

I mean, he knows, a flight director, he knows what's going on. And he strongly believes it will be possible in the next couple decades to go out to an asteroid with a robotic rocket, set up some solar panels, melt ice and turn it into hydrogen and oxygen with electricity and make rocket fuel to go on to other places in the solar system. And once in a while, if you press these guys, if I can speak about all of the people involved in mining asteroids, they do talk about the possibility of precious metals, like you drag a sphere of platinum to some, you know, easily accessed orbit and make money that way. That seems like a long way off. The big thing for us at the Planetary Society,

we want to make sure the science gets done. And that'll probably happen. I mean, asteroids are hard to get to. But we want to make sure the geology is done. and I am really interested in the role of asteroids in life, the natural history of life. Are you and I affected by asteroids? Are we descended from organisms that depended on asteroids and so on? You know, amino acids are found in meteorites. Who knows what goes on out there? It's cool, but it's just amazing. It's like science fiction. In the U.S. Congress, people are debating or working on the laws associated with mining asteroids. And very briefly, do you think there's an angle in this to not just profit from them, but keep them from killing us all off? I want to find them all or find enough of them so we're not going to get hit with one.

And this will be another case, Matt, where governments, the public sector does the exploration and then the private sector goes out to exploit it or or I think the modern verb is monetize it. And this has been true from Christopher, you know, Christopher Columbus, Magellan, Lewis and Clark. This is the way this work is done. Governments do the mapping, the assay, and then the private sector goes in to exploit the resources. So I think it'll be the same process, but we want to have laws in place before we just go running amok. And I am hoping that we will have at least a quick conversation with Jim Bell after that hearing. We'll make it part of next week's show, if we can, and get his evaluation

of what took place there in Washington. Bill, thank you again, as always. Thank you, Matt. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill Nye, the science guy. Up next, no less than, well, FTL, folding space. Where would science fiction be without these fanciful ways to thumb our noses at Einstein and zip about among the stars? It was mere fantasy till Miguel Alcubierre decided to work the math. Miguel teaches and studies so-called numerical relativity, attempting to model what happens out at the edge of what Albert considered where colliding black holes create gravitational waves that cross the universe,

or so theory tells us. He also directs the Nuclear Science Institute at UNAM, the National University of Mexico. I reached him a few days ago on a somewhat noisy Skype connection, but we still had a conversation that could only be called fascinating. Miguel, welcome to Planetary Radio. It's very good to have you. Thank you for the invitation. It's fine to be here.

And you are in your office, I take it, at the National University of Mexico? That's correct. I'm in Mexico City at the moment. 20 years, the 20th anniversary of your, you'll pardon the expression, invention of warp drive. You know, in the Star Trek universe, on the spot where Zephyr and Cochran invented warp drive, there is a big statue of him. Are you hoping that maybe someday somebody might do something similar for you? I think it would be great if they do. But there is a difference because in Star Trek, Zephyr and Cochran were supposed to have invented actually the engine, the actual ship. Whereas I just proposed a geometry of space and time that could allow us to actually

go faster than light. So it's different. Well, there are many people who think that you have taken us a big step in the right direction, although there are certainly many people, including yourself, as I understand it, who believe that even though the theory that you created 20 years ago, the extension of relativity, is apparently mathematically consistent. It may not have much application in the real world. Is that a fair way to put it? That is correct, yeah. What I actually proposed was a geometry of space and time, a way to deform space that would allow you to travel faster than light.

This is not outside of relativity. It's actually part of general relativity. I use the mathematics of general relativity. But one thing is to propose the geometry, and then you have to go back and say, okay, how do I create this geometry? For that, I use the Einstein field equations of general relativity, which usually tell us that in order to have some distortion of the geometry of space and time, you need a distribution of matter, because basically, space-time geometry is just gravity. So you need a special distribution of matter to create a given geometry.

Normally the way we do things when we solve these equations of Einstein is the opposite way around. We actually say we have this distribution of matter, say a star or a planet or a galaxy, and then we plug it into the equations and see what geometry of space-time should correspond to that distribution of matter. That's the way we go about normally. And it's hard to do. What I did was the other way

around. I say, I want this geometry of space and time. And then I plug it into the equations and I read off what kind of matter and energy I need. And what it turns out is that the energy content I need to create this geometry doesn't make a lot of sense. It's something we call negative energy or exotic matter, which physicists speak for saying that it's something that creates anti-gravity. And as far as we know, anti-gravity doesn't exist. So that is a big problem. It's not the only problem, but that's the main problem. And there are a few researchers who feel that they may have come up with ways to get around this need for so called exotic matter generating negative energy i mean before we get into that is there anything else you can say about what in fact exotic how does exotic matter or how would it if it was real

differ from matter that we're all made of? Exotic matter is something we physicists call any type of matter or energy field that violates some properties that we expect matter should have and we have always seen matter has in reality. So for example, we expect matter to have positive mass. We don't expect any piece of rock to weigh minus 30 kilos. They always weigh positive kilos. They always produce positive gravity, so gravity is an attractive force. We expect that the speeds at which fluids move are less than the speed of light. Things like that. So whenever we have encountered theoretically any kind of matter that violates these conditions, we call it exotic matter.

So in the case of the warp drive, basically what we need is an energy field or a type of matter that has negative mass that produces anti-gravity. As far as we know, that doesn't exist in reality. That's not entirely true. There is some examples in quantum theory where you can have very small regions of space with a very small amount of negative mass, negative energy. But it's not clear that's useful at all. It's just theoretical, but it seems to be real. But I don't think that's useful for the World Trade. For the World Trade, we would need a very large amount of negative energy, something with the mass of a star or maybe the mass of Jupiter. We are lucky. But negative, negative mass, that's a big problem.

So the Starship Enterprise, you could build the ship, but you would need that planet-sized piece of exotic matter to get from star to star. When you talk about the reality of this, perhaps, at the quantum level, the tiny, tiny level, is that related at all to some of this work that apparently NASA has funded by, I know there are a couple of researchers, Harold White and Richard Juday. Have you followed their work, and do you think there's anything to it? I followed it a little bit.

The thing is there's not a lot of things to follow because when I look for, I try to look for papers, scientific papers published in the scientific literature by Howard White, for example, I haven't found anything. I have found on the Internet PowerPoint presentations, but that's not the same as a scientific paper, right? So that worries me a bit. And I'm very skeptical because I don't see how this could be done.

I think we need a fundamental change in our understanding of the universe as this is ever going to happen. And I don't see how they can do an experiment that is even remotely related to these things in a laboratory. So I'm really extremely skeptical about this work. And as I said, if it's not published in a scientific journal, checked by peers, then it doesn't really count as scientific work in the academic world. And I haven't found anything published. That really worries me. But you can probably understand why so many in the media, the popular media, have latched onto this and gotten excited about it.

I mean, even you who were, as I understand it, inspired. You told William Shatner, I believe, that you were inspired by Star Trek. I was inspired by Star Trek. And I know that this is really something exciting, which is what I did originally 20 years ago. And if this is going to allow us to travel faster than life, then the universe would be open to us. And if we cannot travel faster than life,

then it's very difficult to reach distant stars. But even though it's very exciting, and I understand why the media latches onto this, the universe is the way it is. It is not the way we want it to be. So we have to live with that. And I think maybe if this is ever possible, I'm not optimistic about that. Maybe it will be possible. But I think we're centuries away. I don't think it's much of a few years in a laboratory in NASA. I think it's really something that if it happens at all, it's going to be centuries away. And at the moment, I really think we don't know enough about the universe to really make this happen. Professor Miguel Alcubierre will tell us about his ongoing work in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, Director of Advocacy at the Planetary Society. We're busy building something new, something unprecedented,

a real grassroots constituency for space. We want to empower and engage the public like never before. If you're interested, you can go to planetary.org slash SOS to learn how you can become a space advocate. That's planetary.org slash SOS. Save our science. Thank you. Your name carried to an asteroid.

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Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. You might think coming up with the theoretical basis for warp drive would be the crowning achievement in a physicist's career, but Miguel Alcubierre has been keeping it real for all of the 20 years that have followed that work as he models other phenomena in our universe, phenomena that enjoy a much more reliable relationship with reality. Perhaps we will always require years to reach the other stars, even the closest of them, but that doesn't mean that we can't understand the universe, and that is work that you're doing that continues in this area of numerical relativity.

Can you tell us what that means? Yeah, numerical relativity is like an area of general relativity that is specialized in studying very strong and very dynamic gravitational fields, like, for example, collisions of neutron stars, explosions of supernovae, collisions of black holes. And these things are so complex, and the Einstein equations of relativity are so complicated that we cannot solve them in these cases.

We can solve them exactly when we have a spherical black hole that is not doing anything. But we have two black holes orbiting each other and colliding and things like that, then there's no way to solve the equations with pen and paper. We have to do that in a computer. So we do numerical simulations on a computer of astrophysical systems with very strong gravity. That's numerical relativity. And that's the work I've been doing for the last 20 years. And this is very much wrapped up into that great quest of modern physics,

looking for gravitational waves, right? Exactly. This is our goal. So the holy grail of numerical relativity has been to predict the gravitational wave signature of a collision of two black holes. That's what we've been working for for 45 years by now, and it was solved about five years ago. But that has been the holy grail,

and we're always interested in that, in predicting gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are a prediction of Einstein from almost 100 years ago, and they have not been seen in reality yet. Nobody has ever measured a gravitational wave. That's not for lack of trying. People are actually trying today. There are big observatories looking for gravitational waves. They haven't seen anything yet. But the hope we all have, because the technology now it's there, and the investment has been made. So everybody hopes that in the next maybe five years, we will detect for the very first time in history, gravitational waves.

And then numerical relativity will get into that game, and then we will say, well, you didn't just detect a gravitational wave. You detected two black holes colliding in the Andromeda galaxy, for example, right? Wow. So what do you think of the work that was done? It was announced in March of this year. It came from the South Pole, the BICEP2 work, which sadly now there have been some doubts thrown on. Yeah, I know about that. When it came out, it was extremely exciting. Not because they

detected gravitational waves directly, because what they claimed was they saw indirect evidence of the effect of primordial gravitational waves. Primordial means they were created in the Big Bang. And the effect this had on the microwave background radiation. So that's what they claim. This has been predicted theoretically. it was predicted about 10 15 years ago and people know what it should look like and and this group in in this bicep observatory in the south pole claim that they have seen the signal if that is true then it's extremely exciting it's a very very fundamental discovery about the early universe it will tell us a lot about how it happened. It would even help theories like inflation and things like that.

And it would be, I think, worth a Nobel Prize. But we have to look if it's true. And certainly in the last few months, there's been a lot of criticism to the result. A lot of people claim that it's not what they claim it is, that maybe it's contamination from intergalactic dust that they didn't subtract correctly. I'm actually not an expert on that. So it's hard for me to see if the criticisms are correct. But that's the way science works. I mean, you discover something and then there's other groups that say, no, what you did was wrong. So you have to recheck it. And

somebody else has to check it again and do it independently. And in the end, things will clear out maybe in a year, maybe in two years, another group will say, this is right. We see the same thing. Or maybe the opposite. We don't see anything. And then the controversy will go on for a while. And that would be exciting for science too, wouldn't it?

That is. That's the way we learn. I mean, science always works like that. So you discover something new and somebody says, well, it's not right. And you check and you double check and they check. And that's that's a process of science. And I think it's all very exciting.

I think these people, as far as I understand, did a very good job. And they announced what they thought they were seeing. And they did the job as well as they could do. And then it's for other people to check if they really did it correctly. And that's the way we work. Miguel, we're about out of time. Thank you so much. It has been great fun talking to you. And I want to say that I, for one,

if anyone ever gets your warp drive theory into reality, I'm going to contribute to the construction of that statue at UNAM. I'm very happy to hear that. But thank you for joining us on Planetary Radio. Very nice. Thank you for the interview. Miguel Alcubierre directs the Nuclear Sciences Institute at UNAM. That's the National University of Mexico,

where, as you heard, he continues his work with numerical relativity as a full professor, simulating such old ho-hum phenomena as the titanic collisions of black holes. His more than 50 publications include the book Introduction to 3-plus- 1 Numerical Relativity. We're going to go on to our local astronomer. No relativity from him, I don't think, but that's Bruce Betts, who will tell us what's up in the night sky in just a few moments.

Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio with Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. Wow. Wow. What a response for your Pluto question, the Plutonian year. We'll get to that. Welcome. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Welcome to you, Matt. No one ever welcomes you. You should be welcome. Thank you. I do feel welcome. You can't see Pluto with your eyes without a telescope, so don't even try. What you can see, however, is Mars and Saturn, although they're getting farther apart, evening sky over in the southwest in the early evening.

And then in the pre-dawn, we got Jupiter getting higher and higher, looking super bright. We'll just keep crashing through this. This week in space history, I have to mark this week every year for you, Matt. 1966, Star Trek premiered. 48 years. Isn't that amazing? 48th anniversary. I'm hoping that the Shatner, the Kirk, can hang in there for a couple more years. Isn't that amazing? 48th anniversary. I'm hoping that the Shatner, the Kirk, can hang in there for a couple more years. He seems to be pretty healthy. Yes. Do you know something that you're announcing?

No, not at all. Not at all. Only his middle name, but go ahead. Is that our trivia contest? No, too many people know it. No, too many people know it. Okay, 10 years ago, Genesis returned from what had been a very successful mission and crashed in the desert of Utah with parachutes not deploying properly. However, in one of the great recoveries, through a lot more effort, they were able to extract information about their collection of solar wind space particles and stuff. Such a great story. Picking these tiny little, literally microscopic bits out of the wreckage.

Yep. On to Random Space Fact! A little bit of a time warp there in honor of our guest, no doubt. The proper motion of a star is the rate of its angular change position over time as observed from the center of mass of the solar system. And in other words, over the years, how does the star move sideways in our skies, so to speak?

And it was actually suspected by way back when, but proof was provided by one of the big guys, Edmund Halley, in 1718, in 1718, who noticed that Sirius, Arcturus, and Aldebaran were over half a degree away from the positions charted by the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus almost 2,000 years earlier. Final little note, there is no such thing, at least to my knowledge, as improper motion in the sky. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. And as you've already heard, I asked you, in Earth years, how long is a Pluto year? And apparently we did well and people amused you. They certainly did. I wish.

We get so many wonderful comments and lots of humorous stuff like this as well. But we just don't have time, folks. I am very sorry. I try to respond to as many as I can. And I don't get to everybody anymore. That's what happens with popularity popularity we're much too important to respond to all of you now here is nicholas schmidt from lompoc california he actually didn't give us the answer we wanted he said well normally i'd say a pluto year is one seventh of an earth

year but come to think of it that darn cartoon dog hasn't aged a bit since i was a kid yeah i guess because he's awesome all right here's our real winner, Nick Priest. Nick Priest from Townsville in Queensland, Australia, who said, and there were very tiny variations on this, each year on Pluto takes 247.7 Earth years, correct? That is correct. All right, well, Nick, we are going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. That is correct. All right. Well, Nick, we are going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

And as I warned last week's winner, who is in Germany, we ship these overseas by tectonic plate, so it may take a little while. A few Plutonian years, at least. Can I go through some of these others? Oh, please do. Now, we got the equivalencies, you know, from a number of people. We got a whole bunch from Ron Bask in Milford, Connecticut. I'll just mention one, that one Plutonian year is enough time for 187,169 planetary radio episodes. We're almost halfway there.

Other people had more of a historical context. This from Dan Campbell in Cumming, Georgia. He said, random space fact, the last time Pluto was at this spot in its orbit, around January 1767, Great Britain was passing the Townsend Acts to tax the colonies to pay for their governors and judges. No taxation without representation. That's what I say. Heard that somewhere. Lindsay Dawson, he gave us a bunch. Pluto years, a long time. It's as though Columbus reached the New World just two years ago.

The Great Pyramid of Giza is just 18 years old. The Ice Age ended 48 years ago, and Earth is 18 million years old. Still not too bad. I love this one. I think you'll like it too. Mark Little, also in the UK. He's apparently prepared to celebrate the Plutonian New Year.

He says he's already got the cocktail sausages in the freezer, along with the guests. David Biddix. I'm sorry, David. David in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. He wanted us to give a special shout out to his kids, Corey, Amanda, James, and Olivia, who enjoy learning about the stars. But as you know well, Bruce, we cannot do that. Good. I'm glad you're following standard procedure. Well, this is FCC regulation, so we're really sorry, and don't ask again, David. On to the new contest. What star has the largest proper motion? So angular change in the sky with time.

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry. You've only got until Tuesday the 16th, September 16th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. A reminder for everyone that you've got until September 30th to go to planetary.org slash Bennu, B-E-N-N-U, to fly the names of you, your pets, your fish, whatever, on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to an asteroid and back. And now you can also submit information via social media to try to fly it in a time capsule, basically along with the names. Check that out.

I've got a blog at planetary.org a few days ago that gives you the information how to do that. Osiris-Rex mission is running that time capsule aspect. Same deadline, September 30th. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about Matt Kaplan as a Klingon. Thank you, and good night. That's Matt. Kapla!

He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, and nobody gets away with calling him a patah. He joins us every week here on Planetary Radio. Bruce will also be on stage for the Planetary Radio Live webcast on the evening of Sunday, September 21st. You can join us as MAVEN goes into orbit at Mars. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the only slightly warped members of the Society.

Kapow! Thank you.